GROCERIES FROM THE SPACE PROGRAM? 

What can the space program offer the grocery store? Plenty. Let me relate the ways.

First, look at the benefits already showing up here on Planet Earth from the space program: the most pervasive being the use of communications satellites in the Clarke Belt (named after visionary and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who in 1945 "invented" the theory). That "parking lot" over the equator, located at an altitude of 22,300 miles, carry the geostationary satellites that bring the world a great deal of the nightly news and carry a high percentage of overseas telephone calls. Remote satellite sensing (via Landsat 5 that orbits the earth every 14 hours and sees everything every 14 days - at an altitude of 570 miles and always at the same local daylight time)) is already used extensively in assessing crop potential, disease, plant condition, soil types, water content, insect infestations and plant stress. Other benefits are appearing in ceramics, high heat-resistant moving auto parts, houses, cutlery, robotics and sensing equipment. Now some of the early work in "space farming" is starting to look promising. Take fish. Fish, can't live out of water. Right? Wrong. It depends where they live. The only reason fish die out of water is because their lungs collapse from earth's gravity when they are removed from the flotational qualities of water. You even "weigh" less in water.

In the weightlessness of space fish could live in mist. A 100percent humid, zero-gravity atmosphere, inside a space station could provide more beneficial "new age" environment for space travellers. We could have a new evolving aero-aquatic species, not of those who swim beneath the seas but those who swim between the stars.

Dr. Thomas Heppenheimer, of the NASA scientific team, and aerospace engineer was the first to come up with this idea and suggests that farming in space may be a major benefit of the space program. Dr. Heppenheimer and his colleagues believe that 10,000 people in space could be adequately fed on a mere 61 hectares (151 acres). The reason? Crop yields would be 10 times greater than on earth. 24-hour-a-day sunlight, a continous year-round growing "season", exact control of water, plant nutrition, temperature and carbon dioxide designed for each type of growing organism. All this without such harmful things as storms, hail, draught, frost, rodents, weeds, pests and diseases in the earthly environment that reduce food production. Such crops as corn could be 40 times more productive than on earth.

Under the regid requirements of space, productivity means survival (as it is becoming to mean on earth) hence goats would produce the dairy products as they deliver twice as much milk as cows. Other spin-offs may be from the field of genetic engineering. Experiments considered too dangerous on earth could more safely be carried out in the biological isolation of space.

Benefits from such research could be as revolutionary, as that on European milk-maids, which caused Britain in 1853 to start compulsory vaccination - starting us on the route to vaccine (named after "vacca", the Spanish word for cow) therapy and pasteurization.

What may prove even more beneficial, is what we have learned from researching for food in space: that there are more than 80,000 edible plants in the world and we are currently, on a world-consumption basis, eating less than four percent, just 3,000 of them. Alone, the big Three: wheat, rice and corn are providing half our protein and calories. Twenty-four other cereals supply another 45 percent. What the potato and the tomato did for the diet habits of Europeans 300 years ago will be duplicated and demanded during the late Nineties and the early years of the Third Millennium as we learn how to use and distribute widely some of these other 77,000 edible plants.

Watch grocery shelves start to display an even wider variety of wholesome foods for your dining table.

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