The only commercially owned and operated plant growth platform in space will be developed by Redwire Corporation, a business that specializes in building space infrastructure for the next generation of the space economy.
The first greenhouse ever owned by a commercial company will be built on the International Space Station (ISS) when Redwire Greenhouse is sent into space no sooner than spring 2023.
Crop Production in Space
Redwire's first flight's customer is anticipated to be the commercial agriculture technology company Dewey Scientific. Redwire Greenhouse will help crop experts on Earth gain insightful knowledge and greatly improve humanity's capacity to grow crops in space.
"Redwire Greenhouse will expand opportunities for scientific discovery to improve crop production on Earth and enable critical research for crop production in space to benefit future long-duration human spaceflight," Dave Reed, Redwire Florida Launch Site Operations Director and Greenhouse project manager, said.
Since plants supply food, oxygen, and water reclamation, growing entire crops in space will be essential to upcoming space exploration missions.
Reed argued that in order to produce crucial insights for NASA's Artemis missions and beyond, it would be crucial to increase the throughput of agricultural production research in space using commercially created technologies.
Customers looking to progress agricultural science from benchtop laboratory facilities to real production in space will be able to do it with the help of the Redwire Greenhouse, which offers a straightforward, scalable commercial solution.
Read also: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Captures 'Orion Nebula's Dreamy Cloudscape' With Over 500 Exposures!
Supporting NASA Missions
Long-term NASA exploration ambitions will be supported by the Redwire Greenhouse, which will also give institutional and corporate clients access to a range of plant science and industrial research objectives.
The facility's concept of operations will be validated by an in-space demonstration in 2023, which will also assess the facility's capabilities for lighting, ventilation, and leaf litter containment.
Dewey Scientific will cultivate industrial hemp in the Greenhouse during the first flight in order to conduct a gene expression analysis. The firm worked with Redwire to provide technical information about the 60-day experiment and to describe how it might show the facility's capabilities while promoting biomedical and biofuels research.
The Redwire Greenhouse will make use of Redwire plant growth technology that has previously received flight certification, including the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System (PONDS) devices that Redwire is now using on the ISS.
For customers with different crop-growing needs or alternative plant support systems, larger, expandable versions of the Greenhouse can be flown. In addition to PONDS, Redwire has overseen plant experiments in the Advanced Plant Habitat, which NASA owns, since 2018.
A grant from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which is in charge of running the ISS U.S. National Laboratory, is also helping to build the Redwire Greenhouse.
Related Article: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Spots A Red Supergiant Star Recovering From A Violent Explosion
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
