Spacefarers by Christopher Wanjek

Author:Christopher Wanjek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Growing Food on the Moon

Next up on the hazard menu, food security. As with most other activities on the Moon, food production will need to be sheltered—that is, growing food not in the ground but rather underground. Scientists and engineers have made remarkable progress on this challenge, though. For example, the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona has created a tube-shaped lunar greenhouse about 5.5 meters long and 2.2 meters high that can produce about 1,000 kcal of food daily. This greenhouse, a bioregenerative life support system (BLSS), could additionally potentially provide 100 percent of an astronaut’s air and potable water. In this closed loop system, plants are grown hydroponically under lights, nourished by nutrient salts containing the necessary nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus for plant growth. With that input, the plants transpire oxygen and water vapor for the astronauts to breathe and drink; the plants themselves, of course, get eaten. The astronauts, in turn, exhale carbon dioxide, urinate, and defecate, and these products are fed back into the system. In short, by creating a miniature biosphere and placing this within the lunar habitat, you wouldn’t need a bulky O2 / CO2 exchanger, as you do on a submarine or on the ISS. Your food is your air and potable water.

According to Gene Giacomelli, who led the development of the BLSS, the system is capable of producing 26 grams of fresh edible biomass per kilowatt-hour, so efficient that it could run on electricity generated by solar panels, at least during the lunar day. Plants exposed to natural surface light would be inundated by harmful radiation, just like humans. One could design underground greenhouses that are fed reflected solar light at the lunar poles, where the Sun shines at least 80 percent of the time. These would require serious construction, though, in the form of a massive excavation of regolith to create the kind of greenhouse seen on Earth outdoors. Maybe once a lunar infrastructure is created, large greenhouses like this could be built. The beauty of the BLSS is that they are highly efficient in maximizing the space-to-crop ratio by stacking crops and dangling light where it is needed. Also, they are inflatable and relatively light to ship to the Moon.

The Prototype Lunar Greenhouse. Designed by University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, this 6- by 2.5-meter cylindrical chamber is lightweight and expandable and could be used underground on the Moon or Mars. The prototype is designed to provide 100 percent of oxygen needs for one person, as well as 1,000 kcal of food daily.

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