Space-Grown Lettuce Is Safe and Astronaut-Approved

NASA’s vegetable production system, known as Veggie, may help pave the way for more sophisticated systems that could supplement astronauts’ diets during long trips to space.

Amy Schleunes

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ABOVE: NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor tends to dragoon lettuce and red Russian kale plants in the Veggie growing system during Expedition 57 in the fall of 2018.
NASA

Lettuce can be safely grown in space using a unique system for plant cultivation in weightless environments, according to a study published on March 6 in Frontiers in Plant Science. The growing system was designed by NASA scientists with the goal of improving astronauts’ traditional diet of dehydrated meats, freeze-dried ice cream, and other processed foods that degrade and become less nutritious over time, according to The Guardian.

Veggie, as the system is called, addresses the unique challenges of watering plants in space “where we can get too much water or not enough water,” coauthor Gioia Massa, a plant scientist at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida, tells The New York Times. “Water coats your surfaces. It will clog the pores of ...

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Meet the Author

Amy Schleunes
A former intern at The Scientist, Amy studied neurobiology at Cornell University and later earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is a Los Angeles–based writer, editor, and communications strategist who collaborates on nonfiction books for Harper Collins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and also teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University CTY. Her favorite projects involve sharing the insights of science and medicine.
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