Advanced Plant Habitat (APH)

NASA Harvests Lettuce for Space Station Study

May 1, 2025 NeRD

Inside a laboratory in the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a payload implementation team member harvests ‘Outredgeous’ romaine lettuce growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat ground unit on Thursday, April 24, 2025. The harvest is part of the ground control work supporting Plant Habitat-07, which launched to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s SpaceX 31st commercial resupply services mission. The experiment focuses on studying how optimal and suboptimal moisture conditions affect plant growth, nutrient content, and the plant microbiome in microgravity. Research like this…

Why Do We Grow Plants in Space?

April 15, 2025 NeRD

1 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Why do we grow plants in space? Plants are such versatile organisms that they can fulfill many roles in our exploration of space. Plants provide us with food, with oxygen, they can recycle water and waste, and they can even provide us with psychological benefits. So all these functions will help NASA in fulfilling our goal of trying to create a sustainable environment for human presence in space. But there are also other benefits. We can investigate how plants…