Posted on 04/16/2012 7:11:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA is clearly looking far into the future for a way to handle both human waste and a need for fuel on either long space flights or when attempting to colonize another planet. To that end, they’ve assigned life support engineer Jonathan Trent the task of coming up with a way to use algae to solve both problems at once. His solution is to use plastic bags floating in seawater as small bioreactors, containing wastewater, sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow algae that can be used as a means to create biofuel.
The whole thing is called Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae or more concisely, OMEGA, and will be demonstrated to reporters at one of San Francisco’s public utilities water pollution control plants tomorrow and is the culmination of $10 million worth of research.
The idea is more practical than revolutionary says Trent, who has spoken to reporters already about the project. The idea was to figure out a way to create an algae farm that could be placed close to a waste treatment facility, without taking up a bunch of land. That’s when he came up with idea of using plastic bags floating in the ocean. Conventional systems use large pools of water set up on dry land. In the test facility, each bag is four meters long and has been seeded with wastewater and carbon dioxide. Sunlight makes its way through the clear plastic as the bags float on seawater, which not only serves as a place for the bags to reside, but also help keep the algae cool, which must be done mechanically in other facilities. The algae eat the wastewater and grow until the bag is filled, at which point it is removed to be used for making biofuel.
Reports thus far show that algae farms set up in this manner would be capable of producing over two and a half million gallons of fuel annually in an area just under two square miles.
Trent says with a real farm, the carbon dioxide come could from nearby power plants, helping to reduce the carbon footprint of the whole process. Not helping, on the other hand, is that the whole scheme is based on petroleum based plastic bags, which in addition to their inherent carbon footprint would also have to be disposed of once a year as they degrade in saltwater. Trent suggests that California farmer’s could use them as field cover instead of the large tarps they currently use. He also says that if one or more of the bags should break, like say in a storm, there is no worry as the algae would die in the seawater and the wastewater released would be the same as wastewater facilities such as those in San Francisco already pump into the bay.
At this point it seems clear that a new type of plastic will need to be developed for the project to become viable, especially if it is to be ported to space exploration applications at some point; perhaps one made from biodegradable material so that it could be grown along the way, and then could be used as fertilizer afterwards.
More information: Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae (OMEGA) project: http://www.nasa.go … A/index.html
That's an unfortunate figure. That would be one third of the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. I think the cost of the environmental impact study for that alone would buy a year's worth of petroleum.
Using your numbers that works out to 0.138% of Earth’s ocean surface.
Thanks, I should have pulled out the abacus.
If we are going to do long duration space exploration we must have a means for recycling wastes specifically complex organic molecules read human excrement and urine and CO2. Plants in this case Algae are the most efficient organisms on earth at turning those wastes into O2 which we need to breath and complex carbohydrates which we need to eat. Urine turns out is a powerful nitrogen source for plants. Our solid wastes have significant phosphorus contents too. Any attempt at long duration space exploration will be using photobioreactors to process wastes using the most abundant resource in the solar system aka sun light to turn waste water in to live giving O2 gas and food.
There already is a group that has GMO cyanobacteria that use waste water to grow and directly excrete C6 sugars sucrose specifically that is pure carbo food for us monogastrics pigs and chickens too. Given a source of the 9 amino acids we cannot synthesis and pure sucrose plus the essential micro/macro minerals mongastrics can be sustained on just 3 items, protein, sucrose and minerals. In Brazil live stock is raised on sugar cane liquids and soy or fish meal from weening to slaughter. It would be a bland and boring diet but what a pig can eat we can eat too. For a resource limited space flight vegan meals would be the norm with limited amounts of single cell protein culture supplements. The mass balance of launch is such that meat would be to heavy to pack for multiyear missions and live stock would be too resource hungry to "farm" in space. It takes 3-10lbs of carbo/protein feed to produce 1 lb or chicken or pig when that same amount of food would feed a human for a week. This is the only argument for veganism in space meat is too heavy and resource dependent to pack along.
Seriously? In space there is ALWAYS sunlight there is no pesky planet to block it once every rotation. In intersolar space all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter the solar flux would be more than sufficient to say put in a window in the side of the space ship and point that opening towards the giant thermonuclear ball of fusion in the center of our system. farther out mirrors could be put outside the ship to concentrate the light towards the windows given that there is not drag in space a large mirror can be very light and very very big for little mass. Some earth orbiting geosync birds have folded light weight antennas that are over 18 meters in diameter coating that parabolic dish with 2 microinches of say aluminum and you have a mirror that in Earth space would vaporize steel at its focal point a better idea would be point that at a fiberoptic cable bundle and distribute the light to the photobioreactors you could even filter out green light as plants only care about red and blue for growth. filter the IR out as well to control the heat in the bioreactors.
The Lilliputian President would probably approve a loan to anybody who wanted to try it......
