Am I the only one thinking that Elon should already be testing some beta Mars habitats on Earth by now? Why aren't we seeing more Biosphere-style experiments?
The key feature would be an inflatable ‘mattress’ on the surface above that will freeze and thaw.
I still think that it will be useful for underground farms on earth. I was really thinking of ‘hostile environments’ rather than growing on Mars.
Powering my underground Mars farm was a challenge but I sorted that out with a nuclear battery. Whatever. Shouldn’t be a problem for earth tunnel farms.
HST: I think if we are to colonize space and start living out there, we could convert earth into a ‘garden of Eden’ ..a work in progress, as it were..with a skeleton farming team tending and supplying food to the space earthlings.
Or if we are to colonies a planet, it would be in the form of a cluster of sealed habitats or environments. And each habitat will be vacated as it regenerates ...in a way, a kind of progression of seasonal changes. Only..on earth, the seasons change. Up there, we will simply move to a seasonal module. This way, we can regenerate and deal with waste/recyclables etc.
Is there any more info on your submission?
There is definitely more scope for automation and robotics and AI with indoor Ag and can be implemented easily compared to traditional Ag. I think I have some PowerPoint version of it somewhere. I will have to look for it. Soil Ag and robotics is my area..not indoor Ag.
Same. Former Biodynamic farmer (horticulture) and did a stint at the MDRS, I was asked by the director to come back as an Executive Officer under her for another mission with more focus on the Green Hab.
If you can find that PP and repost I'd definitely check it out.
Are you working on anything right now in robotics with automating Ag? One of the things that I think we've seen during COVID is the mass acceleration of automated processes in many fields, but I haven't seen as many in Ag then prior to this--mainly in harvesting, weeding but as you know maintenance, pest control and irrigation play a much bigger part in day to day operations and was wondering what has been done in that regard.
I wonder if there is anything for those of us with backgrounds in Ag and tech to do something at places like Biosphere 2 or at the Eden Project.
I've had to go back to Supply Chain since COVID derailed my plans to go to SpaceX and then hopefully come back and work at a more mature Squared Roots if it had a focus on Mars food production, but I definitely like to see something like that happen and maybe even get involved if I'm still useful.
I am skeptical about growing Terra produce in space and even about us consuming them out in space. How do we even digest food in space? I want to know more about that. I want to know what happens to our internal organs. How we age and how we process calories etc.
We are likely better off 3D printing our food and nutrients and calories in space. And some significant space ready body modifications would be required.
Having said that..keeping it technical..I am more interested in growing food in hostile environments here on earth. Or Mars like environments here on earth for wool gathering purposes.
Eventually some produce like lettuce and strawberries will be exclusively grown indoors. But forests and orchards and creating eco systems ..and soil food web is more important. And we need tech to assist us with that to regenerate our earth systems. As we automate them for earth, many of them can be tweaked or exported for space environments. Maybe.
Growing for Mars or space pushes my imagination and many good things have come from that. My email is my hn handle at gmail. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat further.
I do think that after many decades of Mars being sort of within reach but just impractically expensive to go there, now that it's almost time to start packing our bags we're not really prepared. Maybe SpaceX (or Tesla with their solar panels and batteries and EVs) will fill some of that gap, but it makes sense for them to put most of their focus on what they're best at.
Not sure why we don't have more non-Elon-associated organizations doing closed ecosystem testing, but I don't follow space-related news that closely and maybe it's already happening in ways that aren't highly visible like Biosphere-2 was.
Someone else? Who? Governments aren't seriously working on this problem, and there's no money in it for the private sector.
Vertical farms growing organic lettuce and arugula in warehouses are not solving this problem, by the way. They are solving a much simpler, much less interesting problem.
There is a mountain of unknown unknowns in this problem - that it would expect would take at least decades to solve.
And unlike launching commercial satellites, nobody is going to be interested in dropping a few billion dollars on a biosphere R&D startup.
Yes, no one is going to fund this until it looks like sustainable transport to Mars is feasible, which makes transport the priority at the moment.
Doing that in orbit would be quite a trick, even if you didn't restrict yourself to only being able to use found-in-orbit resources.
I suppose that's true, in the same way it's true of all electric cars. But a pressurized cabin and an airlock is a pretty massive change.
There's plenty of fundamental research going on. There are BIOS-3 and Yuegong-1 based on it (AFAIK probably the most successful ones in terms of closing the loop), also MELiSSA, CESRF, and many other labs.