stephen lantin, phd — san francisco, california, usa, earth | writing
bioregenerative life support systems for space
currently: spaceflight hardware, microbial production @ nasa ames research center prev: nasa ames (biological modeling), nasa kennedy (space crop production), nasa armstrong (aerodynamics & propulsion), launchpoint technologies (private sbir, motors/drone tech), ucsb experimental cosmology group, university tech transfer, nasa space technology graduate fellow (nstgro21), speculative technologies brains fellow (s1)
some thoughts:
in total, only about 600 people have been to space; the most at one time has been 19.
how then, can we consider ours a true spacefaring civilization?
it is hopeful that launch costs have fallen to <$2,500/kg; at the rate of space transportation capacity production, orders of magnitude more people can get to space within the next 30 years.
but once we're there, how can we live? how can we thrive?
vision:
a big bottleneck to a true spacefaring civilization is a lack of space life support systems that are both functionally robust and long-lasting.
while physico-chemical systems and resupply are adequate for life support in low-Earth orbit, they do not scale with distance from earth and population-time given their consumable requirements.
as such, we will need to transition to a bioregenerative life support systems approach sooner rather than later; however, we are limited by a lack of standardized time series data of inter-species and metabolite interactions to intelligently design such systems.
i've spent my phd building low-cost, replicable, standardized data collection platforms (plant canopy hyperspectral imaging, live plant structure) and models (publishing soon) for hydroponics (see here and here and here and here for cool pics and gifs; won a competition with this one!) and microbial bioreactors (export-controlled at the moment) to begin tackling this problem.
i have also built functional digital twin instances (concurrent operation of physical system + virtual model + live sensor network to update both) for prediction and control of system behavior.
we should probe the biology in testbeds like these to map out multispecies dynamics, discover stable bioregenerative functions, and develop robust control systems to increase trl.
if you're also working on these things or interested to learn more, send me an email ([email protected])!
influences:
principal components: cosmism, post-scarcity biopunk, tpot/rat-adjacent things
the culture series - iain m. banks
human action - ludwig von mises
entrepreneurial statecraft gets the goods - wolf tivy
