 When we send people to deep space, we can't carry a ton of stuff with us. There's only so much room on a rocket, right? And food takes up a lot of space, and it can break down over time. But one thing we can send with us are super lightweight seeds to grow plants. That's why we're here at Kennedy Space Center to learn how to grow yummy food in space and on other planets. In order to grow plants, you need soil, right? Well, there are some problems with that. Technically, on the Moon and Mars, it's not really a soil. A soil by definition has organic material in it. The surface of the Moon and Mars doesn't, so they're really regoliths. It's crushed volcanic rock for the most part. And there's components in that, chemicals in that, that are not conducive to plant growth. So especially when we go to Mars, we're going to have to figure out if we want to use the Martian regolith as a medium to grow plants in, we're going to have to convert that regolith into a soil, a usable soil. Right, and aren't there some problems already associated with using that soil? Isn't it a little bit toxic? Yeah, the perchlorates that are in the Martian soils are a real problem for plant growth. Perchlorates are a type of salt. NASA's Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover both found signatures of the chemical on Mars. And that's not great news. High levels of perchlorates are toxic to humans, which could make growing food on the Red Planet problematic. But NASA's thinking of ways to clean the perchlorates by washing them away with chemical solutions. There's perchlorates in the environment on Earth, and there's scientists who have already developed methods for remediating those perchlorates using microbes. So theoretically, we could go up there and use either chemical or microbial solutions to mitigate the microbes. So at the end of the day, it might just be better not to use soil at all than to actually try and clean the potentially toxic Mars soil. Of course, you can always bring soil from Earth, but that's not really a great option either because it weighs so much. NASA's looking into other options for growing plants that don't use soil. We have, you know, a basic soil here, but picking it up, it's pretty heavy. And this is even a very big box. Well, even today in controlled environment agriculture, they're getting away from using soil as a medium to grow plants in. They want to go to things that are basically hydroponically grown, aeroponically grown. You want to minimize the resources, even today on the ground, to grow things in. So we're going to be looking at using some of that type of technology in spaceflight so we can eliminate the medium of soil. NASA is testing hydroponics, a method for growing that has gained popularity among terrestrial farmers in the past few years, and also aeroponics, as gravity, or a lack thereof, presents its own challenges. So we're growing things in kind of a modified hydroponics way right now. So hydroponics is growing plants without soil. And generally on Earth, this is using a nutrient solution, a liquid solution of nutrients. And sometimes you use a substrate like a baked clay or a gravel or a sand. Sometimes you can just use water and nutrient solution. And so we're testing different ways of doing this, both for a surface system like Mars, where you have some gravity, and for microgravity in space. So without gravity, you get some really interesting challenges. You get very different behavior of fluids. So water and air have been our biggest challenges, especially in the root zone, watering your plants. And when we figure that out, that's going to be huge. Hydroponics delivers water and nutrients to plant roots using a liquid solution. And aeroponics takes it one step further. Instead of using a solution, plants are grown in a misty air environment. Aside from hydroponics, researchers are also testing what environments plants will thrive in best by testing different lights and temperatures, including environments similar to that of the ISS. Our main goal right now is to produce safe, nutritious, and appealing food for the crew to supplement a packaged diet. So they have a really good packaged diet. They have several hundred foods. And they're actually really tasty. They do a lot of evaluation to make sure that they're going to be very, very delicious for the crew. When we go to Mars, we need a diet that's going to be good for five years. And some of the vitamins don't last that long in the packaged food. So we're looking at, can we use supplemental food production, crops, plants, to add more flavor, more texture, and more nutrients to that diet? I couldn't leave without getting a taste of these plants. Time to eat. Basically, we're just going to cut the leaves off and put them in these little pots here? That's all we have to do. So these are microgreens. So we're going to try here. We got a little bit of broccoli, a little bit of cauliflower. So microgreens actually started life as garnishes in high-end restaurants. You'll go into a restaurant, there'll be like a little marigold microgreen on there or something. Right. Now it's the meal. It's the meal. That's the accent for food. The biggest benefit of microgreens is that they can be harvested in a very short amount of time. So you don't have to wait weeks or months before you can eat them. Here's our famous steak plant. Amara mustard is what it's called. It's also known as Ethiopian kale. Medium rare. That weirdly does taste like steak. It's got that, it's got that Yunami flavor to it. It takes a while to kick in, yeah. Figuring out how to grow fresh food in space is not only important for the nutritional value it will provide, but the psychological value it has as well. When you're on Mars, you're not going to be looking down on Earth. So I think the plants are going to be really important for those reasons as well. Like having a little taste of home almost. Exactly. While humans have explored and adapted to new environments many times before, with space we won't be able to rely on the resources we are accustomed to here on Earth. Growing food is going to be incredibly difficult and we'll have to figure out how to be self-sufficient in entirely new ways because this is an entirely new frontier. Hey everyone. Thanks so much for watching our video. If you want more science content like this, be sure to check out our Verge Science YouTube channel. We'll see you there.