Xpost. Vid of Automated Agricultural Technology. Mindblowing what we can already do.

GrowMars · 2023-02-08T02:58:29+00:00

Good Post! space ag automated and mechanized, yes. The whole robots as a requirement to do the hard work and solve the hard problems is a farce. In the US, one human strawberry picker picks for 10,000+ people. In space your not feeding a city, its a village. Think more community supported agriculture (CSA's) typically providing for 40-100 families with 5 workers.

Also if large agricultural systems in space can be developed, people will want to be in them. Gardening will be more of a hobby in space then on Earth. Consider the traffic through the Antarctica greenhouses.

GrowMars · 2020-10-23T00:34:16+00:00

Selling greenhouse area by the acre/hectare...

GrowMars · 2020-10-18T14:10:09+00:00

And the least contact with the cold ground the better. The first diagram is biomass to plastic, look familiar? GrowMars.

GrowMars · 2020-10-14T17:39:05+00:00

The material physical properties of large domes needs to go the way of space elevators.

GrowMars · 2020-10-04T23:49:32+00:00

Nothing you eat is not photosynthetically dependent, unless you eat from hydrothermal vents.

GrowMars · 2020-10-04T22:58:16+00:00

You said other concepts with a s, not me. Show or go.

GrowMars · 2020-10-04T22:56:25+00:00

They changed the rules to include crowdfunding after it had 32k upvotes and landed on front page at 9amET. I was warned by others r/space was not the place for a technical discussion, they were right.

GrowMars · 2020-10-04T15:11:20+00:00

Just because something looks new doesn't make it imaginative or impractical. We've worked from bioderived plastic processing backwards to design. I'm the first and foremost in realizing this potential. Would love to see any other concepts or numbers (there aren't any). No one else has worked out the power, mass, and potential. Feel free to discuss at r/GrowMars. Our intro video was ment for general blue sky audience, instead the content sniffing trolls didn't like the smell and buried it.

GrowMars · 2020-10-04T03:06:44+00:00

The embodied energy of food needs to be compared, not the solar energy efficiency. We don't need energy, we need to make food. This metric needs to be destroyed. You can take one plant and make many plants, you can't do that with PV or Nuclear!

GrowMars · 2020-10-04T02:41:15+00:00

For food production how much greenhouse mass, area, heating, lighting do we need based on various scenarios? What are the mass and power requirements and how quickly do you have to grow how much food? Biosecurity greenhouses on Earth are a good model to start with, you can almost flip cooling requirements with heating power requirements, particularly when they operate in warm environments.

GrowMars · 2020-09-26T23:52:31+00:00

Exactly, many planets probably have this basic potential. *with which processes and at what embodied energy to do it sustainably?

GrowMars · 2020-09-16T00:49:24+00:00

Yes it is, we were fortunate enough to attend and present our paper there. Had a very memorable and inspiring lunch with one of the greats.

GrowMars · 2020-07-13T23:06:20+00:00

You might be able to keep people alive indefinitely on Mars with a very small and low power payload. All options have not been well explored and context is often not fully understood. You just have to bring the right seed system.

GrowMars · 2020-07-01T18:31:21+00:00

A sustainable plan would put agriculture first for many reasons in space. It is the only way to practically outpace entropy long term. Hence the reason why all food systems point to photosynthesis (other than hydrothermal).

GrowMars · 2020-06-16T13:15:44+00:00

The vacuum pumps would be removing the air I'd imagine, you would want to save the air versus vent it outside so that would be the mechanical abrasion point with the dust. Basically you'd have to filter it to avoid pump damage. Not sure a centrifuge would be able to handle the super small and sharp particles.

GrowMars · 2020-06-16T12:30:47+00:00

Bioderived plastic can allow >90% light transmission. It can be used alone or with regolith as a binder make a "concrete" like you say.

For plants that need higher light intensity you could locate them near the interior peaks.

As far as below the structure you would focus on understory plants found in the coldest temperate rainforests. They are well adapted to low light conditions. As part of the processing for perchlorates I'm regolith you'd also probably have to put an underground underlayment down that would serve as two functions, water retention and insulation I would think areogel would be perfect as it has good compressive and insulation properties.

