back to article Spaceship 'salad units' to farm special astro strawberries

Fruity boffins in America say they have identified a type of strawberry which would be ideal for growing in hydroponic spacegoing mini-farms to feed astronauts on long-duration space voyages of the future - missions to Mars, for instance. Strawberries suitable for growing in space. Credit: Purdue University In related …

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  1. Graham Bartlett

    Good idea

    At last, they're seriously considering hydroponics to make space missions self-sustaining. Hey ho, it's only taken them 40 years.

    BTW, there's a cracking SF short story called (IIRC) "The Insect Tapes", where an engineered ecosystem on a long space exploration mission goes bonkers. Although for the life of me, I can't remember who wrote it. The guy starts with fruit trees and stuff, then finds that greenfly were on one of the trees that was scanned for replicating, and have been replicated along with it. So he calls up the computer to deal with it, and gets some insects to eat the greenfly, but he screws it up and gets a whole chunk of other creepy-crawlies until the ship's buried in them. Then he gets the computer to produce birds, at which point the ship ends up smothered in birds. It ends with him heading down to the cryosleep area to shoot an albatross...

    (Anyone else remember this, or know who wrote it?)

    1. Trygve Henriksen

      By the power of GOOGLE!

      You're looking for Michael Scott Rohan

      http://www.philsp.com/homeville/isfac/t129.htm

    2. Perpetiel

      Might be in this anthology...

      Aries I

      Illustrator Grant, John.

      Imprint:Newton, MA David & Charles 1979

      Note:Kilworth, G. The marble of God's cold lips.--Shaw, B. and Harris, M. The edge of time.--Holdstock, R. In the valley of the statues.--Rohan, M. S. The insect tapes.--Priest, C. and Redd, D. The agent.--Douglas, R. Flies in amber.--Langford, D. Sex pirates of the blood asteroid.--Spruill, S. Prime culture.--Tapp, T. And Englishmen.--Wilson, C. Timeslip.--Devereux, E. MT (and hence to be filled)

      ISBN0715377779

    3. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD

      There...

      ... was an old woman who swallowed a fly...

  2. breakfast Silver badge
    Welcome

    Oddly prophetic

    I once had a dream that I landed on mars and it had been terraformed and was mainly being used to grow strawberries.

    I was picking strawberries as a student summer job at the time, so it was probably mostly about that, but perhaps my subconscious was offering me a small glimpse of our horticultural martian future which I, for one, welcome.

  3. Ben Holmes
    Thumb Up

    I don't know...

    ...who wrote the short story, but 'shoot an Albatross' NEEDS to be a euphamism for something. Anything.

  4. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Thumb Up

    Tch!

    Why not take a packet of Opal Fruits?! That family stuck at the airport in the 80s ad where always stuffing them when they got tired, bored and thirsty!

  5. Asiren
    WTF?

    Needs less light?

    Floating through the expanses of space, without atmosphere to block it out, surely light is something they'd have in abundance? (This is assuming we're not floating off to the next star, and are still within the asteroid belt...)

    Though strawberries in space. Mmm... Now we just need some space-cows for the cream.

    1. Martin Lyne

      title

      with nothing between you and the sun, the plants would get pretty well broiled. Of course, when they are manoeuvring/behind a celestial body there will be no light, so they'd freeze/die.

      Much better to have a stable climate . Not to mention that you can more economically stack plants when lights are involved. (otherwise you;re looking at one rack deep, all facing one way, compared to in a tube as you will be, having them in concentric circles with lights below the rack above. Or something)

  6. AlistairJ
    Happy

    Have no fear

    Flight officer TJ Creamer is on the case

    1. ElReg!comments!Pierre
      Coat

      Why, thank you

      That little comment of yours, it elicited one of the most yukky images ever in my mind.

      Mine's the one with the flask of mindbleach in the pocket.

  7. ElReg!comments!Pierre

    the space berries of doom

    Forget about HAL or belly-busting aliens, I know what will decimate the astronauts on the first mission to Mars. If those are anything like earth strawberries, they will give some fruits for a couple years to tame their soon-to-be biped slaves, then they will grow rhizomes all around and colonize every single available square inch in the ship while not producing any fruits at all anymore. Or possibly just enough too keep the human slaves alive and begging. Beware the Space Strawberries of DOOOOM!

  8. Adrian Esdaile
    Happy

    Not only but also...

    Stephen Baxter in the delightfully depressing 'Titan' (read it and tick off the disasters, he even got Columbia close to correct!)

    Carrots that start out tasty but turn into poisonous killers.

    Not to give a huge spoiler, but I love how a lot of his books finish with everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) dead.

  9. MacroRodent
    Thumb Up

    Yes, strawberries can be tough

    My parents' garden used to have a variety of strawberry that makes berries like mad, even eerily late in the dark, cold Finnish autumns (basically until severe frosts kill it). Small berries (it is really an ornamental plant), but very tasty. I could imagine that growing on Mars...

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