In what is a first for Africa, South Africa’s North-West University (NWU) is to launch a multidisciplinary research area devoted to space biology. Based in the university’s Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, it will draw on expertise from other faculties as well, including Engineering.

Human exploration of the Moon is set to resume in a few years. Crewed missions to Mars are being conceived, although actual colonisation is still firmly in the future. Astronauts on sustained missions to both the Moon and Mars (with current propulsion technology, the average time a spacecraft takes to reach Mars from Earth is seven months) will need to be able to grow at least some of their own food.

“In situ production of fibre, carbohydrates, fats, protein, nutrients and oxygen will be key for sustained living in space under confined, constrained and extreme conditions,” highlights NWU Professor Henk Bouwman, one of the Space Biology project leaders. “This means organisms must be sustained at productive rates, which implies functional ecosystems based on regolith. Regolith refers to unconsolidated, non-biologically enriched rock and dust. They only way to do that is to select and test organisms and communities under simulated (analogue) conditions on Earth, and then to replicate the experiments in space (eventually, the Moon and Mars).”

Africa has a number of harsh ecosystems, including deserts, poor soil areas (some so poor that they are sometimes referred to as regolith), mine shafts, plus isolated islands and aquatic systems. The organisms found in these places could be candidates for the transformation of regolith into sustainable arable soils.

“One of the challenges we will be looking at is how to use microbes and earthworms to convert regolith to soil in order to plant plants,” he points out. “There are so many possibilities. We have the best ecotoxicologists in Africa, and we have so many exceptional researchers who are able to measure stress and the effect of stress on biological systems. I think we are perfectly positioned to conduct such research.”

NWU researchers have already established that earthworms can grow normally, and reproduce “relatively normally” at up to six times Earth gravity. The next step is to see if they can similarly cope with microgravity.

This research will be of interest both to the major space agencies and to commercial space companies. Further, such research could have direct benefits for Africa. “Just think of the multitude of practical developments that can be brought back to Earth and have practical applications for conditions in Africa,” he observes.