The prototype greenhouse. Credit: University of Arizona

Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed a greenhouse that grows plants without soil. The prototype greenhouse is an 18-foot long tube that contains water-cooled sodium vapor lamps and "envelopes" to hold the seeds.

It's dubbed the lunar greenhouse. The idea is that something similar could one day supply food to astronauts on the moon or Mars. It would be buried beneath the moon's surface, so to not be destroyed by cosmic rays and solar flares, and would be operated autonomously, so that food could be ready when astronauts arrive. A lunar greenhouse could be essential for colonizing the moon, which has no atmosphere, no natural water, and extreme temperatures.

The Arizona system works by feeding carbon dioxide into the greenhouse through pressurized tanks. At a lunar base astronauts would provide carbon dioxide by breathing, and water for the plants could be extracted from their urine. Sunlight could be channeled to the underground plants through fiber optic cables.

According to the Arizona researchers, led by Gene Giacomelli, the system contains about 100 kilograms of wet plant material that can provide 53 quarts of drinkable water and a small amount of oxygen during a 24-hour period, while consuming about 100 kilowatts of electricity and half a kilogram of carbon dioxide. It can even be collapsed into a four-foot wide disk for interplanetary travel and deployed in less than ten minutes.

Credit: NASA/GM

Despite President Obama's new budget proposal to scrap moon-landing plans NASA is pushing forward with a new lunar-based mission, dubbed Project M.

According to the agency, "the proposition is simple: land an operational humanoid robot on the moon in 1,000 days."

NASA made a big splash earlier this year when it unveiled a humanoid robot called Robonaut2 in partnership with GM. At the time, Rob Ambrose, chief of the Software, Robotics and Simulation Division at NASA, told Technology Review that the agency wanted to use the robot for a number of different missions, starting with visits the International Space Station. The proposed Project M, which oddly hasn't been discussed much by NASA officials, seems to be part of this plan. The agency is also testing a prototype lunar lander to launch the robot at Armadillo Aerospace located near Dallas, TX. NasaWatch.com reports that the agency plans to land something on the moon in 2013.

According to NASA's Project M white paper:

The humanoid will travel to the moon on a small lander fueled by green propellants, liquid methane and liquid oxygen. It will perform a precision, autonomous landing, avoiding any hazards or obstacles on the surface. Upon landing the robot will deploy and walk on the surface performing a multitude of tasks focused on demonstrating engineering tasks such as maintenance and construction; performing science of opportunity (i.e. using existing sensors on the robot or small science instruments); and simple student experiments.

Below is a video of the Project M lunar lander in action.

On Monday, the Obama administration announced its 2010 budget for NASA. It cancels plans to return to the moon by 2020 and focuses on using commercial companies to ferry astronauts to and from orbit.

While some are up in arms over the future of human spaceflight, Buzz Aldrin is backing the president in an editorial in The Huffington Post.

Aldrin calls Obama's decision his "JFK moment." He praises the president for deciding "to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015."

Aldrin has been far from shy about criticizing the Constellation program, previously calling the launch of its prototype rocket, Ares I-X, "fake" and "a little more than a half-a-billion dollar political show." He thinks that NASA should be spending taxpayer dollars on developing technology for trips to Mars, and he backs a "flexible path" plan that would "redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons."

NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden, said in a press conference Tuesday that he and senior White House officials will spend the next few months devising a new overarching goal for NASA, and a schedule for developing technologies to send astronauts to destinations as yet unknown.

But Obama's budget proposal still has to be approved by congress. "My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program," Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement.