NASA's Next Frontier: Growing Plants On the Moon

An anonymous reader writes in with news about a NASA project that aims to grow plants on the moon in specially made containers. "In 2015, NASA will attempt to make history by growing plants on the Moon. If they are successful, it will be the first time humans have ever brought life to another planetary body. The Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team, a group of NASA scientists, contractors, students and volunteers, is finally bringing to life an idea that has been discussed and debated for decades. They will try to grow arabidopsis, basil, sunflowers, and turnips in coffee-can-sized aluminum cylinders that will serve as plant habitats. But these are no ordinary containers – they’re packed to the brim with cameras, sensors, and electronics that will allow the team to receive image broadcasts of the plants as they grow. These habitats will have to be able to successfully regulate their own temperature, water intake, and power supply in order to brave the harsh lunar climate."

Re:Non SI units

[Sockatume]

It's not liquid coffee, it's ground coffee beans. They're about one third of the density of water.

Re:Awesome

[TapeCutter]

We don't have any such organisms, Venus suffered a major runaway greenhouse, it has virtually no hydrogen, it's oceans boiled and radiation blew the hydrogen into space over time. It's now deader than Mars, and we don't have the technology to resurrect it.

Re:Non SI units

[Sockatume]

I suspect the actual grains are more dense than water, but the powder packs inefficiently. (Instant coffee? You're a monster.)

Re:Awesome

[foobar bazbot]

It would have to travel 4 miles an hour over every possible type of terrain. Better to just live in orbit.

Or just skip the terraforming and live in huge floating bubble-cities. An Earth-standard atmosphere turns out to be a lifting gas in Venus's atmosphere, and there's a region of Venus's atmosphere where both pressure and temperature are confortably Earth-like, and it's got nice steady winds to carry your bubble around the planet much faster than the surface rotation -- depends on latitude, but on the order of 100 hours.

"All" you need is to engineer a nearly-closed biosphere (same as needed for long-term orbiting habitats), and the ability to synthesize the needed inputs from Venusian atmosphere. (In contrast to space habitats, where there's no resources with zero transport costs, but low-energy transfers permit resources from a wide range of places with nearly-uniform transport costs, floating colonies give you access to the upper atmosphere for free, decreasing altitude with increasing cost, the surface with insane difficulty and cost, and orbital (or higher) space at costs similar to those for accessing LEO from Earth's surface.)