Space Travel

When the Apollo Astronauts set out for the Moon – during that brief period of manned exploration between 1968 and 1972 – they carried all their food with them. One way, it was a short three-day journey. Now there is increasing interest in missions of men and women to the planet Mars and even the eventual settlement of other planets. But a trip to Mars typically takes some nine months or more. If you carry all your food and oxygen and water with you, you must carry a great deal of additional mass, which makes the trip much more difficult and expensive, and therefore much less likely.

The solution is to recycle our wastes, generate our own oxygen and grow our own food. So an interplanetary spacecraft carrying a human crew must become something like a closed ecological system. It must hold non-human life, especially plants. If we humans venture far from Earth, we must make our spaceships into gardens.

Serious study of such systems is under way. For example, the commercially available EcoSphere described in the accompanying article was developed by Joe Hanson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.