NASA tech featured in unlikely Disney World attraction

If you’re ever at Disney’s EPCOT theme park, you might expect to see some NASA-related gear at “Mission: SPACE” or “Spaceship Earth,” but you can actually spot some NASA-developed tech in an unlikely place: The Land Pavilion.

Long-time Disney fans are likely familiar with the slow moving boat ride “Living With the Land.” It features indoor scenes, greenhouses, and aquaculture to show different ways farmers around the world are working to improve crop yield and feed their populations. While passing through one of the greenhouse sections, guests pass by and get a look inside a Biotechnology Lab, where “EPCOT scientists are working with the US Department of Agriculture on a number of innovative projects. The goal of these efforts is to produce higher yielding and better quality plants.”

It’s in this lab where two chambers, developed by NASA, can be seen.

NASA’s own Biological and Physical Sciences division has been working with the USDA for years on research for the lab. NASA’s interest in exploring different crops is clear: to find new ways to grow a wider variety of foods efficiently in space, allowing astronauts to make fresh food a larger part of their diets. In addition to just being healthy, the fresh foods can offer a boost in mood for crews stuck in small quarters for an extended period of time and even possibly offer some protection against space-based radiation.

“We have a group here at Kennedy that tests what crops can be grown in spaceflight, based on factors including nutritional quality and overall biomass,” said Dr. Anirudha R. Dixit, one of the research scientists contracted at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to conduct research under this partnership. “The focus of this research is to test the growth promotion abilities of this particular fungus on some of these crops to see if exposure to gases produced by the fungus could help increase their total biomass.”

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One of the methods NASA is exploring is the “Black Magic” fungus, which has been shown to promote the growth of other plants nearby. The question is exactly how it is able to impact the other plants. In order to test all this, conditions have to be carefully controlled in environmental test chambers.

With these chambers, we’re able to continue studying if these volatile compounds are indeed the cause of these growth promotion effects on the plants or if these effects are caused by the amount of CO2 that the fungus produces,” said Ray Wheeler, plant physiologist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “If there are volatile compounds, we want to identify what they might be, why they benefit plant growth and the mechanisms behind this.”

This partnership between the USDA and NASA will hopefully lead to even better space food, but it also has the potential to improve food production down here on Earth. As is often the case, as spaceflight problems are solved, their solutions can improve lives through practical applications on Earth as well.