NASA Funds Research on using Fungi to Make Soil for Space Habitats
NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I Award
Funding: up to $125,000
Study Period: 9 months
Making Soil for Space Habitats by Seeding Asteroids with Fungi
Jane Shevtsov
Trans Astronautica Corporation
Lake View Terrace, Calif.
Synopsis
Background and Objectives: Any large, long-term human space habitat will need to grow most of its own food and recycle nutrients. For easily resupplied missions, growing crops hydroponically makes sense, but soil-based systems possess important advantages in the context of a large settlement that cannot be affordably resupplied from Earth.
One proposed habitat design is a cylinder that rotates to create artificial gravity and houses up to 8,000 people, for purposes such as asteroid mining, space manufacturing and research. This habitat is meant to be self-sustaining with regards to food and have ample green space, which both supports crew mental health and functions as part of the life support system.
At this scale, hydroponics would run into difficulties with the amount of machinery needed and the concomitant proliferation of failure points such as pumps and tubing. Moreover, hydroponic systems require nutrient solutions and do not easily lend themselves to the recycling of agricultural and human waste, which is readily accomplished in a soil-based system through composting the waste (possibly using thermophilic methods that are effective at killing pathogens) and incorporating it into soil.
Instead, we propose to create soil from carbon-rich asteroid material, using fungi to physically break down the material and chemically degrade toxic substances. We will use fungi to help turn asteroid material into soil. The basic idea is to inoculate carbonaceous asteroid material with fungi to initiate soil formation.
Fungi are excellent at breaking down complex organic molecules, including those toxic to other life forms. For example, oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) have been shown to successfully clean up petroleum contaminated soil by digesting the hydrocarbons making up the petroleum.
Fungal hyphae can penetrate long distances into cracks and exert large amounts of pressure, physically breaking down rock – some even live inside rocks. Indeed, evidence indicates that fungi played a key role in early soil formation on Earth.
Approach: Two tasks would be performed during Phase 1. Task 1 will be to identify the leading fungal species for experimental use on simulated asteroid material, followed by study of their soil production rates and the effects of physical parameters such as temperature, humidity and oxygen concentration.
Task 2 will be to evaluate a number of different approaches for performing the breakdown of asteroid regolith by fungi in space – ranking them in terms of productivity and estimated costs, as well as sizing them to support a target mission habitat within a reasonable amount of time.
Significance: The research proposed here will support efforts to develop large space habitats with ample green space and robust agricultural systems. These will then open the door to other activities, such as space mining, manufacturing, and scientific research.
While an expandable habitat can support many types of activities, our soil-making process is a particularly natural fit for asteroid mining operations targeting volatiles, as they use carbonaceous asteroids and leave behind leftover regolith that should make a suitable parent material for soil production.
Our method turns this leftover regolith into a valuable resource. This concept should be exciting to everyone working on off-planet habitats and their applications – a major part of the move toward space commercialization and, in a larger sense, becoming a space-faring species.
About NIAC
The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program nurtures visionary ideas that could transform future NASA missions with the creation of breakthroughs — radically better or entirely new aerospace concepts — while engaging America’s innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in the journey.
The program seeks innovations from diverse and non-traditional sources and NIAC projects study innovative, technically credible, advanced concepts that could one day “change the possible” in aerospace. If you’re interested in submitting a proposal to NIAC, please see our “Apply to NIAC” link (https://www.nasa.gov/content/apply-to-niac) for information about the status of our current NASA Research Announcement (NRA). For descriptions of current NIAC projects, please refer to our ”NIAC Studies” link (https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/NIAC_funded_studies.html).
To find out more, see nasa.gov/niac or contact us at [email protected].
21 responses to “NASA Funds Research on using Fungi to Make Soil for Space Habitats”
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There is a number that nobody has pinned down yet concerning Bernal Sphere size. The question being exactly how big can they be mass-produced efficiently. How many miles in diameter?
I would speculate with a lunar titanium alloy and half-domes lifted from the lunar surface using nuclear pulse devices, that spheres at least a couple miles in diameter are likely. More would be ideal.
Far easier to toss lunar-smelted metal into lunar orbit with a linear mass driver or a centrifuge and do all the fabrication there. The structures wouldn’t have to deal with either lunar surface gravity or the accelerations of a nuclear pulse launch.
You’d probably form it into the shapes you want to use for structural material on the habitats first on the lunar surface, so you don’t have to go the added expense needed for rotating forges in microgravity.
