The minimal cost of life in space

The cost of keeping people alive in space is assessed from a theoretical viewpoint and using two actual designs for plant growth systems. While life support is theoretically not very demanding, our ability to implement life support is well below theoretical limits. A theoretical limit has been calculated from requirements and the state of the art for plant growth has been calculated using data from the BIO-Plex PDR and from the Cornell CEA prototype system. The very low efficiency of our current approaches results in a high mission impact, though we can still see how to get a significant reduction in cost of food when compared to supplying it from Earth. Seeing the distribution of costs should allow us to improve our current designs. c2004 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.