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The BIO-Plex facility will need to support a variety of life support system designs and operational strategies. These systems will be tested and evaluated in the BIO-Plex facility. An important goal of the life support program is to identify designs that best meet all size and performance constraints for a variety of possible future missions. Integrated human testing is a necessary step in reaching this goal. System modeling and analysis will also play an important role in this endeavor. Currently, simulation studies are being used to estimate air revitalization buffer and storage requirements in order to develop infrastructure requirements of the BIO-Plex facility. Simulation studies are also being used to verify that the envisioned operation strategy will be able to meet all performance criteria. In this paper, a simulation study is presented for a nominal BIO-Plex scenario with a high-level of crop growth.

The Waste and Hygiene Compartment will serve as the primary facility for metabolic waste management and personal hygiene on the United States segment of the International Space Station. The Compartment encloses the volume of two standard ISS racks and will be installed into Node 3 after launch inside a Multipurpose Logistics Module on the Space Shuttle. Long duration space flight requires a departure from the established hygiene and waste disposal practices employed on the Space Shuttle. This paper describes requirements and a conceptual design for the Waste and Hygiene Compartment that are both logistically practical and acceptable to the crew.

The International Space Station (ISS) Program requires that there always be a 45 calendar day contingency supply of breathing oxygen. In the early assembly stages, there is only one flight system, the Russian Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator (SFOG), which can meet that requirement. To better ensure the contingency oxygen supply, the Crew and Thermal Systems Division was directed to develop a flight hardware system that can meet all contingency oxygen requirements for ISS. Such a system, called the Backup Oxygen Candle System (BOCS), has been built and tested. The BOCS consists of 33 chlorate candles, a thermal containment apparatus, support equipment and packaging. The thermal containment apparatus utilizes the O2 produced by the candle as the motive stream in an ejector to passively cool the candle during operation.