Growing plants in lunar soil.
Alain Fournier
other things human waste.
Biologists from the European Space Research and Technology Centre (Estec) have shown that you can grow plants in lunar
regolith in which you add some bacteria, without fertilizers. [See the following site, sorry for the French, I don't
have it in English]
http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/Science-Sante/2008/04/17/001-lune-plante.shtml
The plants they have grown, though some parts are edible, can't really be considered as a food crop. Nonetheless, those
plants can be used to make compost, which would then allow to grow more reasonable crops. I see no reasons why something
similar couldn't be done on Mars.
Alain Fournier
Jim Kingdon
> (Estec) have shown that you can grow plants in lunar regolith in which
> you add some bacteria, without fertilizers.
See for example
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/17/scimoon117.xml
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.resmic.2005.07.009
They grew marigolds and a few others in a mix of crushed Anorthosite
(a rock) and bacteria (such as Paenibacillus).
> The plants they have grown, though some parts are edible, can't really
> be considered as a food crop. Nonetheless, those plants can be used to
> make compost, which would then allow to grow more reasonable crops.
Sure, or you could probably just refine their techniques to grow more
familiar crops. But the other input here is the volatiles (carbon,
nitrogen, perhaps hydrogen). In the ESTEC experiments, the nitrogen
was probably coming from the earth's atmosphere. (that's assuming
that the Paenibacillus they used is a nitrogen fixer or some other
nitrogen fixing bacteria made it into their experiment).
The carbon in their experiment presumably comes from atmospheric
carbon dioxide. The hydrogen, I suspect, comes from water (since they
wouldn't have gotten very far without water).
So getting minerals the plant needs (Calcium, Iron and Silicon are
mentioned in the paper's abstract) from regolith would be good for
something, but that isn't really as big a deal (mass-wise) as the
volatiles (carbon, nitrogen, perhaps hydrogen). They still assume a
source of those.
> I see no reasons why something similar couldn't be done on Mars.
Mars is much more hospitable, in the sense that volatiles are
available.
BradGuth
rad-hard plants growing on the surface of our moon, even if covered by
an inflated dome of O2 plus whatever else makes a rad-hard plant
happy, seems unlikely and otherwise damn spendy.
. - Brad Guth
Alain Fournier
BradGuth wrote:
> This should to be good. Public loot paying for the goal of getting
> rad-hard plants growing on the surface of our moon, even if covered by
> an inflated dome of O2 plus whatever else makes a rad-hard plant
> happy, seems unlikely and otherwise damn spendy.
> . - Brad Guth
Doing the experiment on Earth isn't very expensive. Doing it on
the Moon is expensive, but if you already are on the moon, it is
less expensive than carrying your food from Earth.
Alain Fournier
BradGuth
Delivery of beer and pizza via robotic fly-by-rocket should not be all
that spendy. China might become capable of as little as $10,000/kg.
However, intelligent designed plants that are rad-hard might might be
cheaper if it were not for the required water.
. - Brad Guth
Alain Fournier
> Delivery of beer and pizza via robotic fly-by-rocket should not be all
> that spendy. China might become capable of as little as $10,000/kg.
>
> However, intelligent designed plants that are rad-hard might might be
> cheaper if it were not for the required water.
Yes. Recycling the water is a must. You have to bring some at first,
but then you just reuse it over and over. So you have food on a
permanent basis just at the cost of the original setup. If you have
your beer and pizza delivered every night, the cost adds up quite
fast.
Alain Fournier
Mike Combs
news:BrmdnXCCg7HLm4TV...@ulaval.ca...
>
> Yes. Recycling the water is a must. You have to bring some at first,
> but then you just reuse it over and over. So you have food on a
> permanent basis just at the cost of the original setup. If you have
> your beer and pizza delivered every night, the cost adds up quite
> fast.
The Space Studies Institute (http://ssi.org) funded some studies on CELSS a
while back. One interesting thing that came out of it is you don't really
have to worry about a separate water filtration system. If growing enough
food to feed everybody, there's already enough water going into the roots of
your crop plants and coming out the leaves via transpiration that you can
just condense out the drinking water needed (you would need to dehumidify
the air in any case). So your food source doubles as your water filtration
system.
Another study concluded that a CELSS would pay for itself for any setup
intended to remain in operation for longer than eight years. So we could
see any decent space hotel having an interest in closing the cycles.
--
Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole
prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all
human beings... It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that
any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.
Ronald Reagan at Westminster Abbey, 1982
BradGuth
Obviously you haven't discovered the fly-by-rocket wizardly expertise
and all-knowing benefits of having William Mook working on this one,
because he's got that delivery cost down to less than 1% of whatever
you or I might care to think. Think of it as the Mook version of
CATS.
BTW, grown food is mostly water, plus you'll likely need several
meters of water as your surrounding bubble/shield, along with
nighttime geothermal warming and daytime cooling.
How much water is likely sequestered within our moon?
. - Brad Guth
BradGuth
At first you'll have to bring lots of fresh water in addition to all
of the beer and pizza, as in many tonnes of that water just for the
required shield of a small greenhouse/dome, that is unless you've got
rad-hard plant DNA.
BTW, according to William Mook, whereas his methods of getting tonnage
of whatever to/from our moon at as little as 1% the usual fly-by-
rocket cost shouldn't be ignored. My LSE-CM/ISS alternative of fully
utilizing the moon's L1 simply can't compete with Mook's low cost.
. - Brad Guth
BradGuth
wrote:
> "Alain Fournier" <alain...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
Bigelow POOF/inflated cities in LEO, as well as for Venus L2 seems
doable as is. The extra gamma and hard-X-ray saturation of utilizing
our moon L1 is where that extra thick layer or surround of water as
shield will be required in addition to having an artificial solar
shade.
. - Brad Guth