A 25-person life support system based on rice cultivation. Dual-purpose cylinders operated out-of-phase provide steady gas exchange. Predictability over efficiency.
Life support for long-duration spaceflight or isolated terrestrial installations demands oxygen generation, food production, and waste cycling that does not depend on resupply. Most architectures optimize for theoretical efficiency, which produces fragile systems that fail at the boundary cases. The 25-person crew scale is large enough to be operationally meaningful and small enough to permit redundancy.
A life support system based on controlled agriculture. The architecture prioritizes predictability and redundancy over theoretical efficiency, using rice cultivation as the primary oxygen-generation engine and implementing comprehensive materials cycling to minimize resupply.
"Boring = safe. The architecture favors proven techniques over optimization."
Dual-purpose rice cylinders (oxygen generation + caloric yield) are operated out-of-phase for steady gas exchange. The rice plant is well-characterized, photosynthetically dense, and produces food humans recognize as food — important for long-duration psychological reasons.
Comprehensive water, nitrogen, and carbon cycling. Failure modes mapped per loop. Redundancy at the cylinder level, not the plant level — losing a cylinder reduces capacity rather than eliminating function.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Crew | 25 |
| Primary O₂ engine | Rice cylinders, out-of-phase |
| Design philosophy | "Boring = safe" |
| Resupply requirement | Minimized via materials cycling |
| Documentation | Complete conceptual design |
Complete conceptual design with mass/energy budgets, crop schedules, and failure-mode analysis. Next step: scaled cylinder pilot for the gas-exchange phase characterization.