Editors Note: This post is a summary of a presentation by Marshall Martin that was accepted by the Mars Society for their conference that took place August 8 – 11th in Seattle, Washington. Marshall was not able to attend but he gave me permission to publish this distillation of his talk. There are minor edits made to the original text with his permission. Marshall is an accomplished Software Engineer with decades of experience managing multiple high tech projects. He has Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics and Physics from Northwestern Oklahoma State University and an MBA in Management of Information Systems from Oklahoma City University. He is currently retired and farms with his in-laws in Renfrow, Oklahoma. The views expressed by Marshall in this post are his own.
The Earth is a Biosphere supporting life which has evolved and thrived on sunlight as an energy source for more than 3.4 billion years.
Therefore!
You would think a few smart humans could reverse engineer a small biosphere that would allow life to exist in deep space on only sunlight.
Furthermore, eventually the sun will run short of hydrogen and transition into a red giant making the Earth uninhabitable in a few hundred mission years. Long before that time, we need to have moved into biospheres in space growing crops for food. But for now….
The cost of food in space (when launched from Earth) is too high. My Estimates: [1,2]
| Launch Vehicle/Mission | Cost/pound (USD) | Cost/Person/Day* (USD) |
| Space Shuttle to ISS | $10,000 | $50,000 |
| Falcon 9 to ISS | $1134 | $5670 |
| Atlas V [3] to Mars (Perseverance[4] Mars Rover) | >$100,000 | $500,000 |
| 2 year mission to Mars based on Atlas V costs | >$100,000 | $365,000,000 |
If we assume that the SpaceX Starship will reduce launch costs to Mars by at least two orders of magnitude, the cost/person/day for a two year mission would still exceed $3 million dollars.
Solution: farming in space
Starting with a rough estimate, i.e. a SWAG (Scientific wild-ass guestimate): – A space station farm sized at 1 acre producing 120 bushels per acre of wheat, 60 pounds per bushel, 4 crops per year, yields 28,000 pounds of wheat per year. Using Falcon 9 launch costs, this produces a crop valued at $31.7M per year. If your space farm is good for 50 years, the crops would be worth $1.585B when compared to an equivalent amount of food boosted from Earth at current launch costs.
SWAG #2 – I believe a space farm of this size can be built using the von Braun “Wet Workshop” approach applied to a spin gravity space station composed of several Starship upper stages at a projected cost of $513M. More on that later.
Do we know how to build a space farm? NO!
So how do we get there?
Biosphere X would be the next generation of ground-based Biospheres. You may consider the original Biosphere 2[5] as the first prototype. As an initial SWAG, it was marginally successful. As the design basis of a working space farm, it is nowhere close.
Biosphere Y will be placed in Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO) and will be based on the best iteration of Biosphere X.
Biosphere Z will be a radiation hardened version of Biosphere Y for deep space operations.
Key Metrics:
People per acre is an important metric. Knowing how many people are going to be on a space station or spaceship will imply the size of the farming operations required. [6]
Labor per acre is important. It determines how many farm workers are needed to feed the space population (assuming there will be no automation of farm operations). Note: every American farmer feeds about 100 people. Obviously, if it takes 11 farmers to support 10 people in the biosphere, that is a failure. If it takes 2 farmers to support 10 people that implies that 8 workers are available to work on important space projects. Like building the next biosphere that is bigger and better.
Cost per acre will be the major cost of supporting a person in space. There will be a huge effort to reduce the cost of space farmland.
Water per acre required to grow the crops. Since there is a metric for people per acre, the water per acre would include the water in the sewage system. I would think the water for fish farming would be separate or an option.
Soil per acre is literally the amount of dirt needed in tons. This gets fun. Will Biosphere X use hydroponics, aeroponics, light weight dirt, or high quality top-soil? It could be just standard sandy loam. The quality of the soil will have a big impact on what crops can be grown, which in turn, has a big impact on People per acre.
Watts per acre is the power required to operate a farm. Another major cost of food grown in space. Direct sunlight should be very cheap via windows, at least for biospheres in ELEO. In deep space far removed from the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, radiation would pose a problem for windows unless some sort of angled mirror configuration could be used to reflect sunlight adjacently. Electricity from solar panels has been proven by ISS. Power from a small modular nuclear reactors might be a great backup power for the first orbiting biosphere. Note, diesel fuel would be extremely expensive and emissions would cause pollution to the biosphere in space; that implies, farming would be done using electrical equipment.
Improvements based on the Biosphere 2 experience to make a successful Biosphere X:
- Updated computers for: better design, data collection, environmental control systems, subsystem module metrics, communication.
