Gardeners, suit up--it's time to reach for the stars! A spade and a hoe may become mandatory equipment for every future astronaut. Plants are better producers of air, water, and food than any machine man is going to invent. And valuable spin-offs of "gardening in space" experiments are already beginning to benefit smog-filled cities and you and me.
"The science being developed for space exploration is our best hope for solutions to the environmental challenges we are beginning to identity," says Bill Scheld, president of PhytoResource Research, Inc., a NASA contractor based in College Station, Texas.
Henry Robitaille, horticulturist with NASA research projects at The Land, a pavilion in Epcot Center, Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida, says, "Learning enough about how plants created and sustain our atmosphere to reproduce it in miniature in a space station is opening up technology we can apply to the bigger picture--earth's atmosphere, water, and food chains. Agriculture will be the new high-tech frontier here on earth."
Bruce Bugbee, assistant professor in the Plant Science Department at the University of Utah, has been developing high-yield wheats for space. He says, "Genetic engineering has barely begun, but we can dream of wheat with yields five times higher than the world record. Space research will enable anyone to raise real food crops in the middle of the inner city."
The study of water in zero and low gravity has inspired some of The Land's most beautiful projects, computer-controlled, soilless, water-nourished gardens that look the way you expect space gardens in the twenty-first century will.
In one serene lab garden, roof-high vines are spangled with peppers bright as confetti, huge yellow squash, and clusters of fat red tomatoes. The "plots" for these crops are soaring, narrow columns moving sedately at twelve feet per minute on a conveyor belt through a spray that nourishes the roots. The solution drips out over smaller plants growing beneath or drains into a catch basin for recirculation.
On the white floor, rows of plants stand pinned to clean plastic boards, or with their roots fixed in bags filled with rock wool, a lightweight mineral fiber that has good capillary action. Boards and bags are equipped with drip-irrigation tubes, which deliver aerated water containing mineral elements essential to plant growth. The boards and bags are meant to ground plants in space, but soon a firm may market a product that promises, "Harvest your own vine-ripened tomatoes year-round from a trim plastic board set under your kitchen skylight!"
Standing in The Land's Creative Greenhouse, it's easy to believe in Gerard K. O'Neill's vision, detailed in his 1976 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, of orbiting a vast, permanent, sun-powered space farm where millions would live.
The First Moon Gardens
Scheld says a space station on the moon (equipped with gardens) is possible in five or ten years but expects this momentous event won't be realized until between 2010 to
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