This session brings together sociological and historical scholarship about ‘using life to support life in space’. More specifically, we look at the relationships between plants, humans, microorganisms, and technologies in the domain of human spaceflight. Those involved in this endeavour establish links between “sustainable, boundless space habitation and exploration” and “sustainable living on spaceship Earth” (Escobar 2024), but there are many open questions here that our disciplines have just recently started to address (Olson 2018, Munns and Nicklesen 2021, Mackowski 2022).
In this panel, we contribute to this emerging conversation with a focus on bioregenerative life support systems, space food, and experimentation in plant space biology. We ask the following questions: How are different notions of ‘sustainability’ mobilised in these fields? What are some tensions between these notions when applied to Earth and to space habitation? What are the relationships between visions of the future and practical operations regarding resources and infrastructures that can sustain humans in space? How does the development of these resources and infrastructures connect biological questions with engineering constraints? What are some important and unresolved ethical questions in these efforts about human habitation in space and the associated pressures for its commercial exploitation?
The session features three presentations and one commentator. The first presentation by Ilenia Picardi and Marco Serino examines the European Space Agency’s Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative programme in terms of its imagined futures and current dilemmas. The second presentation by Mónica Truninger proposes a reconceptualisation of space food with Earthly considerations that go beyond the focus on astronaut consumption. The third presentation by Paola Castaño addresses the epistemic, institutional, and ethical dimensions of plant biology’s transition from microgravity to experiments on the Moon. Finally, professor Kärin Nickelsen will offer a comment on the three presentations.
Space food is often associated with sustaining life for crews on off-Earth missions. However, as interplanetary travel becomes a central focus for various space agencies and commercial companies, the development of advanced space food technologies has gained increasing attention. This focus extends beyond addressing the technical challenges of producing food in microgravity environments, aiming also to tackle global issues such as climate change and food insecurity in extreme Earth environments. Initiatives like the IAEA/FAO Cosmic Crops project and NASA and the Canadian Space Agency's Deep Space Food Challenge highlight the growing intersection between space and Earth sustainability, emphasizing the need to view them as interconnected rather than separate (Yap and Truffer, 2022).
Drawing on a literature review and desk-based research on space food (sourcing data from online media, space agency documents, and start-up websites developing food for long missions to the Moon or Mars as well as space appliances for Earth agriculture), I aim to reconceptualize space food. Moving beyond its popular framing as food for space crews or tourists, I will position it across three distinct analytical movements: food for space, food in space, and food from space. This reconceptualization engages with the work of Wilson and Vasile (2023) on the space sustainability paradox and their articulation of sustainability for, in, and from space. By adapting this framework to food, I will argue for viewing space food beyond its immediate association with space crew missions, exploring its broader implications. This approach will help identify potential analytical avenues for a sociological research agenda on space food that challenges the traditional dichotomy between space and Earth food, instead positioning it within a more hybrid and fluid Earth-Space continuum.
For the past twenty years, plant experiments in Low Earth Orbit have primarily focused on how these organisms react to microgravity. Despite the appearance of orbiting platforms as controlled laboratories, scientists have faced challenges separating the gravity effects from other environmental factors like radiation, atmospheric conditions, temperature, vibration, and the equipment used. Now, with planned crewed Lunar missions, plant space is shifting the focus from the still ambiguous concept of "cabin ecology" (Anker 2005) to the Moon as a more complex ecosystem.
This presentation examines this transition through two experiments. The first involved planting Arabidopsis thaliana seeds in Lunar regolith samples collected during Apollo missions to test their viability as soil (Paul et al. 2022). The second is the Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF), a growth chamber set to be deployed on the Moon in 2026 to observe growth and stress responses in three plant species (SpaceLab 2024). First, I characterize their understandings of the environment as they attempt to isolate experimental factors. Second, I trace their novel intersections of governmental funding and expertise with commercial and academic research. And, third, I ask how the teams involved in these experiments position themselves ethically in the current visions of human habitation and commercial exploitation of the Moon.
Interrogating the relationship between these three dimensions in the experiments, I revisit sociological accounts of scientific change (Fuchs 1993, Foster et al. 2015) and propose an interpretation that considers scientists’ epistemic, organizational, and normative commitments and not only their responses to funding incentives. The presentation is based on oral histories with plant space biologists, and participant observation from 2022 to 2024 in the NASA Open Science Data Repository Plants Analysis Working Groups, the Space Ecology workshop, and the American Society of Gravitational and Space Research and European Low Gravity Research Association conferences.
In recent years, with the current programmes for space exploration aiming at travelling back to the Moon and envisaging longer and more distant missions (to Mars and beyond) or even space settlements on planetary surfaces, the quest for enabling the permanence of human crews in extreme environments, such as those of outer space, is becoming more and more urgent. For decades, life sciences and space sciences have been looking for means to make such permanence possible beyond Earth, such as ‘Bioregenerative Life Support Systems’ (BLSSs), i.e. complex (and hybrid) assemblages of humans, plants, micro-organism and technologies. In this contribution, we aim at investigating the promises and tensions inscribed in BLSSs, focusing on the ESA-MELiSSA (European Space Agency - Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) programme, devoted to release a BLSS that will help build the future of space missions. Through the theoretical framework of Science and Technology Studies (STS), we analyse the scientific literature on MELiSSA and BLSSs more generally, to gain insights into the narrative infrastructures (Felt, 2009) aimed at legitimating technoscientific research in this domain. We also rely on the notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) to understand the relevant representations of the future and the horizons of expectations regarding life both in outer space and on Earth. In addition, we aim at highlighting how the renegotiation of coexistence between humans and non-humans is predicated in the concept of BLSS. This latter turns out to be a multispecies system (although chiefly human-centred) by which to “replicate” and “translate” earthly ecosystems. Indeed, the purposes of BLSS research call into question different dilemmas about earthly life, especially in the face of the current climate crisis, as it proposes a two-fold prospect for future that implies a tension between two horizons, one addressed to recovering Earth, the other looking beyond it.
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