Farming and the Future of Off Planet Colonization

Clifford Hall, Room 210

Growing crops will be an essential undertaking if the aspirations to colonize either the Moon or Mars are to be successful and sustainable. The Lunar Mars Analog Habitat (L.M.A.H) has introduced the Plant Growth Module, currently in its second mission, and successfully grown crops, which have been integrated into a healthy diet for the crew containing essential nutrients and cancer fighting antioxidants, which are crucial to surviving off planet conditions. If humans desire the colonization of territories off the planet Earth, we will have to model our ancestors in that we will have to be able to grow our own food. In the long run, this may mean we will eventually have to modify crops to suit the conditions on the Moon, or Mars. In the meantime, experimenting within the analog habitat, we must be able to fulfill the most basic functions of survival and that involves farming. Although we cannot exactly replicate microgravity or low-pressure environments, we can still learn a great deal about growing plants and integrating them as part of a closed ecological life support system. This is the most important and exciting time of human exploration, we can’t take everything with us, so being able to grow our own food in space is critical to our success as an off-planet species.