(499a) Food Production and Solid Waste System for Advanced Life Support on Long-Term Space Missions

This paper will report on further development of a concept for a realistic and workable integrated bio-regenerative food and waste management system for long-term space travel, that should integrate well with other elements of advanced life support (ALS) subsystems. The initial concept proposed a system by which sufficient food and fiber could be taken along for a six-person crew on a 3-year round trip mission to Mars within realistic constraints of equivalent systems mass.

The constraints were to be met by lifting off with only a 6-8-month supply of pre-packaged shelf-stable food and fiber products on board (sufficient for one-way transit to the planetary base). During residence time on the planetary base, daily food production would include repackaging and reprocessing a daily excess of prepared shelf-stable ready-to-eat meals with recycled retort pouches that were accumulated during transit for this purpose.

This paper will address technical feasibility of such a system in a 2-step approach, beginning with selection of a specific realistic scenario that could be supported with available data from past and recent NASA-funded research in space agriculture, advanced food technology, and solid waste management. The second step consisted of nutrient/mass balance calculations, which followed the transfer/transport of nutrients from plant growth media through crop development to edible food ingredients, food processing and preparation, crew consumption and metabolism, recovery of organic wastes and inedible biomass residue, and finally bioconversion of those wastes and residues to compost through anaerobic digestion for return to plant growth media.