More than 20 years after the United States first sent humans to space, scientists in Madison started trying to figure out how to send live plants with them.
"You didn't know, without gravity, would the plant know which way to grow? Can you grow plants at all?" said John Wetzel, a program manager at Sierra Space, which makes specialized growing systems in use at the International Space Station.
That plant research, based in a lab on Madison's west side, is the smallest division of the Colorado-based company with around 270 Madison employees. Sierra Space engineers and manufacturers in Madison create a variety of technologies that support life in space or propel spacecraft. That includes trash compactors that shrink waste by 75% and turn it into functional "tiles," tools that extract oxygen from moon dirt, and more.
Research on space agriculture has long Madison roots. Principal scientist Bob Morrow, who leads the effort at Sierra Space, started working on this challenge in the 1980s as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where horticulture professor Ted Tibbits had a NASA grant to study how potatoes grow in space.
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