Space Lab® Café is a compact vertical farm that continuously produces a variety of nutritious produce with minimal water, power, waste, or processing time. It operates with or without gravity, in a Lunar, Martian, or spacecraft habitat, while providing a farm-to-table solution for Earth’s urban centers or remote, harsh environments.
Some features of Space Lab® Café include
An intelligent meal planner produces a planting schedule for personalized menus, allowing the crew to select their desired ingredients, while recommending other crops to fill nutritional gaps.
Mobile root containers support succession planting, so the crew can continuously harvest ready-to-eat crops with little need for refrigerated storage.
Growing plants move from smaller to larger areas with no space going to waste.
A microgravity compatible watering system feeds and aerates all types of vegetables, in any space environment, while blocking microbial growth and self-cleaning.
Close canopy lighting provides uniform intensity an inch away from the plants, for consistent produce quality and minimal volume and power.
Environmentally controlled zones mimic different climates for greater crop variety.
A transparent OLED touchscreen user interface with the ability to become opaque when not in use.
At mealtime, the crew can seamlessly wash, steam, or dehydrate their harvested produce.
Uneaten plant waste is recycled into mushroom substrate and fertilizer, for improved sustainability.
Space Lab® Café supports a wide variety of crops including leafy greens, fruiting crops, rooted vegetables, microgreens, mushrooms and even water lentils!
Artist's rendering of Space Lab® Café (2021)
The Space Lab® Café crop production system leverages heritage space agriculture technology, while integrating novel features for improved efficiency and reliability.
Space Lab Café enables the next era of human space exploration, by providing astronauts with sustainable, enjoyable, and nutritious food while on a lunar base, or in deep space, on their journey to Mars and beyond. And if we can live sustainably out there, then, we can do it anywhere.
Image courtesy of Victory Garden of Tomorrow |
victorygardenoftomorrow.com
