"Taste good. Awesome." These are the words came from the six astronauts who became the first people to eat food grown in space -a fresh red romaine lettuce.
This is not the first crop grown in a space station, however, this is the first time that astronauts living on the International Space Station (ISS) have eaten their harvest. Others were sent back to earth for further examination, rather than eaten.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a number of technologies have been explored for these space-farming experiments like the Orbital Technologies or ORBITEC. The latter has partnered with Kennedy Space Center to develop the plant growth system tag as "Veggie" that produced the most recent crop of lettuce, as well as its predecessor, the Biomass Production System.
"Not only does its greenhouse lighting technology take advantage of the efficiency of LEDs, which waste almost no energy on heat, but its variable light output allows it to be adapted to specific plant species at specific growth stages. It can also sense the presence of plant tissue and only power nearby LEDs. Overall, it uses about 60 percent less energy than traditional plant lighting systems," NASA cited in the article published on their website.
