This is the kind of research that NASA should be doing, and would be if we were serious about space settlement. Instead, we waste billions on unneeded giant rockets. At least China is taking it more seriously.
4 thoughts on “Regenerative Life Support”
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JSC and KSC were doing R&D on regenerative life support and had a semi-closed chamber up and running in the 90s at JSC, with crews staying in it for up to 90 days. A follow up project, BIO-Plex was under construction to do simulated Mars stays of up to a year (the crew would have rotated out every 90 days). It would have processed all waste, grown most of their food (things like herbs and some canned goods would be available). It was shut down by Goldin as part of his eradication of anything human Mars mission related. after the chambers were built, the power and cooling hookups installed, and a control room outfitted.
The early work from the crew perspective is here: http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/books/ground/1.3Crewmembers.pdf
NASA abandoned the cutting edge long ago, and others like Bigelow and Musk have moved into the vacuum. Add to those two John Allen, who made the Biosphere II project. I know that 6 years ago Allen had a Biosphere 3 running, much more low key, in a windowless building on his ranch, but I haven’t heard anything about the project since then.
Reliable, small, regenerative life support is required for basically any mission beyond the Moon. Yet, NASA doesn’t have it, nor are they looking into developing it.
SLS, they say, isn’t going to do lunar landings. (Couldn’t do a single-launch mission with it anyway).
So, what mission can they actually hope to do? The only one I can think of is asteroid retrieval one; sent a robotic probe to grab a space pebble, put it in orbit around the moon, and send a mission to it there. The only other mission I can think of that SLS could do without advanced life support systems (which currently don’t exist) would be reflying Apollo 8.
It’s a rocket to nowhere, in more ways than one.
NASA does a significant amount of Life Support research at ARC, KSC, JSC, and MSFC it’s just not publicized like the Chinese are doing. That’s a failure of PAO and not NASA.