WEBVTT

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Intro music.

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Strawberries and salad crops growing at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center in

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Florida will provide more than nutrition to astronauts when they're on their way to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

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In the state-of-the-art lab the plants are growing in environmental growth chambers that mimic the atmosphere on the International Space Station.

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Plants are being tested for their ability to nourish the crew physically and psychologically and have been used for therapeutic purposes in space for years.

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"On a long-duration mission, eventually they're going to miss looking at the Earth out of their windows. They're going to lose that perception,

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lose that closeness to their home planet.

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So one of the things that plants can provide is actually that psychological feel that they're bringing a piece of Earth with them."

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While tending the crops, the crew exhales carbon dioxide which the plants need to survive.

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The plants create oxygen in return creating a mutual life-cycle success story.

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The tomato and strawberry crops will also add texture, fresh flavors and an antioxidants to the crew's prepackaged food diet.

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"So they're taking a plant, they're taking something that they can go in and physically touch,

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physically smell and get sort of a really relatively good feeling about their mission and sort of forget

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about some of the stresses of all the work they have to do throughout the day."

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On long-duration flights to fulfill  the Vision for Space Exploration, astronauts will feel right at home, tending their little farm in the sky.

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