NASA wanted a garden in orbit. What it got was a very expensive lesson in why Earth is so good at being Earth. In 2023, the NASA crew conducted a costly, public experiment growing cherry tomatoes on the International Space Station, but the harvest by the end was so meager that not even one piece could be tasted. Dr. Gioia Massa, a life sciences project scientist at Kennedy Space Center who has spent years working on ways for astronauts to grow fresh food on the way to Mars, was the principal investigator behind the project, called VEG-05.
However, it turned out to be quite the space gardening tragedy. The ground-based plants yielded more than 100 tomatoes, whereas the plants grown aboard the ISS managed to ripen only 12 tomatoes. There was a little hitch: astronauts were not allowed to eat any of the space-grown tomatoes because of the small quantity of the samples and fears about fungal contamination in them.
The setup: dwarf tomatoes, big expectations
The tomato strain chosen for the experiment was "Red Robin," a dwarf cherry tomato variety bred to stay small and manageable. It was a good fit for the Veggie growth chamber aboard the space station. According to a NASA technical report published on the agency’s research server, the experiment lasted precisely 100 days, from December 2022 to March 2023, and involved comparing the growth of tomatoes under two separate lighting conditions while another batch of tomatoes was cultivated here on Earth, as a controlled sample. Plants that were grown on the ground, experiencing Earth’s usual gravity and without any of the peculiarities of ISS plumbing, produced well over 100 tomatoes. The space crop could produce only 12.
