Passage Excerpt from “Growing Peppers on the ISS Is Just the Start of Space Farming”
Excerpt from “Growing Peppers on the ISS Is Just the Start of Space Farming”
by Melanie Canales
The author, Melanie Canales, is a first-generation Peruvian American farmer and beekeeper based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, on lands of the indigenous Monacan and Manahoac tribes. Her work focuses on creating healthy relationships between people and their surrounding ecosystems.
Unburdened by the constraints of gravity, red and green peppers jut out at 45-degree angles inside the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), a sort of space terrarium not much larger than a microwave. Four chile pepper plants stand effortlessly upright, despite the dozens of glossy fruits weighing them down. These plants have lived entirely in space; their leaves have never been chewed on by insects or rustled by a summer breeze, [and] their stems are unfamiliar with bending toward the sun’s arc across the sky. Scissors glint under the tank’s white and blue lights as astronaut Mark Vande Hei and his team snip the stems of those that are ready for harvest. The peppers whirl around their heads until the astronauts catch them and tape them against a board to photograph.
Back on Earth, the Plant Habitat-04 team of engineers and plant scientists are observing and conferring with the astronauts. Of the 26 peppers in this batch, only the 14 finest will stay on the International Space Station [ISS] for consumption. The rest will be wrapped in foil, sealed in a Ziploc bag, then frozen at a brisk −80 degrees, until they can come roaring back to Earth in the next cargo capsule to be studied later. Now, after a 137-day growth cycle, the astronauts remove the plants from the module and trash them. Project Plant Habitat-04 is complete. It’s taco night on the ISS.
Since 2014, NASA1 has experimented with growing lettuces, brassicas,2 and zinnias3 in space, an endeavor that relies on highly specialized technology over 50 years in the making. [Fall 2021’s] two successful pepper harvests . . . will provide data on the nutritional and psychological benefits of growing vegetables on-craft, as well as a crop’s ability to reliably produce long-term in microgravity. While controlled environmental agriculture is not new, the APH experiment represents an evolution in specialized growth habitats. It doesn’t aim to re-create Earth’s conditions, but to perfect each isolated variable of plant growth in the clinical environment of a spaceship.
“The Advanced Plant Habitat is the most complex plant growth system on orbit today,” says Lashelle Spencer, a plant scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Its more than 180 sensors control and monitor temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide. The astronauts can adjust the color and intensity of the light, and how much moisture the plants’ roots are getting. It waters itself.
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and Spencer has been at Kennedy since 5 a.m. to facilitate the peppers’ final harvest. As part of the project team, she played a crucial role in preparing the seeds that were sent hurtling into space in June and guiding the astronauts through maintaining the plants in orbit. . . . Though astronauts can spend upwards of 100 days in space, their on-mission meals come dehydrated and pre-packaged; their vitamins and minerals are isolated in supplements, which lose nutritional value the longer they’re stored. Spencer’s goal is to create the conditions necessary for cultivating healthy plants in space, so those plants can sustain healthy astronauts on long-term missions. Astronaut food is great, she says—“especially the shrimp cocktail. But you’re missing that crunch. You’re missing that fresh pop of flavor, the green flavor that’s not there in that packaged food.”
The sensory experience of growing productive crops can also help mitigate4 the psychological effects of long-term space travel. . . . Spencer says the team cracked open the door of the APH every day to observe their vegetable companions with all the tenderness of home gardeners. When harvest day came, they batted their bounty around the ISS, taking selfies and delighting in watching the fruits pirouetting around the spacecraft. . . .
“We were thinking no heat, so that [the peppers] wouldn’t be dangerous, but maybe the astronauts need a little spice in their life,” says Paul Bosland, who along with his colleagues at the Chile Pepper Institute genetically engineered5 the NuMex Española Improved chile pepper seeds grown in Plant Habitat-04. . . .
Working with NASA, Bosland cultivated a variety that could accommodate both the nutritional needs of astronauts as well as the logistics of growing a plant in space. . . .
. . . The experiment is helping gather the data necessary to determine the nutritional content of crops grown in space, and therefore how many people they can feed, and for how long. Though much is still unknown, Spencer is certain of one thing that future astronauts will need to do: “I think in an optimal world, a scientist like me would say that they would be growing plants from day one. From the day they left to the day they came back, they would be growing them.”
From “Growing Peppers on the ISS Is Just the Start of Space Farming” by Melanie Canales from WIRED, December 21, 2021. Copyright © 2021 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
1NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
2brassicas: a large genus of herbs, such as broccoli and cabbage
3zinnias: a genus of herbs and low shrubs that have flowers at their heads
4mitigate: to make something less severe or harmful
5genetically engineered: combined parts of DNA from different plants to produce a new plant
Question
Read this sentence from paragraph 5.
Though astronauts can spend upwards of 100 days in space, their on-mission meals come dehydrated and pre-packaged; their vitamins and minerals are isolated in supplements, which lose nutritional value the longer they’re stored.
The sentence contributes to the overall meaning of the excerpt by
- Aindicating that the attempt to grow crops aboard the ISS is an important endeavor.
- Bdescribing the health effects of spending a significant length of time in space.
- Crevealing why certain kinds of foods are more appealing in space than on Earth.
- Demphasizing the difficulty of preserving the nutrients in the crops grown in space.
Show the answer
Correct answer: A
The question asks how a sentence from paragraph 5 contributes to the overall meaning of the excerpt.
