US ASTRONAUT John Blaha this month harvested the first crop grown from
seed in space.
Seeds of a special “super-dwarf” wheat were planted on 6 August in Greenhouse
Svet, a growth chamber on Russia’s Mir space station. Blaha harvested 32 mature
plants on 6 December.
Many proposals for long space missions assume that plants will provide oxygen
and food. “The plants were a little disoriented, but not as much as I thought
they might be,” says Frank Salisbury, principal investigator for the experiment
at Utah State University in Cache Valley.