He is disagreeing with anything I post to harass me. He has replied to every single post I have made in the last couple days with a negative reply- designed to drive me away. I said something that touched a nerve. It was probably my post about Trump and Musk fanboys being so similar (he is both and thus doubly disturbed). He is a cyberthug, plain and simple. Not commenting about space, commenting about me.
A disgusting creep gleefully doing what disgusting creeps like him can only do anonymously on the internet. A coward, a sick mind; I expose him and
his cult and he is driven to reply. Like a broken machine. That he is spending so much time doing nothing but denigrating me proves what a borderline sociopath he is, like so many of the Trump/Musk worshipers.
I’d like to start the Cult of Richard Seaton. All hail your eternal font of magnificent wisdom.
I would like Messier to start banning the trolls. Unfortunately several forums like America Space and Spaceflight insider, have become deserts with little conversation, one was shutdown due to legal action threatened by Coastal Ron, and several others now have Musk fanboys as moderators and they simply ban anyone that says anything anti-musk. The Cult of Musk is a cancer.
I haven’t looked at Spaceflight Insider in years. If it has turned into a pro-Musk forum in the interim that would be quite a switch. It used to be almost as big an Amen corner for SLS as you are.
Musk fanboys are a cancer on space forums. They bully and poison every well. Disgusting creeps. Your gang is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. Many Trumpists among the fanboys also, like you. What a cesspool. Where there were hundreds of people commenting and expressing different views a decade ago, they are now all gone- driven away in disgust. Like I said, the spacex fan club is nothing but disgusting libertarian cultists. They have hijacked all public discourse on space.
Recruiting is likely to be a challenge. Gary is way too cranky to make a very plausible cult guru – though I must admit he’s got the necessary self-absorption down pat.
Just block him then.
I blocked over 50 of them at one time. They just keep on endlessly replying to my comments…long strings of disgusting insults. Better to just tell it like it is.
And Gary is constitutionally incapable of resisting the urge to peek once he “blocks” anyone.
That’s funny. When I block people they become almost invisible except for in the replies by others.
Funny to you….riiiiight.
Not blocking anyone anymore. I explained I am going to just say what you and your gang of toxic thugs are. And your disgusting dog whistling proves everything I say is true.
I, quite obviously, was not commenting about you, Gary, I was commenting about the content of your comment.
I found no fault with your first paragraph.
In your second, of course, you gave into your frequent temptation to boost the idea of nuclear pulse propulsion even when it fits the job to be done about as well as sweatsocks fit a rooster.
As many times as we all call you out on your various obsessions, you never seem to get that you sound like a crankier version of Ralphie in A Christmas Story telling his parents and younger brother that his friend Flick reported seeing grizzly bears out behind the neighborhood store.
You also never seem to get that a rationally-stated disagreement with one of your pet ideas is not equivalent to a personal attack, never mind an insult.
“-you sound like a crankier version of Ralphie in A Christmas Story-“
“-you also never seem to get that a rationally-stated disagreement with one of your pet ideas is not equivalent to a personal attack-“
Riiiiiight.
Too bulky and unwieldy to launch at high-G that way – it’d bend. Easier to send it up as tight rolls of metal strip, then use machines with forming rollers, robot arms and end-effectors to make structure parts and assemblies in zero-G. No forging required.
This is some long overdue research, not just for asteroids but for the needs of Moon and Mars habitats.
That’s pretty awesome to imagine, taking carbonaceous asteroid material and covering it with fungi under the right ambient conditions to have them break it down into useful soil. Makes me wonder if we could go even further and engineer species of them to grab and store useful metals in the fungi as well while they’re doing it.
I didn’t think about it, but they’re right that hydroponics becomes a really complex beast when it comes to doing it on a large scale for thousands of people. It could make a lot more sense just to accept the extra mass and go with created soil for agriculture, if it let you have a much simpler system.
Especially if the “soil” can be created via ISRU.
As is not infrequently the case with new developments in space settlement, I am reminded of the late, great Robert A. Heinlein – specifically his novel Farmer in the Sky about the terraforming of Ganymede. The colonists have to make soil by crushing native rock to sand and powder, then mixing in a biological culture plus organic garbage in small pilot plots, then slowly merge these across the initially lifeless parts. One of the new colony’s chronic complainers launches into a rant, at one point, about how this making soil stuff is all nonsense and what the authorities really need to do is ship in a yard-thick blanket of Missisippi Delta mud to cover the whole moon.