Agriculture for Space
Agriculture in space represents a pivotal frontier in human exploration and sustainability, as it addresses the fundamental challenge of providing sustenance for long-duration space missions and potential human settlements beyond Earth. Space agriculture involves cultivating crops in controlled environments like greenhouses or hydroponic systems, adapting traditional farming practices to microgravity and constrained space conditions.
This innovation is crucial for ensuring the autonomy and resilience of future space missions, reducing dependency on Earth-based resupply missions. Beyond immediate practical benefits, space agriculture also holds profound implications for advancing our understanding of plant biology, environmental science, and closed-loop life support systems.
The two goals of Agriculture in Space
Ag for Space
Develop an infrastructure for research, development, and production of essentials for long-term life support using bioregenerative systems. The systems are to simultaneously revitalize atmosphere (release oxygen and fix carbon dioxide), purify water (via transpiration), produce food, and stock materials for manufacturing purposes.
Space for Ag
Develop an infrastructure for research, development of novel processes, materials, and products to benefit terrestrial applications. Potential benefits and deliverables stated by Mitchell et al. (1996) include "development of active control mechanisms for light, CO2, and temperature to maximize photosynthesis of crop plants during important phases of crop development; automation of crop culture systems; creation of novel culture systems for optimum productivity; creation of value-added crops with superior nutritional, yield, and waste-process characteristics; environmental control of food and toxicant composition of crops; new process technologies and novel food products for safe, nutritious, palatable vegetarian diets; creation of menus for healthful vegetarian diets with psychological acceptability; enzymatic procedures to degrade recalcitrant crop residues occurring in municipal waste; control-system strategies to ensure sustainability (of a plant production system) in space will enable management of diverse complex systems on Earth."
Related Faculty in this Field
Chieri Kubota
Professor, Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, Controlled Environment Agriculture
Peter Ling
Professor, Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Controlled Environment Plant Production