Back at the end of the Nineties, my obsession with the European colonization of New Zealand, particularly with the Acclimatisation Societies, led to my putting together a discussion on the subject of importing fauna and flora to Mars for the late, lamented online magazine Event Horizon. In the intervening 13 years, I’ve continued to research the whys and wherefores of growing food items in space habitats, as well as the potential controls for previously innocuous organisms becoming major pests in lunar or Martian greenhouses. Naturally, you can understand why I’m thrilled to discover that NASA is also looking at the issue of feeding a 30-month Mars mission. Admittedly, I’m also fully expecting that the first serious exports from a permanent Mars installation probably won’t be hot peppers. And so it goes.
With that said, I’m actually more intrigued by the idea of some enterprising soul producing the solar system’s hottest peppers on Mars, either via hydroponics or with the use of suitably augmented Martian soil. Testing the effects of Martian gravity on pepper plants may be problematic, but it’s definitely possible to test the soil viability with Martian and lunar soil simulants in a greenhouse environment. This may be a very public experiment for this winter, when I’ll be starting up pepper and tomato seedlings anyway. Best of all, I could see the interest in Martian explorers taking such a Capsicum plant and shaping it into the first-ever Martian bonsai.