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.
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.