Veggie Team Processes Pillows for Veg-03 MNO Seed Film

A member of the space crop production team pours substrate and controlled release fertilizer into a Veggie plant pillow on Thursday, May 29, 2025, inside the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The plant pillows, along with Veg-03 MNO seed films, which will carry seeds of Red Russian kale, Wasabi mustard greens, and Dragoon lettuce, are set to fly aboard NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station to grow in the space environment to study how microgravity impacts crop development compared to ground-grown plants. Seed films enable seed handling and planting of seeds into plant pillows allowing for astronaut choice of crops to grow. Plants can provide whole food nutrition, improve menu variety, and positively impact behavioral health of astronauts on long duration missions to the Moon and Mars and space crop research aboard the orbiting laboratory is enabled by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division and the International Space Station Program.