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You’re right that you can support plants in inert mediums if there’s a nutrient supplied in the water. I think the person you responded to was suggesting that t

You’re right that you can support plants in inert mediums if there’s a nutrient supplied in the water. I think the person you responded to was suggesting that the soil without added nutrients wouldn’t do anything, which is probably correct. Since you’re right about aeroponics, I wonder what the practicality of using moon dust as a medium is. Perhaps it contains some amount of minerals that could be extracted by plants, thereby reducing how much of it we need to ship to the moon? I’m not even sure that’s possible without established microbial and mycelial cultures – do plants extract minerals from dirt on their own? The experiment results aren’t overtly meaningful here in any case. I thought NASA was so interested in aeroponics partially because of how useless the moon is as a medium for agriculture.

zdragnar 5y ago
Without microbes or fungi, plants are mostly left to either chemical weathering from water or turning carnivorous (which takes a really really long time). Aeroponics has the added benefit of being really frugal with your water supply. Most of the water in a hydroponic system is literally just sitting around in a tube, useless. Also, a leak in an aeroponics system is way less catastrophic in a low-to-no gravity situation. I think using moon dust as a rooting medium would be helpful for water retention in a pseudo-hydroponic setup, as the surface tension would help keep the water from flowing away from the roots. It certainly beats trying to ship the stuff from earth on a rocket, at the very least.