In 2027, humans are set to return to the Moon for the first time in 55 years. While the astronauts on NASA's Artemis III may spend less than 10 days on the lunar surface, scientists around the world are preparing the next steps: how to live, grow food and thrive beyond Earth.
A global consortium of more than 40 scientists from 11 countries and seven space agencies has developed a new roadmap for the plant science and technology breakthroughs needed to make long-term human life on the Moon, and later Mars, possible.
A shared global vision for using plants to sustain life in space and to advance sustainable agriculture on Earth has been published in New Phytologist.
Dr James Lloyd, a research fellow with the ARC Centres of Excellence in Plants for Space and The University of Western Australia's Centre for Plant Energy Biology, said space was a laboratory to study how plants grow, which had informed how to improve plants for agriculture on earth.
"This viewpoint offers a summary of this and how we can use plants to feed our journey of exploration through our solar system – NASA lists food production as a red risk for going to Mars," Dr Lloyd said.
"The international community who co-authored this work are focused on overcoming this limitation, which can unlock new scientific discovers as humanity explores strange new worlds."
Scientists have created a "Bioregenerative Life Support System Readiness Level" framework, to assess how effectively plants can recycle air, water and nutrients in space habitats, to ensure they provide nutrition as well as other critical life support functions to support sustainable space exploration.
The paper highlights progress in crop sciences for space and key priorities for future research, as well as how synthetic biology and precision agriculture can be used to design crops for space and farming on Earth.
It also reveals the psychological and sensory benefits of growing and eating fresh produce in space, an upcoming experiment, which will grow and return the first plants from the Moon with NASA's Artemis III mission, and the need for international collaboration to develop self-sustaining space farms for lunar and Martian missions, in the post- International Space Station era. (The International Space Station is due to be decommissioned around 2030).
NASA's Dr Luke Fountain, lead author of the article, said by learning to grow plants in space, we're also improving the way we grow food on our own planet.
"The technologies we develop for the Moon and Mars will help tackle global challenges in food, energy and sustainability," Dr Fountain said.
Co-author Professor Matthew Gilliham, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space at the University of Adelaide, said the innovations that would keep astronauts alive on the Moon, such as closed-loop farming, recycling, and resource efficiency, were the same technologies that would transform how we grow food and medicines on Earth.
