Designing Farms in Space

The future of space exploration, space stations, and space settlements hinges on our ability to grow tasty nutritious foods as part of efficient long term recycling the air, water, and wastes. This book provides a walkthrough of the chemistry, biology, machinery, plants, animals, and engineering required to make these synthetic ecologies possible with realistic foods, current technologies, and real crops. Plentiful diagrams and illustrations, dozens of tables, and simple processes allow a variety of professions and backgrounds to estimate and understand the principles of farming in space. Tables have rules of thumb that can quickly contribute to space proposals. This book will be a key resource at the elbow of business professionals, engineers, space architects, and space students. The book also includes a story to show what it is like to work in a space farm, menus and meals from the farm, and future work to bridge the technological gaps to bring long term space ideas to fruition.