Food pods and vertical farming could help us grow crops on Mars

() — Even before we got to the moon, humans had been making plans to send people to Mars, and in recent years, the dream seems closer to becoming a reality. NASA plans to set foot on the red planet in the 2030s, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to get there even sooner.

The difficulty is not just getting astronauts to Mars, but also keeping them once they’re there; you can’t just grow potatoes in their soil, despite what Matt Damon would have you believe in the movie “The Martian.”

With a atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth, only half the amount of sunlight, no known accessible fresh water, and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-62°C), Mars is the most challenging environment humans have ever planned for produce food.

A startup called Interstellar Lab thinks it may have the solution. The Paris and Los Angeles-based company designed a controlled-environment pod system that could one day allow crops to grow in space.

“A multiplanetary species”

“Interstellar Lab is the pursuit of a child’s dream against the backdrop of Earth’s climate crisis,” says Executive Director Barbara Belvisi. “When I was younger, I dreamed of becoming a multi-planetary species and living under domes on other planets, surrounded by plants.”

Belvisi spent a year with engineers at NASA’s AMES Space Portal before launching Interstellar Lab in 2018. His Nutritional Closed Loop Ecological Unit System, or “NUCLEUS,” is a modular structure comprised of nine cubic capsules designed to provide a nutritious diet for four astronauts during a two-year mission. Belvisi says he is capable of producing fresh microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms and even edible insects.

“The initial focus was to build a regenerative food production system to promote sustainable agriculture on Earth,” says Belvisi. “But I asked, ‘what if the technology we’ll need to live in space could help us live more sustainably on Earth?’ Thus, the concept of advanced controlled environment modules for Earth and space was born.”

In 2021, the design was among the Phase 1 winners of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge, and in January of this year, NASA announced NUCLEUS among the 11 Phase 2 finalists.

NUCLEUS is now moving to a lab in Cape Canaveral, Florida to participate in the final phase of the challenge, with the winners to be announced in April.

Farming in Harsh Environments

Inside the cubes of the NUCLEUS capsule, plants are grown in vertical growing systems, the method many scientists consider the best option for Martian agriculture.

Vertical farming is a method of growing without soil in a controlled environment, delivering nutrient-rich water directly to the roots of a plant. It can use significantly less water and fertilizer than traditional outdoor farming, and by continually recirculating water, it creates very little waste.

A large-scale example of this method in use can be found at the Emirates Crop One facility in Dubai, the world’s largest vertical farm. According to Crop One, his farm in Dubai covers 27,870,912 square meters of vertical growing space and produces 1 million kilograms (more than 2 million pounds) of crops each year, including kale, spinach and arugula.

Deane Falcone, Crop One’s chief scientific officer, says the principles can be applied to essentially any harsh environment.

“One of the key advantages of this indoor grow is that we can put it in Dubai, we can put it in extreme cold conditions, basically anywhere,” Falcone explains. And apart from water and artificial light, “it is independent of resources.”

According to Falcone, if a vertical farm were used on Mars, water could be drawn from the ice sheets below the planet’s surface, while light could be supplied by a system of mirrors to increase natural sunlight or by using powered lamps. by solar energy and wind energy.

Falcone calls vertical farming in a totally sealed and controlled environment “the only option for farming on Mars,” although some scientists are investigating growing plants directly in the Martian soil. With vertical farming, “you control the daylight hours, you have a lot of influence on what the plant will do,” he says. “You can encourage flowering simply by changing the timing of lighting.”

Falcone points out that in the absence of gravity, such as during the expected nine-month trip to Mars, the most common form of vertical farming, hydroponics (growing in water), would not work. “All large-scale farms on Earth depend on gravity,” he explains. “We are growing in a flowing tray of water, (and) that water is held in the tray by gravity.”

It’s a problem found aboard the International Space Station, where crops are already grown under artificial lights. The seeds are planted in a nutrient-rich substrate inside sealed chambers that are spread with fertilizer granules. To counteract the lack of gravity, astronauts must painstakingly deliver water to the roots of individual plants, a system that would not be feasible on the scale required to feed an entire crew.

Falcone suggests an alternative method, known as aeroponics, which would deliver water to contained roots using a mist.

Once on the surface of Mars, and under the influence of Martian gravity, a vertical hydroponic growing system could be used, housed in an environment like Interstellar Lab’s NUCLEUS.

But Falcone predicts that a much larger space will be required. “The system has to be something that can be trusted day in and day out to provide food,” he says. “It could also be adapted to provide breathable air as the plants that grow there create oxygen. You would have to have a large-scale system to allow for the continuous output of food and additional products like oxygen.”

“The only option”

Food that could be grown in these systems and served to Martian colonists is envisioned in “Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth,” a book by Lenore Newman, director of the Institute of Food and Agriculture. . at the University of Fraser Valley, and Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, both in Canada.

“The key to sustaining life on Mars is an extremely intensive, closed-loop, and efficient food system,” says Newman.

Fraser says that by using LED light and a nuclear reactor as the power source, “pretty much anything is possible in a Martian environment.”

“On Mars, you have to close the loop. You have to pay close attention to anything you’re losing or putting into the system,” says Fraser. “It’s a good thought exercise to remind us of what we could do on Earth if we really doubled down.”

Fraser believes that this type of technology could help us use Earth’s resources more efficiently and reduce carbon emissions.

“The vertical farming industry has done a remarkable job of reducing labor, water, and costs such as land costs. They are achieving an enormous amount of productivity per square acre, per worker hour and per liter of water used,” says Fraser.

When asked if they thought vertical farming was a good option for sustaining life on Mars, both Newman and Fraser responded in unison: “It’s the only option.”