THE PLAN FOR SUSTAINABLE
SPACE DEVELOPMENT
- establishing an initial infrastructure on the Moon -

Our Plan for Sustainable Space Development envisions the Initial Permanent Crew growing all of the plants needed to provide for their full nutritional needs. This would obviously be a major part of what that crew would spend their time on.

Our Agriculture Working Group (AgWG) has looked a practically all aspects of this challenge, have consider the variety of solutions to each sub-challenge, and have developed our own Consensus Plan for how we believe that a fully functioning GreenHab as part of an Initial Permanent Base could grow all of its food. We hope to use this Consensus Plan to conduct intensive summer sessions to demonstrate a fully functioning GreenHab with a small crew providing ongoing meals with full nutrition and variety.

MOON VS MARS
If the optimal agriculture plan for the Moon and Mars are the same, that would be great. But we don't presume that it necessarily will be the same. Our focus has been on the lunar context since we believe that humanity's first, permanent, small base will be located on the Moon due to its proximity (safety), current official plans, and capability (lunar optimized Starship). But we do believe that SpaceX will establish a permanent Martian base very shortly thereafter.

The GreenHabs between the Moon and Mars will operate largely the same with the same hardware, irrigation system, plants, planting & harvesting schedule, plant waste management, etc. However, there are a couple of differences. From NASA's LCROSS results, we believe that there will be enough endogenous carbon and nitrogen to produce the CO2 and nitrates necessary (albeit with some additional chemical steps) for a GreenHab that recycles its waste.

But another, potentially significant difference between the Moon and Mars is that Mars has just enough atmosphere to probably protect plants from being rapidly killed by a solar particle event (SPE) such as a solar flare or coronal mass ejection. By contract, a lunar GreenHab must be covered by radiation shielding. However, the Martian atmosphere is insufficient to protect GreenHab workers from the radiation of galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). At the end of the day, our consensus is that optimized GreenHabs on the Moon and Mars would, in fact, end up being essentially the same as explained below.

SIZE
We have calculated the volume needed to provide for all of the nutritional needs of an Initial Permanent Crew of eight. It comes to a capsule, bisected longitudinally into two, equal-sized GreenHabs. It would have a radius of 6 m and a side length of 6 m.

SET-UP AND MAINTENANCE
We would like for the GreenHab to be set up and start operating as much as possible even before the arrival of the Initial Permanent Crew. For the Moon, this mean the use of teleoperations including dexterous telerobots (DexBots) operated 24/7 by shifts of workers on Earth. We believe that, with proper equipment design, the GreenHab can be completely set up, environment systems including irrigation working, plants planted, equipment maintained, and even some harvesting and storage prior to crew arrival.

Reducing crew labor time will be a high priority for the success of the entire InstaBase effort. The GreenHab will be a major consumer of time if not done properly. We anticipate that the GreenHab will require a significant amount of maintenance on an ongoing basis. Given the number of pumps and materials flow, there will need to be cleaning, oiling of parts, breakdowns, replacement of parts, and repairing of parts. We are of the opinion that practically all of this would be done 24/7 by dexterous telerobots provided that the parts are designed for the DexBots to manipulate and the use of jigs to stabilize parts for precise manipulation by crew on Earth working semi-real-time within a simulated environment.

SHIELDING
We assume that water (from ice) will be available on both the Moon and Mars. This is convenient because the shielding of the habitat would simply require pumping water between two outer layers providing at least two meters of water shielding. We believe that this would be sufficient to reduce long-term GCR radiation to levels that would keep the crew who periodically work within the GreenHab within their career limits.

We considered but rejected the following alternatives:
Regolith shielding - Conveniently available but would require more work to keep it from sliding off the walls of the GreenHab. 3D-printed shielding - Requires a lot more energy and time to establish. Underground - Requires a lot more work to get the same grow volume. Magnetic protection - That technology isn't sufficient for use in the near-term.

The shielding itself will act as an insulator thereby significantly reducing the challenge of maintaining temperature control.

LIGHTING
Natural sunlight has the advantage in that it would not require setting up power and lighting systems. The 24.5 hour day on Mars is attractive. But, growing in a 2D setting means that the GreenHabs would have to have a much greater footprint than if growing food that fills the entire volume of the GreenHab.

We have chosen photovoltaic (PV) panels/drapes with wires bringing in electricity to power magenta LEDs hanging from the ceiling and lighting the entire volume of plants. We favor this approach over light tubes due to the much easier set up and efficiency. We also favored PV panels over light concentrators due to the greater support structure mass and complication of light concentrators.

