![]() ![]() Within the context of a limited, useful life, ECLSS developers still needed a way to measure the capability of an ECLSS to operate in the adverse conditions of space. Sustainable and limited are opposite outcomes. ECLSS designs involve a system life cycle that depends upon the ability to maintain and repair the ECLSS during its useful life and then replace it with a new system at the end of its limited, useful life. The lack of coherence also could be a result of the BLSS concept growing out of the preceding development of non-biological, non-regenerative schema of the environmental control and life support system (ECLSS). The lack of supporting sustainability data is not surprising, considering that an understanding of sustainability is a relatively recent development among biological and environmental system researchers on Earth (e.g., Primmer and Furman 2012 Nimmo et al., 2015 Donohue et al., 2016 Pimm et al., 2019). When the presentation and explanation of BLSS technologies that lay claim to sustainability are not accompanied by a discussion of parameters that would allow a measurement of sustainability, then such claims fall flat. However, sustainability is not well-defined in the schema of BLSS. Finally, we propose a Terraform Sustainability Assessment Framework for normalizing the quantified sustainability properties of a bioregenerative life support system using the Earth model to control for variance.Īcross literature and popular science articles on bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs), the word sustainable is commonly used as a critical mission criterion for deep space exploration (e.g., NASA 2012 Skibba 2018 Andrews 2019 NASA 2020 Kozyrovska et al., 2021 Maiwald et al., 2021). We then explain the properties of environmental stability and propose a method of quantifying resistance and resilience that are impacted by disturbances, extend this method to quantifying consistence and persistence that are impacted by feedback from loads. We explain bioregenerative life support system sustainability in the context of seven theoretical frameworks: a planet with soil, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem services provided to humans human consumption of natural resources as loads and disturbances supply chains as extensions of natural resources engineering application of forced and natural cycles bioregenerative systems as fragmented ecosystems ecosystems as a network of consumer-resource interactions with critical factors occurring at ecosystem control points and stability of human consumer resources. We review a Generalized Resilient Design Framework for quantifying the engineered resilience of any environmental control and life support system and explain how it carries assumptions that do not fit the assumptions of sustainability that come out of environmental science. Even though sustainability is used as a critical mission criterion for deep space exploration, there result is a lack of coherence in the literature with the use of the word sustainability and the application of the criterion. In this perspective paper, we raise attention to the lack of methods or data to measure claims of sustainability for bioregenerative life support system designs and propose a method for quantifying sustainability. 2Norfolk Institute LLC, Norfolk, VA, United States. ![]() ![]() 1School of Integrative Plant Science, Field of Soil and Crop Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States. ![]()
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