Jun 30 1977
From The Space Library
The NY Times reported that a team of two Soviet crewmen, accompanied for a time by a woman plant expert, had completed a 4mo stay in an isolation chamber to test an artificial environment designed for long interplanetary space missions. The team had breathed oxygen and consumed water and food produced by miniature wheatfields and vegetable gardens occupying about half the space of their 1260ft2 test chamber called Bios 3. The plants, grown by hydroponics (mineralized solutions rather than soils), had exuded enough moisture for drinking and household needs and had provided a third of the proteins and fats and half the carbohydrates in the crew diet, supplemented with dehydrated rations of animal fats and proteins stored for the mission.
The Times quoted an Izvestia story describing the experiment and reporting "no significant changes in the physiologic, biochemical and psychological functions of the subjects. Their weight has also remained virtually the same." Dr. G. Lisovsky, head of the Controlled Biosynthesis Laboratory of the Krasnoyarsk Physics Inst. in Siberia, said that earlier experiments in the series begun shortly after the Gagarin flight of 1961 had tried chlorellas (green single-cell algae) as a source of protein and B-complex vitamins for long space trips. The algae had yielded sufficient oxygen and water but did not provide a balanced diet; researchers had then used early-maturing wheat and vegetables. Agronomist Mariya Shulenko had done the cooking while checking out the hydroponics; after she left, Gennady Asinyarov and Nikolay Bugreyev had shared the job. (NYT, June 30/77, 28)
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