Continued

The major focus areas covered by the ALS NSCORT include developing efficient treatment and resource-recovery options for solid, liquid, and gaseous human, crop, and food-process wastes, effective food-processing and food-safety-testing procedures, low-energy crop-production technologies, and global systems-analysis procedures. The NSCORT emphasizes technologies that leverage the energy-saving advantages of enzymatic, especially microbiological, biomass transformations. Research challenges include optimizing conditions for biomass conversions to occur rapidly enough so that biological processes can be competitive with physico-chemical approaches.

The ideal advanced life-support system for a planetary habitat would be 100% closed with respect to mass, doesn?t leak gases, and would have adequate external energy available to power the particular suite of life-support technologies deployed for a given mission. However, in situ resources, where and when available, likely will be important to leverage for certain missions in terms of modeling and eventually testing different combinations of life-support technology. All such considerations are being factored by the NSCORT into the selection of candidate technologies to evaluate at the project level. Individual laboratories specializing in sub-system technologies are working closely with the systems-analysis team to determine the inputs and outputs of candidate technologies for each sub-system and how those inputs and outputs will affect the stability and robustness of the overall life-support system. A major contribution of the NSCORT will be new information on the costs and efficiencies of different technologies for efficiently creating biomass from carbon dioxide, for efficiently transforming edible biomass to food, for extending harvest index by transforming non-edible biomass to edible biomass, and for efficiently cycling non-edible biomass back to renewable resources, including carbon dioxide. The costs of new and different ways for reclaiming dirty air and water and returning them to purities acceptable for human consumption within a closed system also are investigated by the Center.

A second important mission of the ALS NSCORT is to train a cadre of multi-disciplinary technologists and thinkers who will become part of the new age of ALS researchers to develop the first independent, closed, life-support systems for testing on Earth, and later for deployment on the moon and Mars. The value of graduate students and post docs collaborating outside their specific disciplines of training to synergistically create new technologies not possible within their separate disciplines will have immeasurable value in realizing the goals of ALS, and will create a generation of researchers who never again will feel constrained to think exclusively within the box of their disciplinary training! Their future careers as civil servants or government contractors working directly for NASA to implement the first space-deployed ALS, or as university PIs funded by NASA to research the next generation of ALS technologies, will ensure a continuum of ALS brainpower and leadership for the future! The Center is developing a multi-disciplinary distance-education ALS course to be offered by the Partners during year 2 of operations to foster development of that new breed of researcher.

There are people in the world today who see every aspect of the space program as a colossal waste of public resources. A few such detractors are politically vocal and some even attempt to embarrass NASA. They ignore the many Earth benefits and spinoffs of NASA programs that already have improved the quality of life on Earth, not to mention the promise of things to come. In more than 27 years of working in NASA space life science programs, I have noticed a major grassroots appeal of the CELSS and ALS concepts to the general public. Anything that has implications for cleaning up Earth?s environment, for recovering resources from waste materials, for the production of healthful, safe food without pesticides, for hydroponics and productive controlled environment agriculture, and especially for the combination of all these things under a single roof pushes a magic button that captivates public imagination and attention in a very positive way! ALS in particular encompasses multiple concepts that project hope for the future that the public is quick to embrace, and its story may be the very best emissary of NASA to the tax-paying, voting public! Children and adults alike thrill to the concept of a system that is materially closed but energetically open sustaining human life independent of resupply on some foreboding planetary destination millions of miles from home. ALS is a microcosm of Earth?s recycling environment, although a much smaller version that does not have the benefit of oceanic or atmospheric ?buffers? or the time luxury of self-regulating ecosystems. In order to achieve system sustainability and stability, rapid, dynamic regulation and control of component processes is required, and to the extent that they grasp this concept, the public is enthralled by possibilities for ?intelligent control? of the human living environment. The NSCORT Outreach and Education Program finds the ALS concept to be an ?easy-selling?, appealing topic for K-12 and adult audiences alike. Teachers find the normally problematic attention span of fourth and fifth graders to rivet on ALS topics for unprecedented periods of time. Great potential exists for developing entire educational curricula around ALS-theme-based approaches to learning fundamentals in virtually all fields and especially those crossing disciplinary boundaries. The E & O program finds adult audiences to be more receptive to NASA in general following exposure to ALS presentations by NSCORT personnel. A listing of first-year outreach activities is summarized in the document that follows.

The ALS story will play a pivotal role in sustaining NASA?s constituent support base for future Congressional appropriations for the nation?s space program. The ALS NSCORT is thrilled to be part of this important program and looks forward to contributing to this exciting team effort in collaboration with the entire ALS community.

Best wishes,

Cary A. Mitchell, Director
ALS NSCORT