Growing fresh food on the Moon is going to be crucial if astronauts there are ever going to eat anything other than freeze-dried rations. Since husbanding animals on the lunar surface is…difficult (to put it mildly), most mission planners believe that plants are the solution. But we still don’t entirely understand how one of the most fundamental materials to plant growth, water, operates under partial gravity. A team of researchers, led by Karl Hasenstein of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and including John Kiss of the Florida Institute of Technology, and Christopher McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center, recently published a paper in Microgravity Science and Technology that lays out the physics for how water behaves at lunar gravity. Growing plants in space isn’t a new idea. The International Space Station has played host to the Veggie facility and the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) for years. Some researchers even germinated Arabidopsis (thale cress) seeds in actual lunar dirt returned from the Apollo missions. But water behaves differently on the ISS, where it experiences only microgravity. And there are some major hurdles to overcome to get plants to use water in real lunar soil outside a controlled laboratory environment. On...