To make life on Mars possible, Interstellar Lab will teach us to live better on Earth Article Pagination
A Franco-American start-up, "Interstellar Lab", has undertaken, under the leadership of its founder Barbara Belvisi, to realize the first of the dreams of the Mars Society, the realization on Earth of a prefiguring and therefore preparing future human settlements on Mars. At the same time, she wants to demonstrate that these establishments will be very useful for the evolution on Earth towards economical and ecologically autonomous cities because on Mars they will have to operate in closed bio-regenerative loops with a minimum of resources (difficult to be imported and/or produced locally). And what makes the start-up even more sympathetic to me, as an economist, is that it understood that in order to become self-sufficient and to endure, it had to seek out and control a flow of commercial resources. Extraordinarily (but this is probably simply the logic imposed by the constraints resulting from the context), these resources are the same as those that I had considered on my side for future Martian communities.
Before getting involved and investing in the "New Space", Barbara Belvisi had co-founded "Hardware Club", a venture capital fund specializing in electronics and robotics and she had contributed to the launches the incubator "The Family" and the "Hello Tomorrow Challenge", an event dedicated to "deep-tech". She is therefore not new to technologies and “business” and this is important for what she is undertaking now with a small team of 7 people, including several engineers. The Interstellar Lab project, baptized "EBIOS" (for "Experimental BIOregenerative Station"), consists of building in California, on 70,000 m2 in the Mojave Desert (4 hours by car from the center of Los Angeles), a small "village" made up of habitats and greenhouses, allowing a hundred people to live in maximum autonomy by recycling or regenerating by "organic" processes everything that can be, at the inside structures of a type that could be built on the Moon or Mars (see title illustration). For the moment we will not recycle the atmosphere (it is not a priority on Earth!) but we will recycle water by using plants, we will also recycle organic materials, as much as possible non-organic materials and we will will try in all areas to live with local resources by producing its energy (solar of course!), its food (vegetable) at the end of bio-regenerative loops, and by building habitats or domes of common life thanks to 3D printing. This is exactly what we will have to do on Mars where we will always have a huge barrier to the transport of masses and volumes, the carrying capacity of our rockets being limited and the cost of their use necessarily remaining high. Transport is in fact nowhere free and it will always be expensive between planets (production and maintenance of spaceport infrastructure, launchers and spacecraft, propellant; control and repair of launchers and spacecraft after use and before reuse; maintenance of the interior fittings of cabins and common areas; training and remuneration of personnel assigned to piloting and services during the trip, especially since no one will probably be able to make more than a small number of trips – 3 or 4 – due to accumulated radiation doses).
The concept of Interstellar Lab is to provide a research base on bio-regenerative and life systems within closed systems ("ECLSS" for "Environmental Control & Life Support System") as realistic as possible and, at the same time, to generate resources on the one hand by accommodating the scientists interested in the aforementioned research and on the other hand by renting residences inside EBIOS to anyone interested in the experiment of the life in this strange place (between 3000 and 6000 dollars per week). Barbara Belvisi got it right by choosing the location of the first village near Los Angeles, a city with a large population, high average incomes and very strong interest in space. In addition, Los Angeles is one of NASA's centers and Interstellar Lab has on its board of directors, Dr. Greg Autry, a strong personality, who was a member of the last Space Review Team and served as liaison between NASA and the executive under this administration. He is particularly interested in entrepreneurship and New Space economics (which he teaches at the University of Southern California). Apart from the interest in preparing for life on Mars, it is clear what the EBIOS project can bring to life on Earth: learning to perform a normal activity with minimum ecological impact (therefore reduced compared to today), the demonstration that one can live in places that are a priori the most hostile (the inhabitants of countries in the process of desertification or countries where pollution is very strong, will appreciate) and also that the remediation of the deterioration of the environment through technology is not an empty concept despite the doubts clearly displayed by extremist ecologists in favor of degrowth.
