To reach our goal of putting a Forest on the Moon, we need to develop closed ecological life support systems (CELSS) capable of supporting whole Earth ecosystems and people - indefinitely. While the idea isn't new, there are a lot of knowledge gaps and unsolved technical challenges. Here are the ones we're working on now:
Project Summary: This experiment will be hosted on the International Space Station in the ICE Cube Facility. The primary goal of this project is to determine the survivability of the ecosphere in space and to further examine the influence of space conditions on a multilevel aquatic ecosystem. Several secondary questions will also be investigated, including sloshing modes in the Ecosphere, changes in the microbial communities, and how the space environment affects the abiotic parameters of the ecosystem.
Project Summary: Through innovations to enable totally passive thermal and light management, we hope to create a "low-tech" solution for hosting biological payloads in LEO. We will design and build our own 3U cubesat and conduct experiments to determine the composition of plants, animals, and microbes best suited to the unique orbital environment.
Project Summary: Lunar regolith is a harsh, toxic substrate totally dissimilar to our Earth soils. However, if we want to put a forest on the Moon, we're not gonna be able to grow a whole mature hardwood ecosystem in hydroponics. We will test various remediation methods, such as milling regolith to silt and sand particle sizes, using desiccated algae to add organic matter to the regolith, and the inclusion of several fungal symbionts.
Project Summary: People often misattribute air filtration to plants, but in reality the majority of pollutants are removed from the atmosphere by diverse microbes in the soil. These microbes can eat nearly any volatile organic compound (VOC) and convert it to CO2 and H20, so they have been used as sustainable air filters in closed environments like Biosphere 2. Can we reproduce this technique using harsh lunar regolith simulant?
