Green Plants for Mars Mission 262
An anonymous reader writes "NASA doesn't keep back that they are going to send a human expedition to Mars in a couple of decades. One of the obstacles for the longstanding 35-million-mile voyage is a food production. NASA researchers have focused on 20 plant species that NASA believes could be grown during a flight to Mars and after landing on the fourth planet from the Sun. By far not all of them are suitable for space expedition."
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Efficient? (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyway, assuming that a 1-way trip is 2.5 years, that's 5 growing seasons right there, because you don't have to worry about the cold in a heated vehical. If we could use GM Plants that mature even faster, food production would increase to maybe 7 or 8 harvests in 5 years.
Add the time spent actually *on* the surface, and the return trip, and you've got a great deal of food.
Re:Efficient? (Score:5, Interesting)
Second of all, the plants serve a dual purpose: food and oxygen replenishment. Cans don't change carbon dioxide into oxygen. They can't.
Third, space needed depends on the plant. Maybe they'll use algae, which is a plant.
Closed System test run (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, it'll be kind of a drag being locked up on earth for a few months in a small closed environment - but I wouldn't trust relying on plants any other way.
Re:Where's the device that speeds and slows the (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Spam spam spam spam! (Score:1, Interesting)
Round trip efficiency (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the real barrier to owning our own back yard. Fortunately, the technology is something that is not out of reach. It is something that can come to fruition in the next few decades. then you can grow your own food where-ever you happen to be at.
Re:Closed System test run (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I recall (the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to mention this), The project was either a great failure or a great success, depending on how you look at it. It was a great success, because life thrived in it. The failure was in the fact that the system wasn't balanced very well, and the lifeforms that thrived were the likes of cockcroaches; not the humans that were intended to do scientific experiments there.
Re:the list (Score:5, Interesting)
Sweet potato is a large plant, lots of beta carotene. A few of these plants are very heavy feeders, but rapid growers. Nettle is a nutritional secret: you can almost live on the stuff alone. Spider plant is a heavy breather. Not many people know that kudzu is good for you, or that dandelion used to be a cultivated staple in european gardens--you use the whole plant.
Catnip, redwood, trumpet vine, and thistle are headscratchers, though. Medicine, wood, and mulch?
Re:artificial gravity (Score:2, Interesting)
Weight, reliability, and cost perhaps? If they can find a set of plants that will do the job on zero-G, it'll weigh less, be relatively reliable, and the component parts (water, nutrients, etc.) may be recyclable to some extent. Seems like it has the potential to be an elegant solution.
Re:Closed System test run (Score:3, Interesting)
In a cup-is-half-full approach to semi-independent systems, you could say that what they had was not an excess of cockroaches but a shortage of chickens. I mean, why waste all those wonderful little packages of proteins and minerals? Turn them into eggs. Cockroaches in themselves can be useful for scavenging detritus in a garden. An excess of anything like that is just a failure to integrate the system and make sure everything's being used in multiple ways.
I wonder if those biosphere folks ever heard of permaculture? [wikipedia.org]
Re:summary=story (Score:4, Interesting)
Survival of the Fittest (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Closed System test run (Score:3, Interesting)
Plants on Mars itself? (Score:3, Interesting)
If we ever want to have successful Mars colonization then we also have to perform some terrafroming there; I can't imagine too many people wanting to live their whole lives in a cramped, closed environment. Creating some oxygen in the atmosphere would probably be essential for such an endeavour but would it be possible with anything that we've got today?
Re:the list (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be perfect for rapid growth, air recycling, and low maintenance. Provides excellent mulch and is nutritious. Sounds efficient and like it would serve multiple functions.
One of the other posters speculated about gene-mod plants being useful for rapid growth and enhanced yield etc. My first reaction was that we ignore many of the useful food plants, call them weeds because they're too successful, and poison ourselves in the process; we should spend millions to reproduce this in the lab?
