The desire for space exploration of humans
has been raised thousands of years ago
and never faded...
Now, we finally have the chance to go beyond the Earth and possibly settle on other planets. And Mars is a reasonable first step in our exploration of space.
To ensure the long-term survival and development of humans on Mars, a sustainable supply of nutrients is vital.
On the Earth, the sustainable supply of nutrients
could be achieved in two existing ways:
However, would the above ways be workable when
situation changes to human's early settlement on Mars?
On Mars or other alien planets, our home Earth is the only place we can transport supplies from. After research, we found that transporting from Earth faces plenty of problems such as long transport cycles, high costs, and high losses. Obviously, this way is far from feasible.
But trying to grow crops on Mars to achieve local production seems not ideal, either. High soil toxicity would make plants difficult to survive and inedible; Low energy utilization and long harvest cycles would also result in extremely inefficient nutrient production.
Because of its easy culture, rapid production, low cost, and high energy utilization, we made microbial production our best choice to produce nutrient production on Mars.
Simple culture
Low cost
Rapid production
High energy utilization
Referring to the pattern of plant production of organic matter through photosynthesis, the idea of using a system of microbial symbiosis and cooperation to achieve food production was born. This is how Mini Bioproduction Circle System on Mars base (MBCS-Mars) comes about.
The engineered E. coli chassis is now capable of producing more than just a variety of nutrients. What MBCS can do is more than just food production, but also drug supplements, building materials production, and so on.
One day, we hope that our MBCS will become a custom- multifunction production platform to support more space exploration.
