Redwire To Launch First Commercial Space Greenhouse in 2023 (reuters.com) 12
Redwire says it would launch the first commercial space greenhouse in Spring next year to boost crop production research outside Earth and support exploration missions. From a report: The space infrastructure company's project will help deliver critical insights for NASA's Artemis missions and beyond, said Dave Reed, Redwire's manager for the greenhouse project. The Artemis program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) aims at sending astronauts to the moon and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to the eventual human exploration of Mars.
Better hurry while Bruce Dern is still alive. (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
sunrise (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The point of growing hydroponic plants in space isn't to make food for earth. It's to feed people in space.
Re: (Score:3)
That was my first thought as well. But my second thought was "But those places don't have microgravity."
This is a research initiative, it is not a production farm! And the end goal is sustainable agriculture in space, to support an orbital population without having to ship all food from Earth.
Surely you did not think this was some sort of orbital farm designed to deliver food to Earth? That just doesn't pass the logical sniff test. If something sounds completely ridiculous, but people have invested money in
Re: (Score:2)
WARNING: SPECULATIVE BULLSHIT AHEAD
Since I'm in an imaginative mood:
Why not farm in space for Earth food production? Sure, the initial launch would consume resources, but then, outside of a few fertilizer shipments every year, you're basically in "pop it into the ocean" territory for sending it back. Large enough "fields" in space blocks sunlight, lowering worldwide temperatures, lowering the effects of global warming. Seems like win-win to me.
Yes, I realize that's not really feasible at this point in tim
Re: (Score:2)
I vaguely remember a short sci fi story where most food production is done in orbit, but they put a carbonaceous asteroid into orbit and used some sort of alien factory to directly convert inorganic materials into food.
With the right technology, food production in orbit would certainly be possible. But you do realize, every pound of food that comes down from orbit must be replaced by a pound of something going to orbit, right? You can't create matter from nothing.
The only technology that makes that feasible
I wouldn't call it a "commercial" space greenhouse (Score:2)
It's a research lab that is nowhere near being commercially viable. As others have noted, a space greenhouse would likely provide food to non-earth humans because the costs of transporting the space-grown food back to earth would be prohibitive.
Research to gather insights about plant growth in space is not new. This project is obviously not a commercial venture, but how is this research lab even the "first" of the claimed type of research?
Silent Running (Score:2)
I wonder if one day they will have to escape some evil corporation and head off to somewhere unknown :)
space weed (Score:2)
There is a huge market for weed grown in space. How high does your weed go?
Artemis? (Score:2)
How does this help the Artimis mission, and the return to the Moon, to grow crops in microgravity, rather than the Moon's 1/6th g?
And when are we going to have space stations that *rotate* and provide artificial G?