To make the Galy cotton, a team collects samples from a plant and harvests its cells. The cells are grown in bioreactor or fermentation vessels in a cell culture process similar to beer brewing. The final product is dried and harvested, with minimized water, land and energy use, Galy says.
Maybe I just misread the sentence. But the full quote seems deliberately obtuse to me. They don’t explicitly say that they need less water than traditional farming.
It’s not about speed, but energy. Virtually all satellites are gravitationally bound to Earth. Think of Earth’s gravitational potential as a funnel. The satellites sit somewhere on the walls of the funnel. Now, next to the Earth’s funnel, there’s. much deeper funnel: The Sun’s gravitational potential. But between where the satellites are and the point where the Sun’s potential starts attracting them is still a big "hill" or wall separating the two funnels from each other (the top of that hill is the Lagrange Point L1). So to get a satellite out of Earth’s potential to a point from where it could “fall” towards the Sun still requires a large amount of energy.