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Challenges
for Lunar Agriculture
In the fall of
1988, an LRS working group took up the challenge of
entering NSS' Space Habitat Design Competition in
the category: "Advanced Lunar Outpost for 1000 to
5000 persons". In the course of putting together
our award winning entry "Prinzton" (our
three-village lunar town of 3,000 people was
situated in a rille valley bottom just north of the
crater Prinz, SE of Aristarchus), team member Joe
Suszynski of Chicago, drew our attention to the
tremendous energy needs of agriculture.
To get the
community's vital food crops through the fourteen
day long lunar "nightspan" with the same amount of
light provided free by the Sun during the equally
long "dayspan", would take a power generation
capacity several times as large as that needed to
take care of all the settlement's other needs such
as construction, industry, transportation,
air/water circulation and treatment, etc.
Any settlement's
success might, in large part, depend on knowing how
little and/or how infrequently their crops would
need a light-fix during the nightspan to coast
until the next dayspan growth period - and still
produce an acceptable harvest.
Early Soviet
experiments showed that if the plants are simply
chilled to a few degrees above freezing and left in
darkness, they would survive two weeks of such a
regime just fine, springing back during the
alternating two weeks of light-feast to produce
good yields. Eric Drexler, while still in high
school, performed a similar experiment with similar
results.
This is one
solution, but we wanted to know all the options. We
wanted to know if there was a minimal lighting
pattern that would keep the plants not just alive,
but growing. So many hours a day, or so many every
other day? It would probably turn out that
different types and strains of plants did best on
different light diets.
We realized that there might be a
heat-buildup problem. But if the lamps used were on
the surface, in vacuum, and just the
infra-red-filtered light entered the agricultural
areas through the same pathways as heat-filtered
sunlight was allowed in during dayspan, this heat
buildup could be minimized.
Today we realize
that part of the solution is to use non-traditional
lighting: recently developed red LEDs, used as
"task lighting" instead of wasteful "ambient
lighting", is a very promising, very efficient way
to grow plants with power.
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MI.S.S.T. -
Milwaukee Space Studies
Team
Yet to find the
minimal nightspan lighting needs of each kind of
plant might be invaluable to the pioneers who will
need every trick in the book, every ace up the
sleeve, to win the game of self-sufficiency. It
should not cost a lot of money to set up and follow
through a simple experiment following a plant
through the growth cycle at a chosen lighting
pattern. But to provide useful data, the experiment
would have to be done many times, varying light
inputs, hours per day, the pattern of lighting (one
longer period per day versus several shorter
periods, etc.). And we needed to have data for all
candidate crops.
We put together a "Space Studies Institute
Support Team" and put out a pamphlet
aimed at enlisting home hobby gardeners, and
supplying them with guidelines to set up and run
the experiment. This project received some
appreciable national publicity, but only hit and
miss interest from flesh and blood individual home
hobby gardeners. Interest is cheap. Taking the
trouble to carefully perform these lighting
experiments in one's basement or garage on a plant
species of one's choice seems to be another matter.
Simply put, the data from our rag tag green thumb
army of enthused participants did not flood in. The
effort got us nowhere.
But one member of
our team was not discouraged. Convinced of the
crucial importance of this data to the success of
any prospective lunar settlement , LRS
member-at-large David
Dunlop kept exploring all the avenues:
experiment media, ideal experiment crop species,
university support systems, the bibliography of
books written about lunar agriculture experiments,
soils systems, lunar simulant, hydroponics,
lighting options, and on and on.
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LUNAX
- Lunar National Agricultural Experiment
Corporation
Dave's*
brainchild, LUNAX, was launched at an August 1990
retreat-lke conference he had organized, in Door
County, Wisconsin, at the
Chateau Hutter north
of Sturgeon Bay. We developed science experiments
to address some of the interdisciplinary problems
involving space-based agriculture such as energy
supply and consumption, use of "local" resources in
the lunar and Martian environment for soils, and
the adaptive response of various plants to
different environmental conditions. Our target
audience was high school science and Ag-science
teachers, who would hopefully get their students
involved, producing data in good experiment
conditions. This was a chance for students not just
to repeat an experiment whose outcome was already
known - it was a chance to find out something not
yet known, to do real science. If the crops died,
the experiment was not a failure. It would produce
valid data points.