- Oxygen production: Greenfluidics[7] (algae farm subsystem)
- Improved windows: 2DPA-1 polycarbonate[8] vs. ISS windows[9]
- Robots vs. manual labor. (and better tools)
- Soil vs. regolith vs. aeroponics vs. hydroponics vs. ??
- Improved animal and plant selections
Cost of a Biosphere X compared with other ground-based facilities:
| Facility | Area (Acres) | Cost (USD) |
| Biosphere 2 | 3.14 | $150M[12] |
| Regional Mall | 5.7 | $75M [13] |
| Walmart | 0.22 | $2.5M |
| Biosphere X | 1.0 | $10M Special building issues – SWAG: $20M |
Biosphere X design options:
- Crops: Wheat, Oats, Barley, Rye, Corn, Rice, Milo, Buckwheat, Potato, …
- Animals: Fish, Goats, Chickens, Sheep, “Beyond Meat”, cultured meat …
- Insects: Honeybees, edible Insects, Meal worms, Butterflies, …
- Humans: I suggest 2 men & 2 women and work up from there.
- Remote ground support: start big and reduce as fast as possible, goal = zero.
Testing Biosphere X:
Can a team live in the biosphere for two years? (See Biosphere 2 test which was 2 years, i.e. a round trip to Mars and back) How much food was produced? Debug the biosphere. Make upgrades and repeat the tests. Calculate Mean Time to Failure (MTTF), Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), system flexibility, cost of operations, farming metrics (see above). etc.
With enough debugging, Biosphere X will become a comfortable habitat for humans of all ages. This will include old people, children, and perhaps babies. I think a few babies should be born in a Biosphere X (e.g. a few dozen?) before proceeding to Biosphere Y. Obviously, it may be challenging to find motivated families willing to make the generational commitment for long term testing required to realize this noble goal of space settlement. Alternatively, testing of Biosphere X could be simplified and shortened by skipping having babies, deferring this step to the next stage.
Biosphere Y potential configuration:
Once a reasonably well designed Biosphere X has been tested it will be time to build a Biosphere Y. This will require figuring out how to launch and build the first one – not easily done! Let’s posit a reasonably feasible design using orbital spacecraft on the near-term horizon namely, the SpaceX Starship. Using nine upper stages with some modifications to provide spin gravity, sufficient volume could be placed in ELEO for a one acre space farm. Here’s one idea on what it would look like:
A central hub which we will call the 0G module will be composed of three Starship upper stages. Since they would not be returning to Earth, they would not need heat shield tiles, the aerodynamic steerage flaps, nor the three landing rockets. Also, there would not be a need for reserve fuel for landing. These weight reductions would allow the engineers to expand Starship and/or make more built-in structure and/or carry more startup supplies.
We will assume the current length of 165 feet with a 30 foot diameter. Three units placed nose-to-tail make 495 feet. But internally there would be 3 workspaces per unit: Oxygen tank, methane tank, and crew cabin. Times three units makes 9 chambers for zero gravity research.
The three units are connected forward and aft by docking hatches. Since the return to Earth engines have been deleted, the header tanks in the nose of Starship (the purpose of which is to offset the weight of the engines) would be eliminated allowing a docking port to be installed in front. In addition, with the 3 landing engines eliminated, there should be room for a tail end docking port. This will allow crew to move between the three Starship units in the 0G hub.
An aside: I am assuming that the nose of the station is always pointing towards the sun. The header tanks in the nose of the first unit could be retained and filled with water to provide radiation shielding to block solar particle events for the trailing units.
The 0G-units will need access ports on each of their sides to allow a pressurized access and structural support tube extending out to the 1G-units located at 100 meters on either side of the hub. This distance is calculated using Theodore W. Hall’s SpinCalc artificial gravity calculator with a spin rate of 3 rpm. There would be three access tubes extending out to connect to each of the 3 Starship 1G units. I assume the standard Starship has an access door which can be modified to connect to the tube.
One or more standard Starships would deliver supplies and construction materials. They would also collect the three Raptor engines from each modified unit (36 in total) for return to Earth.
I note that the engineering modifications, methods and funding for operations in space to construct Biosphere Y have yet to be determined. However, applying a SWAG for launching the primary hardware to LEO:
This would require 18 starship missions. Using Brian Wang’s estimates of $37M per Starship[21] we get the following cost:
9 Starships times $37M per starship = $333M
18 Starship launches times $10M per launch = $180M
Total SWAG cost: $513M
What’s on the inside?
As mentioned previously, the interior of Biosphere Y will be a Wet Workshop utilizing the empty oxygen and methane tanks in addition to the payload bay volume (roughly 60ft + 39ft + 56ft long, respectively, based on estimates from Wikipedia), for a total length of 155 feet by 30 feet wide for each individual Starship unit. With six 1G Starship units this amounts to about 657, 000 cubic feet of usable volume for our space farm experiencing normal gravity and its associated support equipment (half that for the 0G hub).
Note: Biosphere Y is designed to be placed in Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO). This orbit is below the Van Allen belts where solar particle events and galactic cosmic ray radiation are reasonably low due to Earth’s protective magnetic field.
Since the first Biosphere Y will spin to produce 1G, eventually experiments will need to be performed to determine the complete Gravity Prescription[12, 13]: 1/2g, 1/3g, 1/6g and maybe lower. You would think this would be required before trying to establish a permanent colony on the Moon and/or Mars in which children will be born. This will probably require several iterations of Biosphere Y space stations to fine tune the optimum mix of plants, animals, and bio-systems.
What other things can be done with a Biosphere Y?
- Replace International Space Station
- Astronomy
- Space Force bases in orbit
- Repair satellites
- Fueling station
- De-orbit space junk
- Assemble much larger satellites from kits (cuts cost)
- Lunar material processing station
- Families including children and babies[13] in space
Biosphere Z:
Once Biosphere Y is proven, it is ready to be radiation hardened to make a Biosphere Z. I assume the radiation hardening material would come from lunar regolith. It is much cheaper than launching a lot of radiation shielding off Earth.
Biosphere Z will be able to do everything that Biosphere Y can do – just further away from Earth.
After an appropriate shake-down cruise (2 years orbiting the Moon, Lagrange 1, and/or Lagrange 2), a Biosphere Z design should be ready to go to Mars. Note several problems will have been solved to ensure positive outcomes for such a journey:
• What does the crew do while going to Mars — farming.
• Building Mars modules to land on Mars
• The crew has been trained and tested for long endurance flights
• Other typical Biosphere Y, Z activities
Biosphere S — Major Milestone:
Eventually a biosphere will be manufactured using only space material, thus the designation Biosphere S. Regolith can be processed into dirt. Most metals will come from the Moon and/or Mars surface material. Oxygen is a byproduct of smelting the metals. Carbon and Oxygen can come from the Martian atmosphere. Water can be obtained from ice in permanently shadowed regions at the Moon’s poles or from water bearing asteroids. The first Biosphere S units will probably get Nitrogen from Mars. Later units could get nitrogen, water, and carbon-dioxide from Venus[14]. From the Moon we get KREEP[15]. (potassium, Rare Earth Elements, and Phosphorus) found by the Lunar Prospector mission.
People, plants, livestock, microbes, etc. will come from other Biospheres.
Electronics will probably still come from Earth, at least initially, until technology and infrastructure matures to enable manufacturing of integrated circuits in space.
At this point, humans will have become “A space faring species”
In a century, the number of Biospheres created will go from zero to one hundred per year.
Marshall’s Conjecture:
“400 years after the first baby is born in space, there will be more people living in space than on Earth.” After all, from the time of the signing of The Mayflower Compact to present day is about 400 years and we have 300+ million US citizens vs. the United Kingdom’x 68 million.
The explosion of life:
On Earth there are relationships between the number of humans, the number of support animals and plants. There are currently 8 billion people on Earth and about 1 billion head of cattle. I estimate that there are 100 billion chickens, a half billion pigs, etc.
As the number of Biospheres increases in number, so will the number of people, and the number of support plants and animals. To state it succinctly, there will be an explosion of life in space.
So how many Biosphere S colonies can we build?
Let us assume that they will be spread out evenly in the solar “Goldilocks Zone” (GZ). Creating a spreadsheet with Inputs: inside radius (IR), outside radius (OR) and minimum spacing; Output: Biosphere slot count.
Using: IR of 80,000,000 miles, OR of 120,000,000 miles, (120% to 33% Earth light intensity[16], respectively) and spacing of 1000 miles between Biospheres (both on an orbit and between orbits) you get: 40,000 orbits with the inner orbit having 502,655 slots and the outer orbit having 753,982 slots. This works out to over 25 billion slots for Biospheres to fill this region. Assuming 40 people per Biosphere S implies a space population of over a trillion people. And that is only within the GZ. With ever advancing technology like nuclear power enabling settlement further from the sun, there is no reason that humans can’t expand their reach and numbers throughout the solar system, implying many trillions more.
Can we build that many Biospheres?