GROWTH MEDIA
We considered soil, hydroponics, and hybrid and went with the hybrid approach. This means collecting local rocks and crushing them down to granules of a standard size range. By using cleaned, crushed rocks, we avoid the health hazards of the abrasive regolith on the Moon and the perchlorates in the Martian dirt. Plants do better if their roots can grow in dirt because beneficial bacterial and fungal communities can more easily establish themselves in a dirt rather than purely fluid environment. However, we would flow nutrient solution through our granular in order to retain the advantages of hydroponics. Over time the dirt would be transformed into high quality soil as we mixed in the organics of plant waste.

Plants would be grown in trays which would first be delivered from Earth but then later produced from local resources (plastics on Mars and metals on the Moon). Mushrooms do not require sunlight and yet can be a good source of protein. These would be grown in their own section of the GreenHab. Plants of different heights would be grown on vertically adjusting levels so as to maximize the use of space.

ENVIRONMENTS
The GreenHab would have sections which would be optimized for production including control of lighting cycles, CO2 levels, temperature cycles, watering, and nutrients. By controlling the environments in this way, we anticipate much greater yield than one would expect to get in typical farming settings on Earth.

NUTRIENT INPUTS
In our Plan for Sustainable Space Development, we envision the harvesting and processing of lunar polar ice as being an early priority. The water portion of the ice would primarily be used for propellant. The substantial side-production of organics (both carbon and nitrogen-containing chemicals) could be used to replace losses after recycling and help provide the organic needed to grow the settlement. On Mars, CO2 and N2 are readily available from the Martian atmosphere.

For the Moon, we envision providing the initial set of nutrient salts as a payload delivery with excess for losses during recycling enough to keep full operations for about three years. After this point, we hope that the sources of these nutrients will be sufficiently developed such that no further resupplies would be necessary.

PLANT WASTE MANAGEMENT
There will be plenty of plant waste produced. This will be shredded, mixed in with soil and used to grow mushrooms and form soil of increasing quality. Depleted soil will then be incinerated to provide basic chemicals (e.g. CO2) which new plants will utilize.

SELECTION OF PLANTS / MEATS
Most plants can be grown using this approach and so we believe that the diet will have a wide variety of ingredients to choose from. However, there will be difficulty growing tall trees (with a large root system), dairy, and meats.

A purely vegetarian diet can be designed to provide for full nutrition indefinitely. However, many people would like to have some meat in their diet. We considered early forms of meat including fish, chickens (mostly for eggs), rabbits, and goats. However, we felt that, given the additional labor that animal-based foods would tie up more crew time than we think best for an Initial Permanent Crew. Rather, we think that dairy and meats would best be introduced as the crew population reached about 100 and that we would use plant-based proteins initially such as tofu from soybeans.

PLANTING & HARVESTING SCHEDULE
It starts with the nutritional needs of the Initial Permanent Crew which we consider to be close to the same as the nutritional needs of people on Earth. A variety of recipes will provide for those nutritional needs. Ingredients from storage and freshly grown produce will feed the recipes and will hence set the harvesting schedule. Working backwards, this will set the planting schedule for the individual types of plants.

TOOLS & PROCESSING EQUIPMENT
The crew working in the GreenHab will need all of the tools and equipment necessary to minimize their time spent. There are a large number of tools used in gardening. From these should be selected just those that are necessary given the particular context of the GreenHab and with sufficient spares in case they break down. These tools should also allow for the crew to work with the plants at height since the whole 3D volume will planted. Specific equipment should also be selected or designed to help process produce and waste including maximizing automation.

ROBOTIC ASSISTANTS
As mentioned before dexterous telerobots can assist with set-up and maintenance. They can also help with inspection of plants and equipment. Additionally, they can have implements designed to harvest specific types of plants. With sophisticated development, they could use artificial intelligence and training to perform functions in a fully automated manner. This will be especially important in the Mars setting where telerobotics is not practical (neither from Earth nor consuming 1:1 crew time).

STORAGE
The Lunar (or Martian) Cookbooks will have a year-long menu plan in which planting and harvesting are done on a schedule that will provide fresh ingredients in enough quantity for the recipes at the times that they are needed. However, there will be times in which the plants over-produce or we may want to spread the use of ingredients over time so that, for example, the crew aren't eating zucchini for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week. In these cases, ingredients will need to be stored in the following forms: dried, canned, refrigerated, & frozen (i.e. pantry, refrigerator, and freezer).

INPUT
If, after reading our Agriculture Plan here, you would like to suggest some changes or additions, feel free to contact us by email (DevelopSpace1@gmail.com).

HELP NEEDED
This whole process of growing, processing, storing, and using ingredients grown requires a lot of work (theoretical, experiments, & demos). If you are interested in helping in any of these areas, please let us know (DevelopSpace1@gmail.com).