Astronauts Are Growing Plants and Vegetables in a Space Garden

Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA 

If you take a peek into a vegetable garden at this time of year, you may well see lettuce, peas and radishes. And astronauts are discovering that the same vegetables can be grown in space. In fact, crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been growing vegetables for years in their “space garden.” 

A study currently running on the space station is helping to develop procedures and methods that allow astronauts to safely grow and eat vegetables. It is also investigating the non-nutritional value of growing plants in space – providing comfort and relaxation to the crew. 

“Growing food to supplement and minimise the food that must be carried to space will be increasingly important on long-duration missions. We also are learning about the psychological benefits of growing plants in space – something that will become more important as crews travel farther from Earth.” 

The experiment (“Lada Validating Vegetable Production Unit – Plants, Protocols, Procedures and Requirements“) uses a very simple chamber, similar to a greenhouse, in which water and light levels are controlled automatically. There are four major things that researchers want to find out:

The Lada greenhouse has been used to perform almost continuous plant growth experiments on the space station since 2002. It has been used for twenty separate plant growth experiments, and fifteen modules containing root media, or root modules, have been launched to the station. 

Root modules with seeds are launched to the space station on Russian Progress supply vehicles. Russian crew members water the plant seeds