A. CORRECT. The sentence explains that astronauts’ current food supply consists of dehydrated foods along with vitamin and mineral supplements that lose nutritional value over time. These details support the idea that growing fresh crops in space, as described in the excerpt, is important for astronauts’ nutrition during long missions.
B. Incorrect. While the sentence mentions food and nutrients and astronauts spending “upwards of 100 days in space,” it does not describe the overall health effects of being in space for this long. Instead, the sentence focuses on the limitations of the food available to astronauts.
C. Incorrect. While the sentence does mention that astronauts eat packaged and dehydrated food while in space and that the food and supplements provided are limited in nutritional value, it does not mention the appeal of foods eaten in space compared with foods eaten on Earth.
D. Incorrect. The sentence explains that supplements can lose their nutritional value over time, but it does not mention whether crops grown in space might also lose nutrients.
Question analysis
This question quotes a sentence from paragraph 5 of the space-farming excerpt about the dehydrated, pre-packaged meals astronauts eat on missions of 100 days or more and the vitamin supplements that lose value in storage. Students explain how the sentence contributes to the overall meaning of the excerpt, which means looking past what it says to the job it does in the article.
- Grade level
- Grade 7 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- At grade 7 Explaining how one sentence adds to a text’s overall meaning is a core grade 7 skill. The quoted sentence is long but plainly worded, and the paragraph around it is easy to follow, so the task matches typical grade 7 reading.
- Estimated difficulty
- Straightforward: two steps or one careful reading.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly analyze
- What makes it hard
- How, not what moderate
- The right answer is reworded minor
- Reading between the lines minor
- Evidence
- Answered from one paragraph or stanza
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 10, 890 words; question and choices: about grade 9, 102 words.
- Students, last 30 days
- Not enough answers yet to show (it takes 10).
Why it is hard, traps and wrong answers (shows the answer)
Why it is hard
The sentence is easy to understand but easy to misuse: its last clause about supplements losing value invites a choice about nutrients fading, and its “100 days” invites one about health. Students who ask what problem the sentence sets up, and notice that the next sentence answers it with Spencer’s goal, see that it explains why growing food in orbit matters.
How, not what moderate Working it out
The stem asks what the sentence does for the whole excerpt, so its facts about dehydrated meals and fading supplements matter only as the problem that crops grown aboard the ISS would solve. (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
The right answer is reworded minor Choosing the answer
The key names none of the sentence’s facts, while the nutrient choice echoes “lose nutritional value the longer they’re stored” and so looks better supported by the quoted words. (Freedle & Kostin, 1993; Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990)
Reading between the lines minor Working it out
The sentence never says why its facts matter; the reason appears only in the next one, Spencer’s goal of plants that “sustain healthy astronauts on long-term missions.” (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Strategy: Put the sentence into your own words, note exactly what it says loses value, and then decide what role that fact plays in the excerpt as a whole, not just within the sentence.
Traps
- Twists what the text says: Uses the text's topic and ideas but changes what it says: who did it, how much, when, or why.
- Reads too much in: A reasonable-sounding conclusion that goes further than the text allows.
The wrong answers, classified
B Reads too much in (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994)
Reads “upwards of 100 days in space” and the talk of vitamins as a warning about astronauts’ health, though the sentence describes their food, not what a long mission does to the body.
C Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Links “dehydrated and pre-packaged” to Spencer’s later longing for crunch and turns it into a comparison of how appealing food is in space and on Earth, which the sentence never makes.
D Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Sees nutritional value fading in storage but moves the problem from the stored supplements, which the sentence names, to crops grown in space, which it never mentions.
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
This question asks about the job one sentence does in the whole article. Don’t just restate the sentence. Ask why the author put it here. What bigger idea does it help explain?
Read the sentence closely
The sentence is in paragraph 5. It says astronauts can spend “upwards of 100 days in space.” Upwards of means more than. Their meals “come dehydrated and pre-packaged.” Dehydrated means dried out. Their vitamins and minerals come in pills called supplements. And those pills “lose nutritional value the longer they’re stored.” So they get less healthy the longer they sit.
See what comes right after it
The next sentence shows why this matters: “Spencer’s goal is to create the conditions necessary for cultivating healthy plants in space, so those plants can sustain healthy astronauts on long-term missions.” To sustain means to keep going. So the sentence sets up a problem. Food on long trips is dried, packaged and weak. Fresh crops grown in space would solve it. That makes the pepper project worth doing.
Check each choice
- A is right. The sentence shows the problem that fresh crops would fix. So it shows that growing crops on the ISS is important.
- B is wrong. It mentions “100 days,” but it tells about food, not what space does to the body.
- C is wrong. It never compares how food tastes in space and on Earth.
- D is wrong. The things that lose value are the stored supplements, not crops grown in space.
Watch out: D uses words close to the sentence’s own. But it moves the problem to the wrong thing.
Choose the answer
The sentence explains why fresh food grown in space matters. So the answer is A, “indicating that the attempt to grow crops aboard the ISS is an important endeavor.” An endeavor is a serious effort.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
D is the closest wrong answer, because the sentence does say that something loses value over time. But it is the supplements in storage that “lose nutritional value.” The sentence never says crops grown in space lose nutrients. Fresh crops are the fix, not the problem. That is why A fits.
More questions like this
The original DOE question
The passage “Excerpt from “Growing Peppers on the ISS Is Just the Start of Space Farming”” as printed (pages 50–51)
