- When we send people to deep space,
we can't carry a ton of stuff with us.
There's only so much room on a rocket, right?
And, food takes up a lot of space.
And, it can break down over time.
But, one thing we can send with us
are super lightweight seeds to grow plants.
That's why we're here at Kennedy Space Center,
to learn how to grow yummy food in space,
and on other planets.
(upbeat music)
In order to grow plants, you need soil, right?
Well, there's some problems with that.
- Technically on the moon and mars
it's not really a soil.
- Okay.
- A soil, by definition, has organic material in it.
The surface of the moon and Mars doesn't,
so they're really regolith.
- It's got nothing.
- It's crushed volcanic rock for the most part.
And, there's components in that, chemicals in that
that are not conducive to plant growth.
So, especially when we go to Mars,
we're gonna have to figure out if we wanna use
the martian regolith as a medium to grow plants in.
We're gonna have to convert that regolith
into a soil, a usable soil.
- [Loren] Right, and aren't there some problems?
- [Ralph] Yes.
- [Loren] Already associated with using that soil,
isn't it a little bit toxic?
- [Ralph] Yeah, the perchlorates that are in
the martian soils are a real problem for plant growth.
- [Loren] Perchlorates are a type of salt.
NASA's Phoenix Lander and Curiosity Rover
both found signatures of the chemical on Mars.
And, that's not great news.
High levels of perchlorates are toxic to humans,
which could make growing food on the red planet problematic.
But, NASA's thinking of ways to clean the perchlorates
by washing them away with chemical solutions.
- There's perchlorates in the environment on earth,
and their scientists have already developed
methods for remediating those perchlorates using microbes.
- Okay.
- [Ralph] So, theoretically we could go up there
and use either chemical or microbial solutions
to mitigate the microbes.
- So, at the end of the day, it might just be better
not to use soil at all, than to actually try
and clean the potentially toxic Mars soil.
Of course, you can always bring soil from Earth.
But, that's not really a great option either
because it weighs so much.
NASA's looking into other options
for growing plants that don't use soil.
We have, you know, a basic soil here.
But, picking it up, that's pretty heavy.
And, this isn't even a very big box.
- Well, even today in controlled environment agriculture
they're getting away from using soil
as a medium to grow plants in.
They wanna go to things that are basically
hydroponically grown, aeroponically grown.
You wanna minimize the resources,
even today on the ground, to grow things in.
So, we're gonna be looking at using
some of that type of technology in spaceflight,
so we can eliminate the medium of soil.
- [Loren] NASA is testing hydroponics, a method for growing
that has gained popularity among terrestrial farmers
in the past few years.
And also, aeroponics, as gravity,
or a lack thereof, presents its own challenges.
- So, we're growing things in kind of
a modified hydroponics way right now.
So, hydroponics is growing plants without soil.
And, generally on Earth this is using a nutrient solution,
a liquid solution of nutrients.
And, sometimes you use a substrate
like a baked clay, or a gravel, or a sand.
Sometimes you can just use water and nutrient solution.
And so, we're testing different ways of doing this
both for a surface system like Mars,
where you have some gravity.
And, for microgravity in space.
So, without gravity you get
some really interesting challenges.
You get very different behavior of fluids.
So, water and air have been our biggest challenges,
especially in the root zone, watering your plants.
And, when we figure that out, that's gonna be huge.
- [Loren] Hydroponics delivers water and nutrients
to plant roots using a liquid solution.
And, aeroponics takes it one step further.
Instead of using a solution,
plants are grown in a misty air environment.
Aside from hydroponics, researchers are also testing
what environments plants will thrive in best
by testing different lights and temperatures.
Including environments similar to that of the ISS.
- Our main goal right now is to produce safe,
nutritious, and appealing food for the crew
to supplement a packaged diet.
So, they have a really good packaged diet.
They have several hundred foods.
And, they're actually really tasty.
They do a lot of evaluation to make sure
that they're going to be very delicious for the crew.
When we go to Mars, we need a diet
that's going to be good for five years.
- Right.
- And, some of the vitamins don't last
that long in the packaged food.
So, we're looking at, can we use
supplemental food production, crops, plants,
to add more flavor, more texture,
and more nutrients to that diet.
- I couldn't leave without getting a taste of these plants.
Time to eat.
Basically we're just gonna cut the leaves off
and put 'em in these little pots here?
- That's all we have to do.
- Okay, great.
- So, these are microgreens, so we're gonna try here,
we've got a little bit of broccoli,
a little bit of cauliflower.
So, microgreens actually started life
as garnishes in high-end restaurants.
You'll go to a restaurant, there'll be like
a little marigold microgreen on there or something, so.
- Right, now it's the meal.
- It's the meal, it's the accent for food.
- [Loren] The biggest benefit of microgreens is that
they can be harvested in a very short amount of time.
So, you don't have to wait weeks
or months before you can eat them.
- [Matthew] Here's our famous steak plant.
- Amara mustard is what it's called.
- It's also know as Ethiopian kale.
- Medium rare.
That weirdly does taste like steak.
- It's got that umami flavor to it.
- It takes a while to kick in, yeah.
Figuring out how to grow fresh food in space
is not only important for the nutritional value
it will provide, but the psychological value it has as well.
- When you're on Mars, you're not gonna be
looking down on earth so, I think the plants
are gonna be really important for those reasons as well.
- Yeah.
Like having a little taste of home almost.
- Exactly.
- While humans have explored and adapted to new environments
many times before, with space we won't be able to rely on
the resources we are accustomed to here on Earth.
Growing food is going to be incredibly difficult,
and we'll have to figure out how to be
self sufficient in entirely new ways.
Because this is an entirely new frontier.
Hey everyone, thanks so much for watching our video.
If you want more science content like this,
be sure to check out our Verge Science YouTube channel.
I'll see ya there.