Nitrogen accountancy in space agriculture.

ABSTRACT: Food production and pharmaceutical synthesis are posited as essential biotechnologies for facilitating human exploration beyond Earth. These technologies not only offer critical green space and food agency to astronauts but also promise to minimize mass and volume requirements through scalable, modular agriculture within closed-loop systems, offering an advantage over traditional bring-along strategies. Despite these benefits, the prevalent model for evaluating such systems exhibits significant limitations. It lacks comprehensive inventory and mass balance analyses for crop cultivation and life support, and fails to consider the complexities introduced by cultivating multiple crop varieties, which is crucial for enhancing food diversity and nutritional value. Here we expand space agricultu

SUBMITTER: Yates K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11439006 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature