Would conserving water and composting someday actually help us reach other planets such as Mars?
Jay: Yeah, I think that the questions of life support or how you would sustain people in space for long periods of time is as important to an eventual Mars mission or long-duration mission as other kinds of questions like what kind of rockets are you going to use? What kind of engine propulsion? It’s as potentially limiting as some of these other questions because of what I was talking about at the beginning, of how much material and mass you have to take with you if you didn’t have regenerative systems in place. And the biggest limitation right now for those kind of systems is how much energy it would take to run them. The plants. To grow plants you need a lot of light energy, so where are you going to get that energy? It’s not as simple as just saying you’re going to use the sunlight energy on Mars because you’re farther away, there’s dust storms, there’s no atmosphere so there’s potentially harmful radiation. So there are a lot of really important questions that need to be addressed
