Self-Sufficient Lunar Habitat Designed

An anonymous reader writes "Cosmos Magazine reports on a design for a lunar habitat that is 90 to 95 percent self-sufficient. The proposed habitat uses a closed-loop life support system that recycles and regenerates air, water, and food, reducing the need for costly supply trips. The north pole of the moon is chosen as a location because of its access to sunlight and useful resources. About 11 astronauts could live and work in the habitat for 2 to 3 years. The project would also help the environment on Earth with recycling and other sustainable practices." The designers say it could be 20 to 30 years before such a habitat could be up and running on the moon.

Comments

Russians Used Lunar Day / Night Cycles

[StCredZero]

I read somewhere that the Russians did experiments with growing plants with 2 weeks of sunlight followed by 2 weeks of relative darkness at low temperature. (Not lunar nighttime temperature, but above freezing.) It seems that there are plants can acclimatize to such conditions. (In particular, peas.) They remain dormant and are able to survive for the 2 weeks when the temperature is lowered less light is available, then continue growing. Using specially tuned LEDs, we could provide the interim power for the 2 weeks "economically." (Relatively speaking. NASA contractors would probably charge million$!)

Here's some folks in New Zealand doing experiments that simulate lunar agriculture. There are many papers related to lunar agriculture as well.

Lunar Agriculture Link

[StCredZero]

Here's a link on Lunar Agriculture

http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar_Food_Supply.html

An interesting proposal is to use sulfur lamps, which provide the needed frequencies for plants and are even more efficient than fluorescents. The 2 week lunar night can be bridged by many plants by lowering the temperature and providing a low level of artificial light for 16 hours in 24. (At about the level of an overcast day on Earth.)

Also, algae can be gown in the 2 week period when light is available, then used to feed animals (esp. fish).

Re:this article misses several points:

[scottbell]

Disclosure: I work at NASA.
To be fair, we are researching self sufficient lunar habitats. I probably see an average of 6 papers a year on the topic at the ICES or COSPAR conferences. The real trick is making a compelling case that regenerative life support saves you ESM (Equivalent System Mass). Everything at NASA is reduced to the mass of the system, and thus how expensive it is to launch. Harry Jones, Alan Drysdale, and other big wig life support analysts aren't convinced complicated regenerative systems, especially crops, will actually make for a cheaper lunar or orbital system. The farther you are away from earth, however, the more sense it makes. One could make the argument that we should test crops on the moon for eventual deployment on Mars, but it would be a very expensive experiment.

Re:Because it's There

[AJWM]

It's been done. I just skimmed TFA briefly, but did see an explicit reference to Bios-3, a (Soviet) Russian closed-loop habitat at a research center in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia). Unlike the later Biosphere 2 (the greenhouse-like one in Arizona you're probably thinking of) this was much smaller, indoors (lighting for the plants was artificial -- and the whole thing had an external water cooling system to remove excess heat) and focussed mainly on recycling air and water. They did grow some of their own food (algae and wheat, yum), but also had regular food inputs from outside. Partly this last was due to Russian regulations governing experiments involving humans, by law they were required to be supplied with a regular ration of meat.

Anyway, the experiments were successful within the design parameters. (I had a chance to visit the facility a few months after Krasnoyarsk was opened to westerners, I still have a sample of the wheat grown within it.)

Biosphere 2 was more ambitious, aiming for 100% closed and no artificial lighting for the plants, for a two-year duration. They didn't make it, due to some surprises in the atmospheric chemistry (and things like interaction with the still-setting concrete), and the thing was way more than would be set up on the Moon anytime soon anyway. Bios-3 was much closer to a Lunar habitat prototype, and proved to be workable. (Yes, there'd still be some supply issues -- it will be a long time before anywhere off-Earth is totally self-sufficient, you need huge buffers and/or very good monitoring to make up for random events in the ecosystem. (Being biological, there are always random events.)