Biosphere stuff is more fundamental than just mass. We had several closed ecosystem projects built on the ground out of concrete, with no mass limits, and all of them failed.
A habitat on Mars would certainly not be closed ecosystem, especially not in the beginning. The biggest issue at biosphere IIRC was CO2 poisoning. You can crack the air in a mars habitat with power and in the worst case find Martian resources that will do some advantageous chemistries
The ISS is taking regular deliveries of food, water, and air. Is very much not self-sufficient or closed-cycle. It's also pretty small in volume and really close to home, with evacuation readily available.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 13:25 UTC ·
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Mars early on will also not be closed cycle. It's going to be prepping for a 2 year journey (probably ideally 4 if possible, for when things inevitably go wrong) and gradually consuming those supplies. Unlike the ISS there are vast usable resources on Mars for things like water, but again I think the goal will be to be fully non-sufficient, to help reduce the chances of the first trip being a one-way journey.
Things to notice: it's undergoing yearly upgrades despite NASA having literally decades of experience in this. They still hold a contingency reserve of 8OOL, despite being hours from the ground and being able to evacuate almost any time.
SpaceX has zero experience managing the water cycle even when it's measured in months, much less years, with spares and help many months away in the very best case. They show zero effort trying to acquire such experience.
Let's be real: at this point, Mars for Musk is about as much of a goal as Hyperloop. If we look at actions, not mere words, his goal looks much more like yeeting more GPUs into orbit as a "biological bootloader" [1] than colonising Mars. That's not even touching the fact that SpaceX is now a public company, has a duty for its shareholders, and colonising Mars is a strictly cash-negative enterprise.
Bad engineering, too many uncontrolled variables and roundabout solutions. Just solve the problems directly. Make the air, scrub the CO2, grow only food. The solution looks like a (light weight) nuclear submarine not a greenhouse.
Biosphere 2 was hippie gobbledygook.
"The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991.[15] Bass and Allen had met in the 1970s at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture community led by Allen, who advocated Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept and explored the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters such as nuclear war.[15] Several other former members of Synergia Ranch also joined the Biosphere 2 project"[0]
"Synergia Ranch is an ecovillage founded in 1969 by John P. Allen"[1]
Ed Bass inherited $2.8 million when he was a teenager from his great uncle who made his money in oil production, he's currently chairman of an investment and venture-capital management firm. In between he hung out with a bunch of hippies.[2] Just your typical nepo-boomer arc.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:40 UTC ·
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More likely than growing food will be bringing a couple of years of food with you, and having growth be only for proof of concept experiments (well and some freshness if it works out).
I'm looking forward to SpaceX demonstrating good engineering for a life support system that's capable of running for months on a reasonable mass budget. Except they aren't doing that, are they?
Saying how you imagine a solution would look like is cheap, figuring out an actual system is expensive and slow. Hell, just very basic things like extracting water from urine is actually difficult (organic matter forms a tar of sorts and gunks up machinery) and in the past unforeseen problems did pop up (amount of calcium in urine from disintegrating bones was a problem and didn't show up until in-orbit testing).
Musk is observably not doing things that Mars colonisation would require.
Being able to sustain life for months and years is "underwear", not an afterthought. In fact, I won't be surprised if achieving a reasonable level of life support will take much longer than developing propulsion.
Wasn’t that the one Steve Bannon was involved in, of all people?
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Biosphere 2, just the fact that you won’t be getting a resupply on short notice.
The problem is that Mars is 6-12 months away depending on launch window, at least with current rockets. If something goes wrong you must be able to respond locally and at least survive. The Moon is 3 days away (ish) and LEO is hours away (including time to align and dock).
If you want to send people to Mars you need to build a Mars sim on Earth and actually test your life support systems.
Early mars will likely be robotics, any humans will be going there to die and will volunteer for it. By the time those humans do go, trips to and landing on Mars will be old hat, providing a steady stream of supplies will mean it’s less of a self-reliance biodome situation than some imagine.
Things to notice: it's undergoing yearly upgrades despite NASA having literally decades of experience in this. They still hold a contingency reserve of 8OOL, despite being hours from the ground and being able to evacuate almost any time.
SpaceX has zero experience managing the water cycle even when it's measured in months, much less years, with spares and help many months away in the very best case. They show zero effort trying to acquire such experience.
Let's be real: at this point, Mars for Musk is about as much of a goal as Hyperloop. If we look at actions, not mere words, his goal looks much more like yeeting more GPUs into orbit as a "biological bootloader" [1] than colonising Mars. That's not even touching the fact that SpaceX is now a public company, has a duty for its shareholders, and colonising Mars is a strictly cash-negative enterprise.
[1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2106906678293606496
Biosphere 2 was hippie gobbledygook.
"The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991.[15] Bass and Allen had met in the 1970s at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture community led by Allen, who advocated Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept and explored the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters such as nuclear war.[15] Several other former members of Synergia Ranch also joined the Biosphere 2 project"[0]
"Synergia Ranch is an ecovillage founded in 1969 by John P. Allen"[1]
Ed Bass inherited $2.8 million when he was a teenager from his great uncle who made his money in oil production, he's currently chairman of an investment and venture-capital management firm. In between he hung out with a bunch of hippies.[2] Just your typical nepo-boomer arc.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergia_Ranch
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bass
Saying how you imagine a solution would look like is cheap, figuring out an actual system is expensive and slow. Hell, just very basic things like extracting water from urine is actually difficult (organic matter forms a tar of sorts and gunks up machinery) and in the past unforeseen problems did pop up (amount of calcium in urine from disintegrating bones was a problem and didn't show up until in-orbit testing).
Musk is observably not doing things that Mars colonisation would require.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Biosphere 2, just the fact that you won’t be getting a resupply on short notice.
The problem is that Mars is 6-12 months away depending on launch window, at least with current rockets. If something goes wrong you must be able to respond locally and at least survive. The Moon is 3 days away (ish) and LEO is hours away (including time to align and dock).
If you want to send people to Mars you need to build a Mars sim on Earth and actually test your life support systems.