Hellboy the Space Chile

This is Hellboy*, he’s a very special chilli pepper. He’s part of the Space Chile Grow a Pepper Plant Challenge, which is run by Jacob Torres (who gets name-checked in episode 12 of Gardeners of the Galaxy).

Jacob works at NASA, on the Plant Habitat-04 project, which is going to be blasting chilli peppers up to the International Space Station next year. The chillies will be grown in the Advanced Plant Habitat, or APH, which is currently growing space radishes.

(The space radish experiment is Plant Habitat-02. What’s Plant Habitat-03 going to be, I hear you ask? Well, it’s going to be an Arabidopsis experiment. But it will probably be after Plant Habitat-04, because sometimes things don’t always go according to schedule in space.)

The idea behind sending chillies into space is that they would provide astronauts with a vitamin-rich flavour bomb to liven up all of their meals. After exhaustive testing, NASA chose a variety from Española, New Mexico, as its chilinaut, because it’s quite a small plant, and drought tolerant.

There’s just one teensy little problem. When grown in the lab, under space-like conditions, the peppers just don’t develop the same levels of heat (capsaicin) that they do under normal growing conditions.

And so Jacob has developed a citizen science project aimed at discovering how to give space peppers a consistent kick. People all over the world are growing the same chilli variety, in different ways, to find out what makes them hot. Jacob will collect sample peppers and test their capsaicin levels.

Hellboy is my experimental space chile. This photo was taken on DAP 26 (26 days after planting). I sowed 6 seeds in my AeroGarden (two in each slot), but most succumbed to mould issues. Hellboy was the only one to