Lettuce, First vegetable grown in space by astronauts

It seems like NASA astronauts can now add space farmers to their curriculum vitae as the Americans have shown everyone from the worldwide Space Station their dinner of red romaine lettuce that has been grown and harvested in space.

Astronauts Scott Kelly, Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui were the first to sample the produce from the Veggie orbiting vegetable patch, although declaring the result “awesome” is perhaps rather exaggerating the taste merits of the crop in the absence of a decent dressing.

It was a long journey for the romaine lettuce seeds from earth to the ISS where it was stored for 15 months before being activated in a special plant-growing box called a Veggie unit that was built by a space technological research company in Wisconsin, USA.

NASA now says that the astronauts will clean the crop using citric acid-based sanitizing wipes before they can consume the vegetables. But NASA needs to figure out how to grow food on spacecraft – and on other planets – for future deep space missions such as the one planned to Mars.

“Outredgeous” red romaine was chosen as the lettuce variety because it “is known to be a very tasty variety”, which is important since space travel dulls taste buds, she said.

The first set of harvested greens were sent back to Earth in October of last year for safety analysis.

It’s unclear if the astronauts plan to eat their lettuce plain or dress it up but we’ll be sure to bring in the first review when we get it. “I think that plant systems will become important components of any long-duration exploration scenario”. The plants grew for 33 days before being harvested.

If astronauts are to go farther in space, they will need to grow their own food and this was an experiment to test that.

This time, the astronauts have the green light to reap what they sow – to put it in their mouths. “Overall, it uses about 60 percent less energy than traditional plant lighting systems”, NASA said in a statement.

“There is evidence that supports fresh foods, such as tomatoes, blueberries and red lettuce, are a good source of antioxidants”, Ray Wheeler, the project’s lead researcher, told NASA’s website.