4 ms·
This is an interesting from a protocol point of view, but I would like to see something more useful than leaf vegetable -- I imagine months of whatever nutrient
by verytrivial 11y ago
This is an interesting from a protocol point of view, but I would like to see something more useful than leaf vegetable -- I imagine months of whatever nutrients this lettuce provides could be supplied by a handful of pills. What about actually calories? I guess with leaf you eat the whole thing, but ... it just feels a bit .. gimicky.
- pjc50 11y agoPresumably it was chosen for ease of growing. If you can grow lettuce, you can move onto growing rice/potatoes/corn for calories, although all of those have larger space/water requirements and maybe stalk issues in microgravity.(+) It's rewarding to the astronauts to be able to eat fresh homegrown food rather than years of mush and pills on the proposed Mars trip. I also suspect that, as on earth, it's easier to pack calories into your diet (especially sugar) than a full range of nutrients, some of which decay in air or storage. (+) One of the great advantages of hybrid wheat was solving the problem that bigger ears of wheat snapped off the stalk. In microgravity this would no longer be a problem ..