Let us assume each Biosphere S has a mass of one million tons (10 times larger than a nuclear powered aircraft carrier[17]) That implies 25.1×1015 tons of metal for all of them. 16 Psche’s mass is estimated at 2.29×1016 tons[18]. There are the larger asteroids, e.g. Ceres (9.4×1017tons), Pallas, Juno, Vesta (2.5×1017 tons) and several others. Assuming the Moon (7.342×1019 tons) is reserved for near Earth use. If the asteroids are not enough, there are the moons of Mars and Jupiter. The other needed elements are readily available throughout the solar system, e.g. nitrogen from Venus, water from Europa, dirt from everywhere, so…
YES! My guess is that it will take 100,000 years to fill the GZ assuming a construction rate of about 250,000 Biospheres per year. That implies an expansion of the population by about 2 million people a year ( I acknowledge these estimates don’t take into account technological advances which will undoubtedly occur over such long stretches of time that may lead to drastically different outcomes. Remember! Its a SWAG!)
Is this Space Manifest Destiny? Is it similar to the Manifest Destiny[19] in America from 1840 to 1900? In my opinion, yes! But this is a very high-tech version of Manifest Destiny. The bottom line assumption is that the Goldilocks Zone is empty — therefore — we must go fill it! Just like the frontiersman of the 1800s.
The First Commandment:
This gives a new interpretation of the phrase from the Book of Genesis,
“Go forth, be fruitful and multiply“[20].
Not only are we people required to have children; but we are required to expand life in many forms wherever we go. For secular readers, this may be interpreted as the natural evolution of life to thrive in new ecosystems beyond Earth. Therefore, the big expansion of life will be in space.
It all starts with Biospheres X, Y, and Z optimized for farming in space
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When considering humanity’s expansion out into the solar system, look at the concepts put forward above and ask: “Is this proposal missing a key step or two in the development of biospheres in space?”
Editor’s Note: Marshall appeared on The Space Show on August 27 to talk about his space farming vision. You can listen to the archived episode here.
References:
- B. Venditti, The Cost of Space Flight Before and After SpaceX, The Visual Capitalist, January 27, 2022
- M. Williams, How to make the food and water Mars-bound astronauts will need for their mission, , Phys.org, June 1, 2020, Paragraph 4
- Perseverance (Rover)/Cost, Wikipedia
- Perseverance (Rover) – Dry Mass, Wikipedia
- Biosphere 2, Wikipedia
- G.K. O’Neill, The High Frontier, 1976, p. 71 – based on Earth-base agriculture – 25 People/Acre; p72 – Optimized for space settlement (i.e. predictable, controlled climate) – 53 People/Acre.
- L. Blain, Algae Biopanel Windows Make Power, Oxygen and Biomass, and Suck Up CO2, New Atlas, July 11, 2022
- A. Trafton, New Lightweight Material is Stronger than Steel, MIT News, February 2, 2022
- Cupola (ISS module) -Specifications, Wikipedia
- Biosphere 2 (Planning and Construction), Wikipedia
- How much does it cost to develop a shopping mall?, Fixr, October 13, 2022
- J. Jossy, The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston, Broadcast 4061, July 25, 2023
- J. Jossy, The Impact of the Gravity Prescription on the Future of Space Settlement, Space Settlement Progress, March 29, 2024; J. Jossy and T. Marotta, The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston, Broadcast 3852, April 5, 2022
- Atmosphere of Venus (Structure and Composition), Wikipedia, “…total nitrogen content is roughly four times higher than Earth’s…”
- KREEP, Wikipedia
- Habitable zone (i.e. “Goldilocks Zone”), Wikipedia, Picture/graph, Top-right.
- Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier (Design features, displacement), Wikipedia
- 16 Psyche (Mass and bulk density), Wikipedia – Note: the mass of all main asteroids are available on Wikipedia
- D. M. Scott, The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny, Divining America, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center, 2024
- Bible: Genesis 1:28 (Adam & Eve), Genesis 9:1 (Noah), Genesis 35:11 (Jacob), and generally repeated elsewhere in the book.
- B. Wang, Mass Production Rate of SpaceX Starship Costs, May 28, 2020
The biosphere approach means to use ecology. This is very much the wrong way of looking at growing food.
Almost all food is grown NOT using the ecological approach. In a wheat field, do farmers add and manage a complex web of multiple species (predators, prey, pollinators, etc)? Of course not. They just grow plants.
Remember, the biggest challenge with Biosphere 2 was the ecological side of their project and not the garden side of their project. After they had serious problems with their ecology, they changed their garden to grow more sweet potatoes which significantly increased the caloric intake of the crew. So, why unnecessarily complicate matters?
The Prototype Lunar Greenhouse project at the University of Arizona just uses the straightforward greenhouse approach which is far, far smaller and far, far less costly than Biosphere 2 and yet they are look at providing for all of the nutritional and life support needs of the crew while requiring far less maintenance than managing a facility as large as Biosphere 2 for the same number of crew.