Food pods and vertical farming could help us grow crops on Mars

Even before we reached the moon, humans had been making plans to send people to Mars, and in recent years, the dream has looked closer to becoming reality. NASA plans to have boots on the red planet in the 2030s, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to get there even sooner.

The difficulty isn’t solely getting astronauts to Mars but also sustaining them once they’re there; you can’t simply grow potatoes in its soil – despite what Matt Damon would have you believe in the movie “The Martian.”

With an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, only half the amount of sunlight, no known accessible fresh water, and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is the most challenging environment in which humans have ever planned to produce food.

A startup called Interstellar Lab believes it may have the solution. The Paris and Los Angeles-based company has designed a controlled-environment capsule system that could one day allow crops to be grown in space.

This composite panoramic image, shot by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on April 8, 2023, shows the "Marker Band Valley" colorized and at different times of day.

The face of a bear appears to take shape on the Martian surface in this new image taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Two craters create the eyes, a circular fracture shapes the face, and a V-shaped collapse structure represents the nose.

The Curiosity rover discovered this rock, smaller than a penny, that resembles a flower or piece of coral within Gale Crater on February 24. The small pieces in this photo were created billions of years ago when minerals carried by water cemented the rock.

NASA's Curiosity rover used two cameras to create this selfie in front of "Mont Mercou," a rock formation that stands 20 feet tall.

The Ingenuity helicopter captured this color image of Mars from 16 feet above the planet's surface in April 2021. It's the first color image ever taken during flight by a rotorcraft on Mars.

This perspective of Mars' Valles Marineris hemisphere, from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic comprising 102 Viking Orbiter images. At the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.

This 2016 self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling location in the Murray Buttes area on lower Mount Sharp.

This photo of a preserved river channel on Mars was taken by an orbiting satellite, with color overlaid to show different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express mission captured this 2018 image of the Korolev crater, more than 50 miles across and filled with water ice, near the north pole.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to obtain this view of an area with unusual texture on the southern floor of Gale Crater.

Cooled lava helped preserve a footprint of where dunes once moved across a southeastern region on Mars. But it also looks like the "Star Trek" symbol.

Although Mars isn't geologically active like Earth, surface features have been heavily shaped by wind. Wind-carved features such as these, called yardangs, are common on the red planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars' thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yardangs are sharp and dark.

These small, hematite-rich concretions are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA's Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches across. The view comes from the microscopic imager on Opportunity's robotic arm, with color information added from the rover's panoramic camera. These minerals suggest that Mars had a watery past.

This image shows seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, which are called recurring slope lineae, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.

Mars is known to have planet-encircling dust storms. These 2001 images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet's appearance when haze raised by duststorm activity in the south became globally distributed.

This composite image, looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp, was taken in September 2015 by NASA's Curiosity rover. In the foreground is a long ridge teeming with hematite. Just beyond is an undulating plain rich in clay minerals. And just beyond that are a multitude of rounded buttes, all high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.

InSight's seismometer recorded a "marsquake" for the first time in April 2019.

From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this 2016 image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rov