Home » NASA Astronauts Pick Peppers in Space for the First Time on International Space Station

NASA Astronauts Pick Peppers in Space for the First Time on International Space Station

By  //  November 1, 2021

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Happy pepper picking day aboard the @Space_Station !🌶️Today @Astro_Sabot gets the honor of harvesting the station’s first crop of chile peppers as a part of the Plant Habitat-04 study, one of the most challenging station plant experiments to date. (NASA Image)

(FOX NEWS) – Humans introduced a new life form to outer space on Friday as NASA astronauts harvested the first-ever chile peppers onboard the International Space Station.

The Hatch chile pepper seeds arrived at the space station on a SpaceX resupply mission in June and were promptly planted by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough.

“Finally, I made my best space tacos yet: fajita beef, rehydrated tomatoes & artichokes, and HATCH CHILE,” astronaut Megan McArthur tweeted.

Astronauts have access to a wide variety of freeze-dried and prepackages meals that they are regularly re-supplied with, but learning how to grow fresh produce millions of miles from earth will be key to longer missions.

“The challenge is the ability to feed crews in low-Earth orbit, and then to sustain explorers during future missions beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations including the Moon, as part of the Artemis program, and eventually to Mars,” Matt Romeyn, principal investigator for NASA’s Plant Habitat-04 experiment, explained.

“We are limited to crops that don’t need storage, or extensive processing.”

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