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Regenerative life support is considered a key enabling technology for the human exploration of space. Without regeneration, the cost of supplying the materials necessary to sustain human life escalates so rapidly that manned space flight becomes uneconomical for all but short, near-Earth missions. One of the methods for providing regenerative life support utilizes a Controlled Ecological Life Support System, or CELSS. To accomplish this regeneration, the CELSS must incorporate technologies for food production, food processing, atmospheric revitalization, water purification, trace contaminant control, and waste processing. Many experiments have been conducted to characterize the performance of individual CELSS subsystems (e.g., plant growth, waste processing). However, very little research has been done to define the performance and operational aspects of CELSS technology at the overall system level.

Little information exists on the responses of plants to environmental conditions which combine lower than Earth-normal atmospheric pressures with changes in the partial pressures of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Data collected on the growth of plants in such environments will be valuable in the development of low-pressure plant growth facilities for use on Space Station Freedom, the moon, and Mars. Such low pressure environments have been proposed previously as a means of facilitating EVA operations. Additionally, in some planetary base applications, the use of low atmospheric pressure would allow the use of lightweight plant growth structures for food production, thus reducing both the mass and the launch cost of the life support system.

NASA's Centrifuge Facility is a multi-purpose life sciences research facility to be flown on Space Station Freedom. It will provide the capability for conducting experiments with living plants and animals in the microgravity environment of space. One component of the Facility is a plant habitat which is capable of supporting a wide variety of plant species under highly controlled environmental conditions. The conditions to be controlled include temperature, humidity, lighting (photosynthetically active radiation or PAR), air velocity, trace contaminant concentrations, nutrient element concentrations, and atmospheric composition. Lockheed conducted a “rapid prototyping” exercise to develop and test a preliminary design for such a plant habitat. Concurrent with an analytical effort, breadboard fabrication and testing was performed to support the acquisition of detailed performance data for both design analysis and validation of the simulation models used in the analysis.

MMARS (Moon/MArs-base Resource Simulator) is a computer program that automatically generates quantitative summaries of the physical resources (components and facilities) required for normal operation of a planned planetary base or other large project. The user enters a small set of base task descriptors which define the goal or purpose of the base, and the program automatically adds all components, facilities, and functions needed to support that task. And because the support components added also generate a need for support themselves (any component may require power, or labor to operate, for example), MMARS continues, in recursive fashion, to add components and facilities to support the growing list of components and facilities, until the demand for new resources no longer increases.