NASA is considering a commercial proposal for long-term tests of advanced environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) hardware on the International Space Station (ISS), backing up the original station equipment with potentially more reliable life-support gear designed for human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit.
Paragon Space Development Corp., a Tucson, Ariz.-based life support company with roots in the Biosphere 2 closed-system experiment, has briefed station-utilization managers on systems it says can generate oxygen and recycle water without moving parts.
That would be much simpler than the complicated systems keeping station crews alive today, and would provide Paragon’s engineers with a realistic environment for the sort of long-term tests that would give spacecraft designers confidence their ECLSS would function throughout a mission to an asteroid or Mars.
“Here’s a phenomenal opportunity to make the ISS less dependent on Earth, which reduces its operating cost,” Paragon CEO Taber MacCallum says. “In the same way, we need to make a deep-space mission not dependent on Earth.”
Among the technologies Paragon has briefed at NASA headquarters is a device that uses solid oxide electrolysis to generate oxygen from the water vapor and carbon dioxide that astronauts exhale. Another applies rugged industrial membranes already used in difficult terrestrial environments to purify urine and other waste water.
Once the space shuttle stops flying later this year, water will become an even more precious commodity on the station than it already is.
Its waste-water recycling system has suffered mechanical problems with the centrifuge needed to make its distillation process work, requiring its return to Earth for troubleshooting and repairs.
A second system Paragon is pitching to NASA uses a passive Nafion membrane setup to extract clean water from waste, including the brine left behind by the current system.
The company has had two small grants from Johnson Space Center for the water purification work, and additional funding to begin developing a system that can use the approach.
The company has installed industrial membranes in the crew capsule air-handling system it is developing with funds from the first round of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-1) seed-money effort, which it hopes to apply to some of the crew vehicles NASA is helping private companies develop as a way to get crews to the ISS.
The advantage of space station testing is twofold, MacCallum says. The station gets another way to maintain the environment for the crew, and NASA gets a long-term test of the kind of systems it will need for deep-space human exploration.
In those missions the crew cannot send failed hardware back to Earth for repairs, so the simpler and more reliable the system is, the better.
With the station scheduled to operate at least through 2020, that will allow plenty of time for the extra-long-duration testing MacCallum says will be needed to validate deep-space ECLSS.
“Just as we qualify a structure to higher levels than we operate a structure, we need to qualify our life support system to a longer duration than we plan to operate that life support system,” he says, suggesting that ECLSS hardware should be run at least 1.5 times as long as it will be operated on a human mission beyond LEO.
The idea is “absolutely” an appropriate use of the space station, says Mark Uhran, assistant associate administrator for the ISS at NASA headquarters. “Advancing the ECLSS system is very high on our agenda, and [the] space station is a perfect place to do a next-generation test,” he says.
The U.S. space agency has long considered the ISS a testbed for the technologies that will be needed for deep-space exploration, and is studying using it temporarily in the summer of 2012 as a full-scale analog of an exploration vehicle on the way to Mars or another distant destination.
Paragon Space Development Corp., a Tucson, Ariz.-based life support company with roots in the Biosphere 2 closed-system experiment, has briefed station-utilization managers on systems it says can generate oxygen and recycle water without moving parts.
That would be much simpler than the complicated systems keeping station crews alive today, and would provide Paragon’s engineers with a realistic environment for the sort of long-term tests that would give spacecraft designers confidence their ECLSS would function throughout a mission to an asteroid or Mars.
“Here’s a phenomenal opportunity to make the ISS less dependent on Earth, which reduces its operating cost,” Paragon CEO Taber MacCallum says. “In the same way, we need to make a deep-space mission not dependent on Earth.”
Among the technologies Paragon has briefed at NASA headquarters is a device that uses solid oxide electrolysis to generate oxygen from the water vapor and carbon dioxide that astronauts exhale. Another applies rugged industrial membranes already used in difficult terrestrial environments to purify urine and other waste water.
Once the space shuttle stops flying later this year, water will become an even more precious commodity on the station than it already is.
Its waste-water recycling system has suffered mechanical problems with the centrifuge needed to make its distillation process work, requiring its return to Earth for troubleshooting and repairs.
A second system Paragon is pitching to NASA uses a passive Nafion membrane setup to extract clean water from waste, including the brine left behind by the current system.
The company has had two small grants from Johnson Space Center for the water purification work, and additional funding to begin developing a system that can use the approach.
The company has installed industrial membranes in the crew capsule air-handling system it is developing with funds from the first round of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-1) seed-money effort, which it hopes to apply to some of the crew vehicles NASA is helping private companies develop as a way to get crews to the ISS.
The advantage of space station testing is twofold, MacCallum says. The station gets another way to maintain the environment for the crew, and NASA gets a long-term test of the kind of systems it will need for deep-space human exploration.
In those missions the crew cannot send failed hardware back to Earth for repairs, so the simpler and more reliable the system is, the better.
With the station scheduled to operate at least through 2020, that will allow plenty of time for the extra-long-duration testing MacCallum says will be needed to validate deep-space ECLSS.
“Just as we qualify a structure to higher levels than we operate a structure, we need to qualify our life support system to a longer duration than we plan to operate that life support system,” he says, suggesting that ECLSS hardware should be run at least 1.5 times as long as it will be operated on a human mission beyond LEO.
The idea is “absolutely” an appropriate use of the space station, says Mark Uhran, assistant associate administrator for the ISS at NASA headquarters. “Advancing the ECLSS system is very high on our agenda, and [the] space station is a perfect place to do a next-generation test,” he says.
The U.S. space agency has long considered the ISS a testbed for the technologies that will be needed for deep-space exploration, and is studying using it temporarily in the summer of 2012 as a full-scale analog of an exploration vehicle on the way to Mars or another distant destination.