Question: can food be grown in space ?

Luke Fountain answered on 15 Oct 2025:

Yes it can! This is what I do in my job. Our space crop production team at NASA are developing technologies to grow plants in space and figuring out the best way to grow food on the Moon and Mars. We’re not quite at the Moon yet, but we have both our Veggie and Advanced Plant Habitat plant growth systems on the International Space Station where many crops have been grown, including salad crops like lettuce, and even tomatoes and chilli peppers!

Sometimes when the astronauts grow these plants they get to eat them, and they say it improves their psychological wellbeing because they don’t get much fresh food and it makes them feel more connected to Earth. Astronauts have even made space tacos with the chilli peppers they grew!

We’re hoping that as we go back to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, that astronauts will be able to grow more of their own food, since it’s so expensive to send food from Earth to the Moon each time – it’d be much easier if they could grow their own food!