GROW SPACE TOMATOES
By Robert Morrow, Rotary Club of Dundas Valley Sunrise, Ontario.
I was a teacher. I taught geography at all levels – elementary, secondary, teacher training. Then, for about five years, I wrote about agriculture for teachers. I authored or edited over 120 books, including three Canadian atlases.
When they asked me to write the first teachers guide for Project Tomatosphere, I thought, “This will be a nice little thing to do.” I ended up staying 15 years, until I retired last year. It was just so exciting! We send tomato seeds to the International Space Station and back, then mail them out to kids in schools across Canada and the United States to plant to see if being in space has any effect.
The program was started by a Canadian astronaut, Robert Thirsk, and Michael Dixon, a professor at the University of Guelph who specializes in “closed environment systems” – what it’s like to maintain, and live in, environments like the International Space Station or a module on Mars. They had worked together at the Canadian Space Agency and thought, “Why don’t we try growing seeds in space?”
Getting things up to the International Space Station is always a struggle. We sent seeds up every two or three years at first, and in other years we used various simulations. Now they go up every year. We send 1.2 million in two packages of 600,000 seeds; each package is about 18 inches by 18 inches by 2 inches. My estimate is that the cost of sending a package that size into space is probably in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. Then we have two other packages that don’t go up in space. That’s the control group.