Thanks... I understand all that, though not on the level you posted.
My question was sort of tongue-in-cheek, referring to the lack of large bodies of salt water in space...
Sorry I though people were serious that space would be a dark and energy less place. You are right about the salt water thing only a few other bodies in the solar system have salt water that we are reasonably sure is liquid all be it at depth; Europa, Ganymede and Castieo however none of them have liquid water at the surface. Jupiter cooks them with lethal levels of radiation not a place for humans to make a landing. The idea of floating bags in the ocean to make fuel is kinda silly given that we have gigatons of fossil carbon under our land and ocean floor just waiting for us to dig it up the green fallacy is just that a logical fallacy. What does make sence is using algae for waste water clean up on a regional scale and for the production of sugars to feed animals with, some algae are also 60% protein by dry wgt too growing livestock food in brackish waste water in the desert would be a good idea but the corn lobby has such power to keep a strangle hold on the North American food chain we as in most Americans are by atomic isotope analytics 80% carbon from corn it is in almost every ingredient of our food chain.
“Doubts Linger About Space Station’s Science Potential”
Orlando Sentinal
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-space-station-science-20120414,0,72\06720.story
: After more than 12 years and at least $100 billion in construction
: costs, NASA leaders say the International Space Station finally is
: ready to bloom into the robust orbiting laboratory that agency
: leaders envisioned more than two decades ago.
: “The ISS has now entered its intensive research phase,” said Bill
: Gerstenmaier, head of NASA operations and human exploration, in
: recent testimony to Congress in defense of the roughly $1.5 billion
: the agency spends annually on the outpost.
: But doubts linger.
: More than a quarter of the space that NASA has designated for
: experiments sits empty. Much of the research done aboard the
: station deals with living and working in space — with marginal
: application back on Earth. And the nonprofit group that NASA chose
: to lure more research to the outpost has been plagued by internal
: strife and recently lost its director.
: And more broadly, questions remain about whether NASA can develop
: U.S. capability to send experiments up and bring them back to Earth
: — and whether, in fact, the station can live up to the promises
: that were used to justify its creation.
: “Now that NASA has finished ISS construction, I hope the incredible
: potential of ISS is not squandered,” said U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall,
: R-Texas, chair of the House science committee.
: This “incredible potential” is what NASA used to justify the
: decision to build a space station, which has been in the works
: since the Reagan administration.
: “When we finish, ISS will be a premier, world-class laboratory in
: low-Earth orbit that promises to yield insights, science, and
: information, the likes of which we cannot fully comprehend as we
: stand here at the beginning,” said then-NASA chief Dan Goldin
: during a 2001 congressional hearing.
: In the decade following, NASA and its international partners used
: the space shuttle and other vehicles to assemble the station,
: complete with several on-board laboratories lined with science
: “racks.” These racks, each about as big as a telephone booth,
: provide a home for dozens of experiments and can stream data and
: video to researchers back on Earth.
: But then — as now — some questioned the station’s future as a
: center of science. They note much of the research done aboard the
: station deals with surviving the space environment, from studies of
: spaceflight’s effect on human muscles to developing improved smoke
: detectors for human spacecraft.
: Privately, some NASA officials worry the outpost could feed into
: the agency’s reputation as a “self-licking ice-cream cone” in that
: space-based experiments help NASA keep doing space-based
: experiments.
: Others note that station research — there have been about
: 500 American experiments and 800 international ones — has produced
: comparatively little scientific literature. Thomson Reuters Web of
: Science, which tracks such publications, has identified about
: 3,000 scientific articles that have resulted from station research.
: By comparison, a 2001 satellite that cost about $150 million
: — NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe — has generated more
: than three times as many papers; many scientists used the probe’s
: analysis of temperature differences in space to theorize about the
: origin and structure of the universe.
: “If you wanted to grade space-station science, it would be an
: incomplete right now,” said Jeff Foust, editor of The Space Review,
: a popular online magazine.
: He said critics could make the argument that money spent on the
: station might be better invested in other missions. For example,
: the budget-busting James Webb Space Telescope, seen as successor to
: the Hubble telescope, still is only a fraction of the station’s
: cost at nearly $9 billion.
: But, Foust said, “there is a rationale for the ISS that goes beyond
: simply science” — promoting partnerships and better relations among
: space-faring nations, including Russia.
: NASA officials, however, say research is just beginning and already
: there have been advances.
: Scientists at Johnson Space Center have taken advantage of the
: station’s lack of gravity to develop “micro-balloons” the size of
: red blood cells that can carry drugs to cancer tumors. And the
: European Space Agency is looking to help doctors better diagnose
: asthma by using an air-monitoring device developed for astronauts.
: “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Marybeth Edeen, NASA manager of
: the station’s national laboratory.
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