Op-Ed: Growing food in space — Good idea, but who understands it on Earth?


By Paul Wallis
September 4, 2023

International Space Station. — Photo: NASA / AFP

Growing food in space has been a major thing for decades. It’s critical science. It’s also a very good idea, generating very valuable information. It’s also been creating some very high-yield crops for food production.

China has been deeply involved in this field for decades. The results are particularly encouraging thanks to the selective targeting of important crops like rice, corn, and similar staples. That said, there are a lot of issues that aren’t translating into production on Earth. There are also a few fundamental problems with space production.

The problems on Earth are simple enough in one way. Developing new crops and inserting them into a cumbersome old-style environment could be an own goal. The new food may be great, but food distribution isn’t exactly a happy-go-lucky commercial and logistics scenario.

To get the best out of the new crops, using up huge areas of valuable land with “whatever” nutrients definitely isn’t the best option. Lab-grown species have this problem more or less constantly at the inception stage. The first GMO potatoes planted in the wild simply died. These new high-yield crops are tough, but their priority value is as viable commercial food. Mistakes can be expensive and time-consuming.

Time is one thing the world’s food supply may not have. Water crises are now routine worldwide. Any use of water needs to be as efficient as possible. This means that the new crops need to hit the ground running in commercial and nutritional terms.

The short answer is vertical farming, sky farms, etc. This is not a “choice”. It’s inevitable. Old-style farming cannot defend itself against the climate and massive water shortages. That’s the classic no-brainer that nobody’s been mentioning so far. This will eventually be called the Second Agricultural Revolution. The last one was about 10,000 years ago.

There’s another much less obvious issue with physically growing crops in space, which is another proposal by the UAE, “orbiting greenhouse” satellites. The idea has a few economic issues, too, notably the cost of distribution, but this is trickier.

Rising sea levels and violent flooding are already putting tens of millions of lives at risk in Bangladesh, but they bring another problem that threatens the entire nation: Water-logged land and high salinity in streams and soil are killing crops 

– Copyright AFP/File Kazuhiro NOGI

The science says that DNA modification by exposure to radiation created these new crops. …So, what happens if the actual crops are themselves irradiated and mutate again? It’s a genetic piece of string that could lasso the whole idea of growing food in space and hang it. You’d have to monitor the crops for genetic issues and prove they were safe.

It’s also perhaps too obvious to point out that radiation shielding in space has been on the To Do list for far too long. Anyone would think it was a philosophical problem from the sheer lack of activity dealing with it.

This may yet even be required on Earth if superheated air generates any problems with plants receiving solar radiation. (That’s speculation, but foreseeable problems are at least easier to express.) The ozone hole hasn’t yet gone away, by the way. That’s a lot of UV if it expands.

Space bred crops will work, and work well. The real blunders are likely to be on the ground. This needs to be done well, or it’s “O Brave New World with such fools in it” again.