LunarPlant: Growing Salads on the Moon

Header image: SINTEF researcher Galina Simonsen with hydroponic plants at the CIRiS/NTNU Social Research Centre in Trondheim. Image credit: Jana Pavlova

Researcher Galina Simonsen works at SINTEF, an independent research organisation based in Trondheim, Norway. She and her colleagues are part of an international project called LunarPlant, looking into growing plants on the Moon. 

Agriculture is distinctly challenging in the air-free lunar environment, which can reach 200º during the day and drop to -183º at night. To make life harder, the lunar ‘soil’ is really regolith, a rocky powder not ideally suited to plant growth. Meeting these challenges will involve using the available resources to provide artificial environments and light and a replacement for fertile soil.

“You may already have heard of hydroponics. This is a method of growing plants in water, which is entirely possible if the water contains sufficient nutrients. The use of this method is essential to the success of this project.”

“Radar data indicates that the Moon’s polar regions hold more than 600 billion kilogrammes of ice. This is enough to fill about 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. It is much less than we have on Earth, but will be enough to enable humans to maintain some level of activity. The ice will be melted to form water which will be used to cultivate food plants.”

The LunarPlant project is based on a circular system of resource use, meaning that the fertiliser used on the Moon will come from the astronauts themselves.

Some gardeners will already be familiar with the term ‘liquid gold’, used to describe the use of urine as a fertiliser. However, urine is not generally recommended for use on plants for consumption, so one of the challenges for the