Weeds are where it's at: nettle, dandelion, mustard, etc. etc. are nutritious and useful in many ways.
actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
Too add to the list down below, I'll throw in a few I know are very nutritious and fast growers,and also able to take some extreme environmental conditions, efficient in other words
lambs quarters
purslane
kale
bunching onions
along the same lines, chives
sweet clover
There's some other fast growers and tougher plant candidates but they are nastier tasting, like some of the lichens. If they had enough light and a salt water/mineral mix tank, dulse might be a good choice as well.
Left out things that would be too hard to grow in an enclosed small place, there's quite a few really. In normal cultured gardening, there are just hundreds of candidates probably, it really *is* a variable that would be determined on space available and how much water is available, light available, and that is about it. Modern vegetables are pretty good at being *food*, most of them have been very successfully bred over the generations to be fast growers, etc, they just need a *lot* of water and root and foliar space, and a lot of them are not edible until they achieve a large size, or are not practical because of length of time for seed to seed. I would assume that is what is the big drawback to what the selections might be. For example, corn is tasty, but only medium nutritious, takes a huge amount of resources and space, and even the fastest corn is still weighing in at about two months growing time. Off the list. The radishes though, heck ya, about perfect. I think their primary criteria would have to be a fast generational cycle and having most of the plant be edible. And they could always do just sprouts, dried grains and seeds are fairly compact and already being mostly dehydrated they are efficient to launch weight wise, and after sprouting they have activated enzymes which make them a lot more nutritous than the mature plant. It's a small window with sprouts, usually about until they get their first real leaves, as opposed to the bud leaves.
Personally, I think they should make an executive decision that YES INDEEDY (that's my official vote anyway) we as humans are going to colonise mars, and that will entail dragging our crops with us, so they should just go ahead and start terraforming now by introducing the simpler plants in the hopes they might adapt. I know that is controversial, but that's the only thing rational if you are serious about colonization at any time in the future. No sense wasting time then if you choose "yes". Robot probes could be the advanced gardeners, even if all they did was set up greenhouses and get a few of the simpler crops up and growing before the humans showed up.
When previous historical explorers traveled, they took the means to self perpetuate their food supply, they took seeds and livestock with them. They didn't know what would be "out there" so they couldn't take a chance on a very long and hazardous journey and then get stuck with no food eventually. they did the only thing logical at the time, they traveled with a "farm in a box". If they had had the ability to send that "farm in a box" stuff FIRST, ahead of their voyages,they would have done so. We can do that now with the next stage of human exploration, so, IMO, we probably should.
Yes, aware of the risks of "contamination". I don't consider it contamination, I consider it rational cultivation. I don't want Mars and exploration to be limited to a few academic hands off pursuits,look but no touch action in other words, I want it eventually open for joe human to go there and live if he chooses to. Open source colonization, not closed source propietary.
That will obviously mean then that we will be haulin
Growing fuel and air. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/NP02-24-20
Re:Closed System test run (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the list (Score:1, Interesting)
non productive? (Score:2, Interesting)
professional sports addicts
video game addicts
stock traders
politicians
TV couch spuds
mindless order followers in the "destructive arts and in-humanities"
all them "other guys" who ain't *you* based on ethnicity or religion or whatnot
Seems like there was a pretty big eugenics experiment, "bumping off the unproductives", carried out in the last century, but then goodwins law kicks in to mention it. whoops, just did it. Oh well, it seemed to have had a few problems associated with it, or perhaps you missed that part.
Careful what you list as unproductive, chances are you will fall on someone else's list then
Re:you plan or you die (Score:2, Interesting)
Not sure you've ever worked in a bureaucracy but they are mostly a bunch of civil servents climbing the GS pay scale ladder, lording it over an army of contractors who are mostly there for the pay checks and because the work is cooler than you find in the private sector and somewhat less psychicly destructive than working for the DOD building things to kill people. There are probably some idealist and people who still dream of Apollo and Mars in their ranks but that system will crush your dreams.
