1/3/2023 0 Comments Astronaut on phone![]() This assumes that fruits, vegetables, starch, sugar, and oil would be produced using aeroponic techniques, which allow plants to grow without soil, while conventional farming would produce meat, fish, dairy, and honey. They estimated the annual caloric intake of the crew aboard, then combined this with parameters set by modern farming techniques to predict the size of the space required.įor a crew of 500 people with omnivorous diets, just 0.45 square kilometres would be enough to feed them all. Marin and colleagues used a numerical code called HERITAGE to tackle the question. The Lada greenhouse on the ISS has been growing plants since 2002 in microgravity.īut spaceships have limited space, so just how much would need to be dedicated to farming? Space agriculture systems are already being tested. This would not only produce fresh food, but also recycle nutrients and faeces, generate oxygen, and continuously purify the air – making the spaceship into a closed ecological system. The best and most obvious option is to grow crops and raise animals aboard the ship – essentially, to run a farm. ![]() Astronauts on the ISS currently consume about 1.8 kilograms of packaged food per day to feed crew this way over centuries would add up to millions of tonnes of cargo. ![]() How do you feed astronauts if the journey lasts millennia? Dried food stocks aren’t an option because they would take up far too much space and their vitamins would deteriorate over time. Turns out, just 98 crew members are needed to ensure a 100% success rate for a 6300-year journey. They previously calculated the minimum size of the initial crew to ensure that their descendants arrive at the other end without genetic disorders. Marin and his team are interested in how human populations may evolve and survive in the resource-limited environment of space – especially when the journey is one-way. “The original population would grow old and die,” says Marin, “leaving their descendants to continue travelling.” This is well beyond the lifespan of any astronaut, and so such spaceships must be multi-generational. ![]() To reach even the closest exoplanet – Proxima Centauri b – would take about 6300 years. “With our current technology, it is not feasible to reach an exoplanet in less than several centuries of travel,” explains Frédéric Marin, astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg in France, who led the study. How do you feed astronauts on extremely long journeys?Įuropean astronomers have calculated the amount of onboard space needed to feed the crew of a multi-generational ship – one of the many challenges of journeying to planets orbiting stars other than the sun. ![]()
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