Lettuce Feast: Astronauts Get First Taste of Veggies Harvested in Space

While space food has come a long way since the freeze-dried ice cream and Tang you remember from childhood, the vacuum of space isn’t exactly an ideal environment for growing fresh food.

Astronauts aboard the worldwide Space Station are officially the first humans in history to ever eat space-grown lettuce.

The technology, named Veggie, is part of NASA’s plant experiment – Veg-01 – which is studying plant growth in space, in order to provide future astronauts with a sustainable food source.

Light was provided by red, blue and green LEDs, Daily Mail reports, and the plants were sanitized with citric-acid based wipes before ingestion. It has been cultivating and growing for the past 33 days before today’s harvest. Half of the harvest will be set aside for further analysis, while the other half will go straight into the space veggie-hungry stomachs of the researchers.

It’s not expected that the ISS will get anywhere need self-sufficiency as a result of this experiment, but the point of the effort is to explore how humans might augment food hauled from Earth on longer trips to spots like Mars.

On Friday NASA took to their blog to let everyone know that crew members of Expedition 44 would be eating food grown that was grown in space on August 13.

The Veggie unit was developed by a team of engineers and collaborators including Dr. Ray Wheeler, chief of Advanced Life Support activities at the Exploration Research and Technology Programs Office at Kennedy, Dr. Gioia Massa, and Dr. Gary Stutte.

It might sound unbelievable, but, NASA astronauts aboard the global Space Station (ISS) are ready to sample fresh veggies grown in space microgravity.

Otherwise the plants would grow purple and might look inedible.

The lettuce seeds had been on the station for 15 months before NASA astronaut Scott Kelly activated the pillows on July 8.

Space exploration may seem glamorous, but it’s no picnic for the astronauts who sign up to work aboard the global Space Station.

Significant further advances will be necessary, and each of them promises to bring new innovations to agriculture here on Earth. The first crop of produce for Veg-01 was planted in May 2014 and returned to Earth in October for safety testing.