Could You Actually Grow Potatoes on Mars?
If you got stranded on Mars tomorrow and someone handed you a bag of potatoes, could you actually grow them in the dirt outside your window?
That's the setup in "The Martian" by Andy Weir. If you've seen the movie, you know the plan: Mars dirt, plus human waste, plus water, equals dinner. It looks almost easy on screen.
It is not easy. Mars soil has a chemistry problem that never even comes up in the movie, and once you know what it is, you won't watch that scene the same way again.
Here's why this isn't just a fun "what if," though. Astronauts on a normal mission eat somewhere around 1.7 to 2.5 kilograms of food a day. Stretch that across a multi-year round trip to Mars and NASA's own estimates put the food alone at close to 3,000 kilograms, per person, if every single bite has to launch from Earth. Multiply that by an actual crew and you've got a rocket that's mostly groceries.
That's the real problem sitting underneath Watney's potato plan. It was never really about potatoes. It's about mass. Every kilogram of food you don't have to launch is a kilogram you can spend on fuel, equipment, or just getting people home safely. Growing food once you get there isn't a nice bonus for a Mars mission, it's one of the only ways a mission like that becomes possible at all.
So did the movie actually solve that problem? Sort of. It got the goal right and the method very wrong.
In this class, my co-teaching robot Watson and I dig into what "The Martian" got right, what it got very wrong, and what real researchers are actually doing right now to solve the Mars food problem for real. (Haven't met Watson yet? He's a real offline robot I built myself. Long story, worth its own post.)
You'll walk away knowing:
What's actually toxic about Martian soil, and why it's not what most people guess
Why "human waste as fertilizer" is half right and half genuinely risky
What plants actually need to grow, and why soil might not even be the important part
What real scientists are testing on Earth right now for future Mars missions
This one's a single async class, 25 to 30 minutes, ages 12 to 15.
Grab it here with code JBLOG7510 for a free seat while it's active.
Not ready to enroll yet? Try this first.
You're the first person sent to live on the Moon or Mars, and it's your job to design a greenhouse that can feed everyone there. Draw it, then think through what you'd need to bring from Earth to build it, and what you'd grow to keep everyone healthy. No right answers required, just curiosity. Download here for free.