Astrobiologist Grace Crain on growing plants in astronaut waste: GotG18

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma talks to Grace Crain, a researcher on the MELiSSA project developing circular life support systems. 

Since the last episode, NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed on Mars and started sending back hi-res images of the red planet.

Professor Volker Hessel from the University of Adelaide sent some pills into space on NG-15. They’ll spend six months on the outside of the International Space Station, to see how they fare in the space environment. They’ll be stashed in the Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) platform, along with eleven varieties of seeds.

Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi is growing sweet basil in space, and tweeting a photo of the plants’ progress every day. This is part of the Asian Herb in Space program.

I released this episode on International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating women’s social, economic, cultural and political achievements. The theme for 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge, and I am thrilled to have Grace Crain as my guest for this show. Grace is currently working on her PhD at ETH Zurich, in collaboration with the Melissa project. Her research into closed-loop systems challenges our ideas about waste and our place in this vast ecosystem we call Home.

Grace mentions two practical applications of closed-loop technology here on Earth. The first is the Semilla Sanitation hub I have blogged about – a mobile toilet block that recycles water to grow mint for tea! The second is the La Trappe Brewery the Netherlands, which makes their beer production 100% circular by using the technology developed for the ISS astronauts:

I mentioned that we have a kerbside collection for food waste that goes