As said before, what I appreciate the most in this EBIOS project and what really distinguishes it (and better!) from the Mars Society simulations is that Barbara Belvisi understood the interest, if not the need, of operate as a business enterprise. It does not seek to develop it and make it live on private donations or public subsidies with no funds, feeling that on these bases it could not be sustainable. She wants to make it a profitable business (and I think that's also probably the spirit of the first sponsors), that is to say, to ensure that her offer is the subject of sufficient solvent demand to generate a positive margin. Of course, it initiates it with sponsors, but these are also investors who hope not only to enhance their image but also to help their own “business”. Together they want to earn money in order to benefit from it and be able, in addition to the personal pleasure that they will be able to derive from it, to reinvest it to develop the project and reproduce it elsewhere in the world by improving it more and more. This “basic” principle of economy is the best guarantee of sustainability. Illustrating this state of mind, it is interesting to note that the main sponsor of Interstellar Lab, Bruno Maisonnier, is also an entrepreneur who knew how to succeed both in terms of his concept, by concretizing it in a very satisfactory way, and financially by reselling it at a very good price and who can use EBIOS for their own benefit. Remember that he is the creator of Aldébaran, this company which designed the small humanoid robots that Arnaud Montebourg took in his arms and that the whole world was able to admire, and which was fairly quickly sold to the Japanese Softbank (fault to be able to be developed with French capital). Bruno Maisonnier now wants to give the maximum intelligence (artificial of course) to his robots and the EBIOS project "falls well" because one of the problems of Mars (or the Moon) will be the low population and the extent of the tasks to be accomplished. with the maximum autonomy, therefore the ideal environment for the robots that he could design. Its cooperation with Barbara Belvisi, which will offer it a remarkable space for experimentation and demonstration, seems a priori to be a “win-win”.
There are already ecologically autonomous living experiences prefiguring cities that could be built “on other stars under other skies” but none seem to have chosen the path of realism as Interstellar Lab wants to do. "Biosphere-2" with its completely closed project was too ambitious, especially in its time (1991-1993 and 1994). For its part, the Mars Society is only looking for “users” (and not “customers”) wishing to carry out more or less scientific simulations and is depriving itself of the tourist and therefore commercial attraction offered by its habitats. What characterizes EBIOS is its “bottom-up” approach (or as Barbara Belvisi says, “from the ground-up”) and open to commerce. It is not a question of seeking to achieve immediately the goal that one envisages but only what it is possible to do today without forgetting the objective which is that of the real Martian (or lunar) habitats. Biosphere-2 failed because it was impossible to control such a complex habitat as its promoters had envisioned; the Mars Society's simulation bases vegetate because the candidates for simulations are insufficient compared to the operating costs generated by each. The result is that their comfort is spartan, which is not serious, but also, that their realism is less than that which Interstellar Lab envisages with respect to future space habitats and their means of research should ultimately be much more limited. This does not exclude Interstellar Lab intending to adopt very "advanced" rules in the future when it is possible to do so. Thus from the beginning, the greatest precautions (segmentation of living, growing and working spaces) will be taken in order to avoid microbial contamination because these contaminations in a closed ecological environment, therefore of small volume, present a risk of this type. extremely high since there cannot be the buffer effect (spreader of this risk) offered by large volumes (such as the terrestrial biosphere for example) and the imbalances are extremely difficult to control or manage if they are allowed to develop.
This first implementation should cost a maximum of 30 million dollars. Barbara Belvisi will get them but if you want to participate in the project yourself, do not hesitate to contact her, it will certainly not be "lost funds". After there will be other villages, the next one in Florida but also in other environments just as extreme as the Mojave Desert as long as they are also easily accessible to tourists. As is also planned in Europe, why not in Switzerland, in the high mountains, to replace certain refuges, our "cabins" as they say, aging or insufficient in capacity or equipment, where the problems concern the supply, waste and recycling, and soon readapting to new forms of tourism given the melting ice?
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— Katie Tue Dec 24 00:17:31 +0000 2019
Title illustration: EBIOS in the Mojave Desert, artist view (credit Interstellar Lab).
Links:
http://interstellarlab.earth/about
https://www.usinenouvelle.com/editorial/l-industrie-c-est-fou-la-start-up-francaise-interstellar-lab-developpe-vraiment-des-villages-autonomes-pour-la -earth-and-space.N905729
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