That’s one small step for interstellar irrigation … one giant leap for space-spinach, to be.
“Took us a couple of days,” Will Bolyard said.
“Then it was like, ‘Well, you know it is zero gravity.’”
Will, a sixth-grader at Westwood Middle School, is a budding scientist who wants to dig in to Mars some day.
NASA does, too.
The space agency in recent years has rocketed up the Artemis project, with a goal of putting astronauts on the Red Planet in Will’s lifetime — provided the aforementioned, gravity-defying groceries work out.
To get there, the Earth’s moon will serve as the literal launch pad, and that means colonizing the orb we see nightly from our window.
The infrastructure of outer space will abound.
Structures will be have to be built to safely house the astronauts, and there’s something else.
A certain something, in this case, that couldn’t be more earth-bound.
Something oh-so-organic and elemental.
Everybody’s gotta eat.
Which, Will’s teacher Lindsay Smalls said, means going back to the land.
Of another planet.
“You can’t truck soil up there,” she said. “Not at $15,000 a ton.”
You can’t haul a bunch of ready-made food up there either, she added, though NASA did get pretty good at that during its Apollo run in the 1960s.
The idea of Artemis is to grow your own, once you get there.
Salad bar from outer space
With the help of the Institute for Competitive Sciences, which is a sort of think-tank for students from elementary school to college, NASA two years ago launched the “Planting the Moon” challenge, an effort to see who could devise the best, most efficient ways to plant crops on the moon.
Like every experiment, it began with a series of questions:
Will plants and vegetation actually be able grow in the lunar “regolith” — that dusty, grainy layer of rocks and minerals covering the moon like a tablecloth?
In outer space, what will food sustainability actually mean?
What about nutrients, fertilizers and everything and anything else that might need to be deployed to make the regolith more hospitable to literal alien invaders?
Westwood Middle is among schools from the northeast and southeast taking part in the experiments.
It all began with bags mailed to Smalls’ classroom of NASA’s concoction of regolith, which contains all the silicates and other elements of the real stuff found on the Moon’s surface, mimicking it all in an earthly approximation as close as can be.
The teacher smiled as she held up a shiny foil bag labeled, “LHS-1, Lunar Highlands Simulant.”
“Check this out,” she said. “It even looks ‘space-y.’”
Smalls, for the fashion-appropriate record, was wearing a space-y shirt, also.
Both of her shirt’s long sleeves depicted all the phases of a full Lunar eclipse — given that the Artemis work, in many ways, has taken over her classroom.
Science fact (not fiction)
Tables in the back were brimming with plants.
There was the aforementioned spinach, poking up with the right stuff from the regolith.
You had your peas, carrots and lettuce, also.
A bumper crop appeared to be in the making for the spinach, in fact.
Will, as said, is already thinking about science as a career — and so are his fellow classmates on the Planting the Moon project who have quickly made Smalls’ classroom their favorite place to orbit in school.
“I definitely want to be an astronaut and I definitely want to go to Mars,” classmate Jessica Brown said.
She’s currently considering the college classes she’ll need to get to there, not to mention some of the NASA-mandated physical conditioning she’s already taken up on her own.
Meanwhile, Emmett White is interested in geology, but he’s also already an aerospace engineer-in-training, at least as a hobby: He and his dad are model-rocket enthusiasts who both groove on trajectories, parabolas and the like.
Future astronaut Madison Hall still can’t get over the experience of a couple years back of being able to regard the tops of clouds, as she did from the window seat of her first passenger-plane ride.
And Laina Osborne, who wants to engineer all those lunar and Martian excursions from her lab on earth, doesn’t need the Hubble Telescope to see the possibilities.
“I like that NASA isn’t looking at us as just being ‘kids,’” she said.
“This is important work that could mean everything. And we get to be part of it.”
Houston, we have a proposal
Roger that, Smalls said.
In middle school, she got good grades in science and went on to ace chemistry in high school and college.
Early on, she thought she might want to be a marine biologist, but bench work and a desire to be a teacher beckoned.
She still has an affinity with all things H20, however.
That’s why there’s also a good-sized aquarium in her classroom currently containing trout swimming around in their own underwater universe.
And why she was impressed with the scientific end-around the class took when it came to actually irrigating the lunar plants — as one can’t pour water in space.
Well, one can, she said.
Depending upon one’s perspective, though, the result is going to be either aquatic awe, sans gravity — or just a floating annoyance that’s going to have to be wrangled in some way.
The class had to wrangle the water issue.
“So, they came up with this system of pumps, nozzles and a syringe-type delivery system to get the water directly into the regolith,” the teacher said of her Artemis students.
“This wasn’t in any of the instructional materials and I didn’t ‘tell’ them to do it,” she continued.
“They looked at the problem and they came up with a workable solution. That’s what experimentation is, and that’s what scientists do.”
