

NASA Astronauts Eat Space-Grown Food - jimschley
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/10/431239435/one-small-bite-for-man-nasa-astronauts-to-eat-space-grown-food

======
ourmandave
The quote from the radio story on NPR was:

"That's one small bite for a man, one giant leaf for mankind."

------
pvaldes
A minute of silence for the first spatial member of the plantae kingdom killed
so many miles far away from home in such horrible lab accident.

"Ground control to major Tomato"

"Ground control to major Tomato"

"Absorb your pellets and put your helmet on..."

We'll miss you so much, little Latisha 'Redleaf' Stemstrong.

~~~
knodi123
From the aptly named
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plants_in_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plants_in_space)

"The first organisms in space were "specially developed strains of seeds"
launched to 134 km on July 9, 1946 on a U.S. launched V-2 rocket. These
samples were not recovered."

------
chrisu
Original Source:

[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/meal...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/meals_ready_to_eat)

------
XorNot
I wonder what the expense of scaling this would be. Could you blow up a large
inflatable greenhouse on the side of the station, for example, to get more
growing area. Could you scale to reduce oxygen-demand this way?

~~~
RLN
My first thought in the case of an inflatable greenhouse is that any small
piece of debris is going to go straight through it. Not really a very
knowledgeable area for me though.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Maybe we could use similar techniques we use for car tires to auto-close holes
in them? Like two layers of outer surface and some chemical in between that
would react with the air that's rushing out and seal off the hole? I don't
know the details about such technologies, but it seems to me that inflatables
should be much easier to make self-fixing than hard structures.

~~~
icebraining
NASA has explored inflatable modules; they used a series of outer layers to
reduce the energy of the debris, plus an inner layer made out of Kevlar.

[http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/station/transhab/](http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/station/transhab/)

------
verytrivial
This is an interesting from a protocol point of view, but I would like to see
something more useful than leaf vegetable -- I imagine months of whatever
nutrients this lettuce provides could be supplied by a handful of pills. What
about actually calories? I guess with leaf you eat the _whole thing_ , but ...
it just feels a bit .. gimicky.

~~~
pjc50
Presumably it was chosen for ease of growing. If you can grow lettuce, you can
move onto growing rice/potatoes/corn for calories, although all of those have
larger space/water requirements and maybe stalk issues in microgravity.(+)

It's rewarding to the astronauts to be able to eat fresh homegrown food rather
than years of mush and pills on the proposed Mars trip.

I also suspect that, as on earth, it's easier to pack calories into your diet
(especially sugar) than a full range of nutrients, some of which decay in air
or storage.

(+) One of the great advantages of hybrid wheat was solving the problem that
bigger ears of wheat snapped off the stalk. In microgravity this would no
longer be a problem ..

