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The future of manned space exploration will be determined through a process which balances the innate need of humanity to explore its surroundings and the costs associated with accomplishing these goals. For NASA this balance is derived from economics and budgetary constraints that hold it accountable for the expenditure of public funds. These budgetary realities demand a reduction in cost and expenditures of exploration and research activities. For missions venturing out to the edge of habitability, the development of cost effective life support approaches will have a significant influence on mission viability. Over the past several years a variety of mission scenarios for Lunar and Mars missions have been developed. The most promising of these attempt to provide basic mission requirements at a minimum cost. As a result these missions are extremely power limited.

Direct osmotic concentration (DOC) has been identified as a potential wastewater treatment process for potable reuse in advanced life support systems (ALSS). As a result, further development of the DOC process is being supported by a NASA Rapid Technology Development Team (RTDT) program. DOC is an integrated membrane system combining three unique membrane separation processes including forward osmosis (FO), membrane distillation (MD), and reverse osmosis (RO) that is designed to treat separate wastewater streams comprising hygiene wastewater, humidity condensate, and urine. An aqueous phase catalytic oxidation (APCO) process is incorporated as post treatment for the product water. In an ongoing effort to improve the DOC process and make it fully autonomous, further development of the three membrane technologies is being pursued.

The Space Station Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) consists of 51 functions. These functions are mostly independent of interactions. One exception is the regenerative air revitalization functions of carbon dioxide (CO2) removal, carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction and oxygen (O2) generation. Integration of these interdependent functions and humidity control into a single system provides significant opportunities for process simplification and reductions in power, weight and volume requirements compared to the use of discrete subsystems. An example of the magnitude of the opportunities provided is given by the ARS-1 developed by Life Systems under the sponsorship of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Information presented in this paper quantifies the savings achieved by this integration and identifies other advantages available through process integration.

Since 1994, the NASA Ames Research Center has hosted an annual space settlement design contest for 6-12th grade students. Thousands of students and hundreds of teachers from around the world have involved themselves in space settlement, including environmental and life support systems, some devoting months of intense effort. Prize winners now find themselves at Harvard, Stanford, MIT and other top universities, and at least one flew a zero-gravity experiment for the European Space Agency (ESA). Contestants work at home and send their entries to NASA Ames each March. Extensive reference materials are supplied on the web. All entries are judged on a single day by a panel of NASA and contractor scientists and engineers. In 2007, the Ames center director, Pete Worden, was a judge. Many categories are created to generate a large number of winners and every attempt is made to reward entries that show serious effort with some sort of prize. All winners are invited to visit NASA Ames in June.

For wastewater treatment applications, membrane processes are known to provide excellent treatment but are subject to failure due to membrane fouling. The Direct Osmotic Concentration (DOC) system evaluated in this study provides a membrane based primary treatment process capable of overcoming this problem. A full scale test apparatus containing full scale test module membrane cells has been developed and has undergone preliminary testing that provides a basis for comparison with other primary water recycle process concepts. This study confirms and extends the initial testing of this hardware and determines the required improvements to the existing test mo dules. These improvements, in addition to future testing, are intended to complete the validation of the concept and mature the hardware to the point that human rated test equipment design and development can be based directly on the test module derived data.