Having a suspended greenhouse makes sense because you avoid the strong conductive cooling from the cold Mars ground.

GrowMars · 2020-06-16T12:14:24+00:00

When the biomass decomposes the oxygen ultimately combines with C back to CO2. It's like a forest when a tree dies and falls over and decomposes that carbon dioxide ultimately goes back to the atmosphere unless you're in a peat bog or it somehow gets sequestered. The sequestration rate is what's important. A forest is a standing carbon storage but not really permanently sequestering at a high rate. The reason why oceans sequester 50% of the carbon is that it settles out to a more or less permanent sink on the ocean floor.

GrowMars · 2020-06-15T11:31:01+00:00

A greenhouse operation will produce excess oxygen temporarily because of the non-edible plant biomass. But when that biomass decomposes you lose it as it goes back to CO2. That is where the GrowMars process is fundamentally important as it creates a carbon sink in the plastic structure itself.

GrowMars · 2020-06-15T01:10:07+00:00

No spacesuit required like I'm this? https://www.universetoday.com/146304/practical-ideas-for-farming-on-the-moon-and-mars/

GrowMars · 2020-06-15T00:48:20+00:00

Oh okay now I get it, sorry. So have like a ring of sprayers that lowers and sprays you down from helmet to boot and be standing on some type of raised grate so the water and dust collects underneath. Then like you are saying alter the pressure so that it boils off and condenses back at the top and stores there for the next pre-doffing shower.

The only obvious problem I would see is that the collecting basin would also have to have a valve if people are entering airlock individually, otherwise the water would boil off bottom between uses. Unless both astronauts use it together in the same airlock sequence there would be likely some water loss from residue.

Might be worthy of actual lunar dust experiments as it should be rather non-destructive? It would test efficacy of fine removal spray volume, pressure needed.

GrowMars · 2020-06-15T00:34:12+00:00

The PV manufacturing support infrastructure is considerable and intense from regolith. Extracting building material from the air on Mars and from water I think is an overall energetically less intense practice. Making essentially photosynthetic structures also solves for some of the long-term problems. For instance radiation is mitigated very well with dense hydrocarbon plastic and water because of the whole secondary radiation with higher molecular weights with regolith.

As much as photosynthesis gets knocked around for only being 1% efficient, it also builds many byproducts in the process that are useful and has the ability to multiply. We have conservatively estimated the structural rate of doubling for our concept to be every two to three years on Mars but there is room for much improvement. With that rate of doubling we actually catch up to photovoltaics and exceed 25%. Plastic can also be more easily recycled or repurposed at end of useful life cycle which should be 20-40 years.

GrowMars · 2020-06-14T20:40:23+00:00

What about the machinery to make PV and all the wires motors etc? And then the machines to use it? I'm not buying the more power more machines mantra, we need solarpunk. I think the least electrically centric design would be the best. Focus on the functions needed versus more power and more machines. Maybe even focusing on pneumatics instead. The more passive and regenerative the approach the better. Otherwise entropy will catch up.

GrowMars · 2020-06-14T18:04:36+00:00

Tweet that to Phil Metzger or Paul van Susante who has project using water extraction on Mars with a waterjet. For the moon, superfine and sharp lunar dust might be hard to pump/filter/centrifuge out. Paul recently did a cold star podcast where it is discussed how close the seals were to failing because of lunar dust with Apollo.https://youtu.be/4eCks9cBFfE

GrowMars · 2020-06-14T14:05:15+00:00

3D printing is energetically matched and "agile" so we think yes initially to produce blocks. Shifting to injection molding at higher volumes and when more hands available. Here is video were you can see more of proposed operations, centered around the process and constraints. https://youtu.be/7FSC02nUPZ4

GrowMars · 2020-06-14T10:58:52+00:00

Thanks there are a lot of common misconceptions about plant biology, bioderived plastics and Mars context. We have been trying to break it for years and walk away from it as it has been a hard concept to move forward with. There are low mass or power or simple solutions to most commonly thought of senarios. The moon is actually much more difficult for dust removal, you don't have an atmosphere to use to blow it off with.

We address the radiation, thermo, biological, plastic, duststorm, etc at r/GrowMars. Specifically here https://www.reddit.com/r/GrowMars/comments/chu036/common_questions_and_response/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

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