Michigan BLiSS Selected for 2 NASA X-Hab Projects

Post date: Jun 09, 2017 2:11:36 AM

Monday, June 5th, 2017

This past Tuesday, NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation selected the grant winners of 11 universities projects looking to "strengthen [NASA]’s deep space exploration capabilities, including habitation systems needed for an extended human presence beyond Earth’s orbit". Of those 11 projects, two of them were awarded to Michigan's Bioastronautics and Life Support Systems (BliSS) team. This award comes shortly after the rebranding of the BLiSS team, having changed the "B" in their acronym from "Bio-regenerative" to "Bioastronautics" in hopes to expand the scope of work to all things in the field of astronaut habitation and life support systems.

The two projects the students on the BLiSS team will be working on for the 2017-2018 school year are a "Mars Habitat Commonality" and a "3-D Printed Plant Growth Substrate". Being one of the four universities tasked with developing a Mars Habitat Commonality, students will "create a habitation system with common features among in-space and surface habitat designs". This project award was gifted along with a $20,000 grant for personnel and supplies to design, build, and test the product. This project is separate from the Mars 2117 Project that the Michigan BLiSS team is developing for the University of Michigan's Campus of the Future project.

The "3-D Printed Plant Growth Substrate" project assigned to BLiSS will have the team "design and prototype a substrate that utilizes 3-D printing to achieve effective plant growth in microgravity". This project looks to build on NASA's goals developing a habitat that, one day, can be self-sustainable as "growing fresh food in space will be essential for deep space exploration". This project award was also gifted along with a $20,000 grant for personnel and supplies to design, build, and test the product.

Throughout the next year, the BLiSS team will work on a series of deliverables including a series of design reviews to be given to NASA for both projects. This team of NASA scientists and engineers will assist the BLiSS team throughout the year by providing insight to product development. The projects will culminate with prototype delivery and performance evaluation by NASA in May of 2018.

For continued updates, follow the Michigan BLiSS team on Facebook.