Feeding the astronauts of the future

Uploaded on February 23, 2024

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Feeding the astronauts of the future

2024-02-23 - In terms of food production, what will be needed to sustain astronauts on long-duration missions and Canadians living in isolated communities?  (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)

Chris Patterson: When astronauts are in space, they typically don't have access to fresh food a lot of the time. 

Really, the only time they get to have something fresh, like a fruit, for example, is when cargo resupplies arrive at the Station.

So, when we talk about growing plants in space, we're very excited about this because the astronauts will now have a reliable, consistent source of fresh food almost all the time where they're on site.

There's actually two payloads that we have up there right now that are capable of producing plants. One is the Veggie unit, and the other is what we call the Advanced Plant Habitat or the APH.
Veggie is a little bit of an older system, so it's not as advanced as APH is.

It is still very capable of cultivating plants, and we use it for experimentation all the time.

But the APH, what makes it really unique and very useful for us as plant scientists and engineers is that we're able to control the environmental parameters that it gives to the plants. So, we're able to control aspects like temperature, humidity, lighting and really make sure that we get the most out of the plants when we put them in there and that they’re as comfortable as possible given that they’re not back home on Earth.

When we're talking about producing food in space, we are going to be starting with plants. Specifically in Canada, we have a really long and rich heritage with cultivating plants in controlled environments, which is what we'll be using when we go to space.

With a bioregenerative system, we mimic how the Earth recycles its resources by adding things like primary producers or plants, algae, things that undergo photosynthesis to reuptake the waste products that astronauts produce.

So, things like carbon dioxide. By adding these organisms in, they're able to refresh and recycle that back into things like oxygen, for example, they’re able to clean the water that the astronauts excrete through various means, and we're able to recycle it and feed it back to the crew and then vice versa. That will be fed back to the plants, and you just get a cycle going.

So, we can take these technologies and put them into environments where communities may live that have typically lower access to food. And we think that this could really benefit not just Canadians, but people in general all across the world.
 

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