Agriculture in Space

If long-term and long-distance manned space missions are envisioned to bring man to the Moon and Mars, or whether permanent outposts such as the International Space Station or the next-generation spacecrafts will orbit far from Earth or other habitable zones, foods will have to be provided in-site rather than transported. In spite of the many technologies already tested, soil-based bioregenerative life support systems are the ones that provide most services and close the matter loop. BRTSim has widely been used to test the biogeochemical functioning of a small soil volume used to plant crops and test the hypothesis that human urine can be recycled by soil microorganisms to provide primary, secondary and micronutrients to plants. The biodegradation of human urine (FIgure 1) can satisfy the N, P, K, S, Ca and Mg to a range of extents depending on the application rate (UUA), and even exceed the plant requirements (Figure 2). BRTSim was used to analyse how the soil qualities (salinity, pH and other) changes as a function of the UUA and the microbial ecological stability, whose details are comprehensively reported in PUBLICATIONS

Figure 1

Figure 2