Civil servents judge their success by the size of their annual budget, how many papers their team publishes, how coll their dog and pony shows are and how many civil servents and contractors they have working for them.
A prime directive is you must spend all the money Congress budgeted you whether you really need to or not. If you don't you risk getting your budget cut so if you can't spend it constructively you squander it on toys(often computers). There is zero incentive in this system to spend money wisely or efficiently.
There is also very little incentive in the civil servent or contractor ranks for breakthrough success. You are better off going through the motions year in year out than you are in sticking your neck out, taking chances to do something bold, potentially failing and having your head chopped off. It is a classic CYA (Cover Your Ass) environment.
Another big difference between Rutan's team and NASA. His chief test pilot is a high school drop out, seat of the pants flier and all heart. Compare him to the current NASA astronaut core and you will see they are all academic overachievers who've spent all their lives playing the system, jumping through hoops and checking boxes to build the resume to get in to the astronaut core. Problem is they end up with no heart and an inability to challenge the system, inability to challenge the system is a fatal weakness in these people, so they suck as adventurers and pioneers.
I should qualify that JPL seems to have mostly escaped this syndrome which is why they still do so much useful work in spite of the complete collapse of NASA's manned space program.
Re:Private Jets? Rock stars? (Score:4, Interesting)
In my experience "N/A" usually means "An embarassingly large amount"
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:3, Interesting)
That might kill any microorganisms that could be on Mars, or, it could give those microorganism something to feed on. If they're already there, they have an evolutionary head start in that environment.
The aborigenese of the south pacific used to plant the seeds of the species that were most usefull to them on the virgin islands they visited, so that the next time someone would come there, they would have palm trees and aloes and all the stuff they might find usefull there.
We've been trying to find signs of life on Mars, and we can't.
I think its time to fill the void.
Most of the reason. (Score:3, Interesting)
The two major reasons for failure of the project were related to plant choice and layout. In short, they chose american-friendly plants and "arranged them attractively" for the press. They made little brookes and tiny farms. In short they tried to "make a little planet of happy foods". They had a "rainforest room" and so on.
This was unforgivable, and purely political (as in political infighting).
I beleive the "major" cuplret was either wheat or rice. Whatever the plant was it grew "too fast" and far too much of the plant produced was "useless" with a long decay period (e.g. it was wasteful and recycled slowly).
Biosphere 2 was not really an attempt at much of anything. The kind of "closed system" needed for space travel isn't that hart to imagine, but it would be pretty ugly. Lots of dark greens, hydroponics, stacked growing racks, fungus, human-waste recycling, etc. Not so much a well-stocked biosphere as a bunch of plants which are geared to supporting one kind of animal (humans, duh 8-) all in a greasy and stark but well lit arangement.
As stated elsewhere, plants are quite predatory (sorry vegans, plants engage in a progrom of murder, life is tough, get over it... 8-) and often toxic. Most of the friendly plants we eat have a whole lot of plant we don't eat made along with each unit of food.
One would almost imagine a lot of sugar-plants and kale and one-each from the staple vitamin producers and a big blender to pulp up a paste. Then 400+ days of paste...
The ubiquetous but boring "food cube" of science fiction.
Then a fliter membrane from hell for the waste-to-water and waste-to-firtilizer transaction without all the nice "dirt".
I'd expect it to reek.
But I'd go. Eating sucks anyway so a uniform diet of paste would be little worse than what some people live with anyway. (can you say 20 years of Ensure, some people can...)
My only limit? No annis (lic.. lik... liqu... whatever... I can't even spell that the name of that nasty black candy, but the flavor sucks...).
One of the odd-out things they will have to invent is the "recycleable" air filter media. Basically you will need "activated charcoal" but you will have refresh it. Actually activated charcoal wouldnt' be that hard to manufacture in a closed system if you used some sort of condensate system to recapture the off-gassed nastyness when "burning" the charcoal. Then filter the air with it and "burry it" but desolving the "used" charcoal in the hydroponic solution.
eh... maybe...