The Next Generation of ECLSS: Life Support Outside the Earth-Moon System

To date humans have travelled distances of up to roughly 350,000 km to the moon and stayed alive in the Mir Space Station for a record single mission length of 438 days. These numbers are compelling and encouraging because the technologies used to achieve those feats could be used to help achieve missions to further destinations. While missions to near Earth objects (NEO) and beyond may have durations shorter than or similar to some of our stays at ISS and Mir, they will span distances up to hundreds of millions of miles from Earth; this represents lengths tens to hundreds of times farther than current records with the important distinction of exponentially longer abort times and diminishing opportunities for resupply. Because of many technology attributes based on abort time, resupply opportunities and total distances, long missions to NEO or to Mars can draw on our experience at Station and in LEO, but we will need to dig deeper. Taking humans further into space will require new architectures and potentially disruptive changes to our mentality regarding system engineering and risk. This could mean new architectures, development cycles focused on a unified end goal, and spacecraft holding systemic margins of safety instead of relying on Earth for support. This paper is a top-down look at the requirements that have traditionally driven ECLSS architectures over the past two decades and the life support technologies that have been developed to meet those requirements. From a historical investigation, ideas for the next generation of ECLSS can be derived to bring us closer to humankind’s aspirations to travel beyond the Earth-Moon system.