ForumforAg Food Systems Podcast Summary

In this episode Mark Titterington talks to Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut and professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University in the US, about agriculture in space and its relevance for food systems on Earth. Mike, who flew two missions to the Hubble Space Telescope and made four space walks, shares how his experiences in space gave him a deeper appreciation of the fragility of our planet and the need to sustainably manage natural resources, including through advancements in agricultural technology. They also discuss the potential for space-based agriculture to support long-term space travel to Mars. Mike will be the keynote speaker at the Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference on April 1. 

Here is a summary of the conversation.

With your background in space, what makes you interested in agriculture and, specifically, speaking at our Annual Conference?

During my spacewalks I’ve seen both the beauty and the fragility of our planet. It looks like paradise, yet you see the thinness of the atmosphere, like the top thin layer of an onion. You understand that if we keep the planet healthy, it will sustain us. Agriculture is an important part of this, and that means agriculture in space as well as on land. Until the past couple of decades, we couldn’t grow plants in space, and we took supplies with us. Now, we’ve been successful in growing food in zero gravity, experimenting with aeroponics and hydroponics. We need to be able to grow food in space to support exploration, and the techniques are applicable on Earth. Up in space, it’s also a comfort to have plants around.

Looking deeper into innovation in agriculture in space, you mentioned aeroponics and hydroponics, and we’ve heard about moon rocks and of course satellite technology. What are astronauts learning and how can that help us build a resilient and sustainable food and agriculture system on Earth?

First, there’s monitoring. A big part of what we do is observing and monitoring the Earth to see how the land is doing, the agricultural disintegration in some areas and prosperity in other areas. We do that with satellite technology and also the International Space Station, which is a wonderful resource.

Then there’s cultivation. Space is a harsh environment for growing food, yet we can produce a garden on the space station with different types of plants, for example, peppers and lettuce. The crew loves eating them! We’ve learned to protect against radiation, and to grow plants without soil and the nutrients it would contain, or a natural water supply. We bring water up and we clean and reuse it.

One interesting thing is how plants grow differently in space, for example, a sunflower in reduced gravity doesn’t develop its normal thick supporting stalk but a thin “wire” develops instead, yet still with a big flower. There is no soil in space, but there is regolith, a kind of dirt on the moon and Mars. There have been experiments with a simulated version of regolith and it looks possible to grow things in it. A lot of what we’re finding can be applied to terrestrial agriculture as well as in space.

How has being in space shaped your perspective on agriculture and our planet’s future? You talked about how you saw the fragility of our planet – has that changed you?

My job was working on the Hubble Space Telescope and that took me on four spacewalks. On the first spacewalk, when I looked down I mainly appreciated how beautiful our planet is, how it looks like paradise. I was very focused on my work on that first spacewalk.

On my second spacewalk, I was more relaxed, and I had some little breaks to look down more and think about the Earth. I realised how it protects us, and how we need protecting from space. Space is a very harsh environment – I was only able to live there because I was in a spacesuit, and the only thing that protects us living on our planet is it’s atmosphere. And I saw how razor thin it is, as I’ve said, fragile. When I looked away from the Earth below there was just the darkness of space and I realised that we have nowhere else to go.

Another revelation was how I think about what I call home. I changed my concept of what home is. I grew up thinking of myself as a New Yorker, an American, a European. Being up there in space, I realised Earth is my home and wherever you’re from, India, Europe, Japan or wherever, we’re all from planet Earth. We’re all in this together. We’re living in paradise, we need to be amazed by it every day. Earth is our home – home to everything, the past and the future.

We live with incredibly fast change in science, technology, innovation and geopolitics. Do you see any changes that give you both some stability and some insight into what the future holds?

Three things have really changed both in the space programme and in our world, and the way we do things. One is the influx of amazing technology to help us with whatever it is we’re doing. If we learn about it, and trust it, we’ll start seeing the advantages of it. Another is the shift towards international cooperation, which is one of the great outputs of the space programme, especially the International Space Station. And the third is governments and companies cooperating to achieve goals and lead to prosperity.

If you have found this short summary interesting, there’s lots more to hear in the full 28-minute conversation. It is available now on iTunes, Podbean or Spotify or on this website.