U.V. Plantation
This idea has been brought to life
There have been whole films dedicated to growing plants in space (hello Matt Damon!), it's one of the crucial challenges of life in space, so we don't have to bring everything we need to it with us!
Maker blog entries
Description This making process is turning out to be very fun and very hard. I had a go at making a conveyor belt but it turned out to be difficult without access to precision instruments, so I spoke to another tinkerer (my friend Darren Kent from Spitfire Architecture) and we agreed that instead of a conveyor belt, maybe I could make a track of some kind, and run the plants around it on some kind of carousel. I got a hat box and painted white for the base. On the hat box sits a ring-shaped track. The plant capsules will be attached to castors so they travel around the track. These capsules will be like horses on a carousel-like structure, which will be powered from the top (or possibly from the bottom, depending on what works best), by a battery-powered motor (designed for spinning garden ornaments). The whole thing will be covered with a massive plastic cloche (the type you can use to cover seedlings) and this will act like the dome of my rocket. I am hoping to make it look like a kind of space plantation inhabiting the upper storeys of a dome-shaped nose-cone, with little astronauts moving around underneath. Wish me luck!