Jonathan Lethem might prefer to think that his short story Lostronaut, in the most recent New Yorker, was a reflection on absence, love, memory, and death, but you, know the heck with artsy authors and their high-falutin’ themes (though his Fortress of Solitude is a bit of a nod to comics nerds). This story focuses on one member an international crew of astronauts trapped on their low-earth-orbit space station. The Chinese have launched a series of space-mines that prevent the crew from using their re-entry pods to get back to earth, so all they can do is send messages home as their space station slowly runs out of energy. We’re told almost immediately that the station’s air supply is provided by plants kept in a special greenhouse, but that the facility was damaged in an accident. As the plants die, the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen gets steadily but slowly worse, leaving the station inhabitants with plenty of time to ponder life and death.
The use of plants to recycle air and provide food for long term space trips is one of science fiction’s favorite tropes. It makes so much sense, right? Green plants and algae use carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen, which humans and other assorted mammals breath in and convert back to carbon dioxide. The planet Earth itself functions, more or less, under exactly this sort of closed system.
In the 1990s, NASA’s Advanced Life Support division conducted a series of experiments at the Johnson Space Center to see if they could make the system work on a much smaller scale. Working with the Utah State University, they developed USU-Apogee, a kind of dwarf wheat that grows to its full height of 18 inches in just 23 days under spaceship-type conditions (primarily 24 hours of artificial light). The wheat’s small, double leaves are also thought to be more efficient for processing carbon dioxide than plants with larger leaves. In the 1995, NASA locked a scientist in a 7.2 meter chamber for 15 days with a crop of dwarf wheat. The scientist, Nigel Packham, exercised on a treadmill every day and conducted experiments the rest of the time. By the end of the 15 days, Packham emerged healthy, and the results indicated the wheat had produced more than enough oxygen for one man. Even better, the scientists found the plants actually increased their respiration rate when Packham was active and producing more CO2, and then slowed down when he became less active.
In subsequent experiments they used chemical and mechanical means to recycle air and water for a four-volunteer crews for 30 and then 60 days. And in a fourth test, conducted in 1997, NASA installed five volunteers in a three-story chamber for 90 days and had them use a combination of plant, mechanical, and chemical processes to recycle their air and water, and to provide some of their food. The experiment was deemed a success, and a yet larger experiment was planned for 2001, but it appears to have never been conducted.
But NASA has not abandoned the project. In 2002, Gary Stutte spend 73 days on the International Space Station so he could conduct Photosynthesis Experiment Systems Testing and Operations (PESTO, née Photosynthesis and Assimilation System Testing and Analysis (PASTA)). He grew some USU-Apogee dwarf wheat in three cycles of 23 days so he could try to determine the effects of microgravity on the plant. The result? Stutte found that the plants grew and respired at about the same rates in microgravity as they did on earth. Looks like Lethem’s— and the rest of SciFi’s— premise of using plants to provide the oxygen on for our great colonizing spaceships is on pretty solid footing.
Image courtesy of NASA
November 19th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
[...] Vote Lostronaut: Plants. In. Spaaaaaaaaace! | Science Not Fiction … [...]
November 19th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Lostronaut: Plants. In. Spaaaaaaaaace! | Science Not Fiction …
The use of plants to recycle air and provide food for long term space trips is one of science fiction’s favorite tropes. It makes so much sense, right? Green plants and algae use carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen, which humans …
November 20th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
What I do not quite like about the idea of the story is… from what I read here space mines seem to be a very inefficient way to make LEO unaccessible.
The earth is big, such is space. You would need many, many, many mines to do this. Even then the effectiveness is doubtful in my mind, especially for preventing these astronauts from returning home. But then I can not really think of anything that would be. Maybe something more moveable that actively seeks targets, moves closer and then destroys them with a weapon of some sorts, like a laser, or high speed projectile weapons.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
[...] stories and science collide! Posted by Miriam Goldstein under Uncategorized Check out Eric’s latest column for Science Not Fiction, in which he ponders the possibilities of plant-based intergalactic life [...]
November 21st, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Yeah, Elmar, I hear you. Generally at SciNoFi we try not to go after people for just getting stuff wrong, or for ideas being implausible. It would be too easy, and we don’t think all that interesting to read about how movies, TV, and literature get things wrong. But it’s a bit of a stretch in this story. Maybe the mines stayed between the space station and earth, but even still, the US couldn’t make a hole by throwing things at them until they exploded? Unlike earth mines, these things were visible, right there in space. Just blow them up!
Lethem is a pretty good writer (In addition to Fortress of Solitude I recommend Motherless Brooklyn), but he’s smart enough to have thought just a little harder about why they couldn’t get back to earth.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:46 am
I know what you mean Eric and I love the sonic screwdriver like the next man
I just dont like things that are not logical. If there is a sonic screwdriver to fix my unobtainium- drive then fine. I dont know anything about a sonic screwdriver or how it would fix my unobtainiumdrive, I cant even imagine it, so I will just turn off my brains and accept it as a given. But… when there are mines in space preventing my hero from returning to earth and therefore dooming him to certain death, then my brain starts working and tries to think of all sorts of ways to overcome the problem, or of reasons why this should not be a problem to begin with.
That is, I think a general problem with science fiction:
The closer to science it gets and the further it moves away from fiction, the more attention to detail has to be payed by the author.
I am particularily annoyed with inaccuracies, when the author is obviously trying to transmit some kind of message or agenda and then uses “false science” to do that (e.g. anti cloning message in 11th hour).
April 17th, 2009 at 6:03 am
[...] Setting aside for a moment the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, there are some ideas that have been around for a long time that are just now seeing the light of day. The idea I’m thinking about today is regenerative life-support systems for long-term space exploration. The idea is simple, really. You just create a tiny, self-sustaining ecosystem on a spacecraft and send it on its way toward Mars or Jupiter or wherever you’re interested in going. The astronauts tend the garden which provides them with both fresh produce and breathable air. Of course, actually implementing this system is much more challenging than it seems on the surface. Discover takes a little closer look at the problem in a recent article on their blog. [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
[...] reading the story makes you feel sciencey, Eric explored the science behind using plants for life support on the Science Not Fiction blog. But if reading the story makes you want to kick back and feel [...]
September 20th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
[...] Creating a space farm is a such a common assumption that SciFi writers almost routinely include some kind of plant growth or space farm area in any show that involves long distance space travel or space-based colonies. Off the top of my head, I can think of an episode of Doctor Who, and the film Sunshine, and the New Yorker story Lostronaut. [...]