Could spaceships just put a bunch of plants on board to produce all their oxygen and get rid of the carbon dioxide?
In: Biology
Well if you mean recycle CO2 into Oxygen, then yes. The problem is that the main issues for Spaceships are weight and space (designing for more space means adding weight), because for every pound you launch, you also need some amount of weight in structure to support that pound, and some amount of fuel to propel that pound plus the structure, plus the extra fuel from Earth.
Plants aren’t very weight or space efficient. I’ve read that you’d need around 500 or so plants per person, and obviously you’d also need the energy for lighting the plants and watering the plants. In some future where we are building ships in space for very long space journeys, it may well make sense, for the foreseeable future though, they likely wouldn’t be used.
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