Another comment from Phil Sadler, received today via e-mail. He gave me permission to share this message on the public forum.
If some of your group doesn’t know about BVAD, then they probably also don’t know about ESM (Equivalent Systems Mass), who are the NASA people who spoil everyone’s Lunar fantasies, like this drawing. ESM is a “brutal” metric that is applied to all our efforts and gives NASA a number for comparison purposes of other competing designs.
Then you have the people who seem dedicated to growing in regolith. This might be something in the distant future where people live in giant wheel space stations and grow in soil, but somehow, we need to get past that. Even with the National Geographic Mars video series, they were growing in regolith. We have grown a number of root crops in NFT systems, Ray with the BPC at KSC grew a number of crops of potatoes, soil is not required, at least for these earlier missions. You should take that challenge on with your group because it detracts from everyone’s efforts.
Keeping the regolith out of the Habitat will be a major challenge and like with Martian perchlorates in its regolith, this presents a major problem. We are working to eliminate any growing media consumables from our efforts. The more your group understands ESM, hopefully it will advance their designs and efforts in this area. Ray again is a good one to gather his input. It will require record levels of production, including “ditching” growing in regolith, inter-canopy lighting, dynamic growing system design, etc., all the tricks.
This is our recent Ohalo unit, probably a more advanced design, and still, it is not good enough.
When I see static shelving like with the Chinese Lunar Palace, I know that they haven’t considered ESM, either.
Here is a rendering that just appeared on Netflix that the artist used our UA-CEAC LMGH modules, on the left, but they are clueless, too.
I don’t want to appear to be “a space crumudgeon” but what we have produced in the last years is really disappointing and I know we can do better.
Regards,
Phil
Phil brings up so many essential points to think about. His hands-on experience with these analog growing systems over the decades, he has seen a lot of what can work and what absolutely cannot. He takes that experience and still experiments with new materials and is innovating with the folks in the Biosystems Engineering group at University of Arizona.
