Can you actually grow potatoes on Mars?
Space farming researcher Bruce Bugbee says that the story gets it pretty much right. Bugbee, who runs the Crop Physiology Lab at Utah State University, has been studying how to grow food crops on spaceships for NASA for the last 30 years.
Let's start with fictional astronaut Mark Watney's crop itself: If you're forced to rely on just one crop to grow in a space habitat, "potatoes are a good choice," Bugbee says. "They're a good producer of carbohydrates and they can be a big part of the diet."
Of course, the nutritionists with whom Bugbee and his students consulted weren't too crazy about such extreme monoculture. "They say stuff like, 'Are you nuts? We haven't ever tried that before. We'd need 30, 40 crops at the minimum." But while it's good advice for those of us living on Earth to diversify our diets, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which there'd be enough room for that many different kinds of plants on any sort of space mission, even on an extended one to Mars.
Click here to continue reading at popularmechanics.com.
