Nov 23, 2016
Lessons from Mars
Robyn Gatens, deputy division director for Nasa's International Space Station programme, has seen plenty of negative reactions to the practice in her 30 years at the US space agency. In Nasa's case, recycling almost all the water on the ISS has meant that since 2009 the space station has been able to host six astronauts, rather than three. The firm's founders met at the European Space Agency where they were working on recapturing CO2 to make longer space missions possible. Similar farming systems where plants are stacked up on shelves to save space and grown from seeds are already common in Asia, and are beginning to become more popular in the US and UK. Dr Gioia Massa, a Nasa scientist working on food production, says many of the lessons the space agency is learning could be applied in urban plant factories and other agriculture settings, with the potential to increase the amount of food grown in less space. The space agency is now considering making the cargo cushioning material out of 3D printer stock so that once in space, it can be used to create things such as tools.
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