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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.]
Our Business Card, contact info no longer valid
Our Button 
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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