Keep a crew alive with a living habitat
On Mars there's no resupply run. A Bioregenerative Life-Support System (BLSS) closes the loop — plants and machines recycle air, water, and food so the colony sustains itself. Learn how it works, then run the model.
What is a bioregenerative life-support system?
A habitat on the Moon or Mars has to provide every life-support function — breathable air, clean water, and food — with almost no resupply from Earth. The answer is a regenerative, closed-loop system: crew breathe out CO₂ and produce waste; crops take up that CO₂, transpire water, and grow food while releasing O₂; chemical systems scrub, split, and recycle what's left. The tighter the loop, the less mass you must launch — and launch mass is the dominant cost of any space mission.
This page is built on the BioSim model (Kortenkamp & Bell, TRACLabs / NASA), a simulation of an integrated habitat and its life-support modules that AI-research groups use to study how to design and control these systems. Your BioSim Astrobotany branch extends it for plant-focused (astrobotany) scenarios.
The modules that keep the loop closed
BioSim models the habitat as interacting process modules — each consumes some resources and produces others.
Crew
Consume O₂, water, and food; produce CO₂, waste water, and solid waste. Rates depend on crew size and activity (sleep, work, EVA).
Air revitalization
Scrubs CO₂ from the cabin (VCCR), reacts it with H₂ to reclaim water (CRS), then splits water back into O₂ (OGS).
Water recovery
Turns dirty and grey water back into potable water, recovering condensate from crew and crop transpiration.
Biomass / crops
Nine+ crops (wheat, potato, soybean, lettuce, tomato…) take up CO₂ and water and light, releasing O₂ and growing edible food.
Power
Solar (variable) or nuclear (steady) supplies every module. Lighting a big crop area is a major power — and mass — cost.
Stores
Buffers of O₂, water, and food absorb the day-to-day imbalance. Bigger buffers are safer but add launch mass.
↗ Open the BioSim GUI full-screen ⚙ AstroBotany BioSim source
Design habitats & optimise them — in the AIRI course
🎓 Hands-on habitat design (AIRI course)
Want to design your own closed-loop habitat and put numbers on the trade-offs? That's a module in the AIRI course — an interactive sandbox (tuned to NASA BVAD and Wheeler/SIMOC crop data) where you size crew, crop area, crop mix, and recycling efficiency, then watch the reserves and the Equivalent System Mass (ESM).
🤖 Machine-learning optimisation
Each habitat design is a labelled data point — configuration in, outcome (sustainable? mission length? system mass?) out. That's exactly the setup the BioSim paper uses genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning for: searching a huge design space to minimise ESM while keeping the crew alive. In AIRI, students pit a machine-learning optimiser against their best human design.
🎲 In the game
On the Settlers of Mars board, BLSS is the science under the "Living on Mars" turn — the Farmer & Scientist sizes the farm and life support, and the whole crew lives or dies by the result.