Goodbye freeze-dried space food.
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Today on the global Space Station, a batch of romaine lettuce became the first food grown and consumed in space.
“It’s fresh.” After toasting their pieces of lettuce together with a quick “cheers”, astronauts aboard the worldwide Space Station took the first bites of food grown and harvested entirely in space.
The lettuce grew in a rooting “pillow” that contains the seeds and soil for the plants.
Other planned methods of growing plants in space include vertical agriculture, in which plants are grown in hydroponic shelves.
Half of the produce will be packaged, frozen and sent back to Earth at a later date where it will be analyzed by scientists.
The technology, named Veggie, is part of NASA’s plant experiment – Veg-01 – which is studying plant growth in space, in order to provide future astronauts with a sustainable food source.
NASA said that the astronauts will clean the lettuce with citric-acid-based sanitizing wipes-which sounds like a bad dressing, frankly-before eating half of their harvest on Monday, August 10. This meal marks the first time that astronauts have been able to have fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space. “Overall, it uses about 60 percent less energy than traditional plant lighting systems”, NASA said in a statement.
Astronaut Kjell Lindgren pronounced it awesome, while Scott Kelly compared the taste to arugula.
The first “pillows” were activated, watered and cared for by astronaut Steve Swanson in May 2014, according to NASA. After 33 days, the plants were sent back to earth for analysis.
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Testing for this experiment in space was done in the Habitat Demonstration Unit at NASA’s desert test site in Arizona in 2010 and 2011. The ability to grow crops on long voyages will be essential to stocking the prolonged deep space explorations NASA hopes are on the horizon. That is, there isn’t much of it coming from the Sun, and there’s no atmosphere to speak of to capture it. To mitigate that, Veggie started with red and blue LED lights, which are efficient in giving plants the energy they need.