[*
Other
charter board members included then LRS President
Mark
Kaehny, and MMM
Editor Peter
Kokh,
with a list of
advisors from Academia , NASA etc.]
The LUNAX I
conference (a follow up conference a year later was
canceled because of minimal registration) produced
two experiments:
(1) The
Nightspan Dark
Hardiness Experiment controls lighting
schedules to follow the twenty-eight day cycle of
sunlight and darkness on the Moon's surface.
(2) The
Lunar Soil
Evolution
Experiment
takes standard, well-characterized
"Minnesota Lunar Simulant" material as a starter
soil medium for plants and follows the fertility of
the soil, experimenting with variations of organic
additions, season after season. The idea is to find
the best and quickest strategy to evolve soil
derived from lunar regolith into rich, fertile,
productive soil, in as short a period as
possible.
The initial trials
of the LUNAX Nightspan Dark Hardiness Experiments
were done at East High School in Green Bay,
Wisconsin and the Lac Courte d'Oreille Community
College in Hayward in the fall of 1990 and spring
of 1991. Cybil Fisher
a senior at East High submitted her experiments to
the State FFA contest where she was a finalist in
the national FFA. Cybil 's work then won the
national FFA student recognition award in the fall
of 1991, winning her an $8000 scholarship.
In November '91, a
second revised edition of the initial experiments
was produced with special appendices on plants, use
of Lunar Soil Simulant materials, and a
bibliography of sources on Lunar agriculture.
Supplemental materials about the Lunar simulant
material produced by the University of Minnesota
Space Science Center and materials about Wisconsin
Fast Plant materials and supplies from Carolina
Biological were also included with second edition
materials.
Promoting and
publicizing this effort, Dave Dunlop crisscrossed
Wisconsin and neighboring states (especially
Minnesota and Illinois). Presentations on these
experiment tracks were made at the '91 and '92
conferences of the Wisconsin. Society of Science
Teachers and at the '91 and '92 International Space
Development Conferences in San Antonio and
Washington, respectively.
In June '92 the
FFA New Horizons magazine carried an article
about Cybil Fisher receiving the national student
recognition award, with a short article about
LUNAX. As a direct result of this exposure
approximately 60 requests for information about
these experiments were received from 37 states.
Requests have come from from both science
instructors and students at the elementary, high
school and college levels.
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Harvest
Moon
To help the cause,
we started a Lunar Agriculture - LUNAX newsletter.
Meant to be published quarterly, only two issues
were published, a year apart.
* A List of Subject-Related
Articles from Moon
Miners' Manifesto is
a the bottom
of this document
LUNAX was
eventually allowed to die. High School Science and
Ag-Science teachers generally showed some real
enthusiasm for the project. But it is hard to avoid
the conclusion that, for most of them, the LUNAX
Experiments were simply a means to arouse student
enthusiasm. But it does not matter how many
experiments we inspired. The kicker was the all but
universal critical failure
to report experiment results - the
raison d'être of LUNAX.
Our previous
attempt to interest individuals in these
experiments had likewise generated little response.
We hope publishing the experiment guidelines on the
web in the near future will yet spark critical
interest.
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NEWS &
New Developments:
- 8/21/02 Dave
Dietzler of the Moon Society St. Louis
chapter writes that he intends to do a 'little
experiment' in which he will "give one set of
plants light 12 hours a day for two weeks and
then refrigerate them for 2 weeks and give
another set 24 hours of light a day for 2 weeks
then cool them.
- 8/14/06 David
A. Dunlop, who originated the LUNAX
experiments and served as Executive Director of
LUNAX is looking forward to reactivating this
project. In the past 15 years a lot has changed
with lighting technology and that makes all the
difference as to how experiments should be run,
what equipment they should use, and what there
goals should be. In addition to the original
"Nightspan Dark Hardiness
Experiment," which can now be recast
using the new technologies, LUNAX is looking at
a line of experiments that would point out
the best ways to transform lunar regolith
into rich agricultural soils. That line
of experimentation was always part of the LUNAX
plan, but was never activated. Dave reports that
he has found new interest in Lunar Agriculture,
now that we once again are headed back to the
Moon as a National goal.
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LINKS to
Relevant Work Elsewhere
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