Each evening, after doing his exercises, Viktor Patsayev glided over to Oasis, a little square greenhouse attached to a wall of the Salyut 1 space station, to water the flax plants inside. A sad-faced man with a precise manner, Patsayev would push a handle to pump water from a reservoir into the layers of resin that held the seeds. After about a week, two little flax shoots poked up through the artificial soil. Patsayev and crewmate Vladislav Volkov carefully tended to the fragile seedlings like parents. The cosmonauts seemed to be cheered by them. "These are our pets," Patsayev said. "They are our love," noted Volkov unabashedly. Scientists at Energia, the agency responsible for the Soviet manned space program, had not designed the greenhouse to comfort the cosmonauts on the 1971 mission. Oasis and its flax plants were among the first experiments that looked toward the future―when colonies in orbit, or bases on the moon or Mars, would depend on space agriculture to help recycle oxygen and feed their crews. Until humans learned how to grow crops in microgravity, the cost of resupplying such outposts would be prohibitive, and lengthy missions away from Earth would be impossible. And like all facets of the space race, growing crops was something the Soviets wanted to do first.
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