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Widow · 01-13-2021, 09:59 PM,

7: Life Maintenance & Support

7.1: Environment

Chesterfield Stations systems have been designed to maintain a comfortable environment for the crew-members for both short-sleeve cabin operations as well as suited operations under a variety of challenging external environments. It now maintains a fully controlled cabin atmosphere and living environment. Additionally, it is robustly designed to sustain critical functions for returning the crew safely home after a failure or catastrophic event, such as a toxic contamination or fire event or a breach in the pressurized cabin vessel. As the station is designed for long term missions, it must be able to support life without any external supplies. Deep Space Engineering's Air Revitalization System (ARS) is responsible for providing adequate ventilation for the crew, maintaining carbon dioxide, humidity, and trace contaminant concentrations at comfortable and safe levels, and maintaining the temperature at the desired crew selected set-point. It includes two different types of fan packages, each redundant, that are optimized over a range of operating points.

7.2: Atmosphere

Multiple heat exchanges remove heat from the air and transfer it to the Thermal Control System (TCS). A regenerative system continuously removes carbon dioxide and humidity, while a high efficiency particulate filtration system removes dust, fungi, and microbes from the air. Air monitoring ensures critical gases are within safe parameters and a suite of emergency equipment protects against fire and toxic contamination vents. The system accommodates for both low (sleep) and highly active (exercise) periods for the full crew compliment. As such, many of these components are already sized to handle the crew as-is. Chesterfield Stations TCS consists of both an active coolant network and passive heaters and insulation to protect the internal thermal environment from the extreme external temperatures and to collect and reject heat from internal components. The TCS is sized for a high heat load capacity and utilizes both radiators and a regenerative Phase Change Material (PCM) heat exchange to accommodate peaks of high thermal loads without relying on the use of expendable consumables. By leveraging Chesterfield Stations capabilities and initially minimizing the internal components, the TCS can be simplified to primarily passive thermal control while scarring for an active coolant network.

Deep Space Engineering has managed to successfully create a self sufficient supply of oxygen using algae as a catalyst as it has been found to produce a significant amount of oxygen, and is relatively low maintenance and does not require large volumes of space to be as effective as alternative methods. Deep Space Engineering has a secondary generator in case of emergency, however this has yet to be used.

7.3: Vegetable Production System

Chesterfield Station, since its intention to relocate to Texas in a more remote setting, has developed a Vegetable Production System to eliminate the need to import food supplies. In addition to this, the plant room will allow for Deep Space Engineering to investigate the effects of microgravity on plant life, to find a long term alternative to shipping goods to the station increasing the productivity and profit of all tasks being undertaken onboard Chesterfield Station, and add fresh food to the crews diet and enhancing happiness and well-being onboard Chesterfield Station. Each garden is about the size of a carry-on piece of luggage and typically holds six plants. Each plant grows in a clay-based growth media and fertilizer. The pillows are important to help distribute water, nutrients and air in a healthy balance around the roots. Otherwise, the roots would either drown in water or be engulfed by air because of the way fluids in space tend to form bubbles.

In the absence of gravity, plants use other environmental factors, such as light, to orient and guide growth. A bank of light emitting diodes above the plants is used to produce a spectrum of light suited for each individual type of plants' growth. This LED bank allows for each type of plant to receive its own unique amount of time under the light, and intensity of light, for optimal growth conditions. It has been noted the plants tend to reflect a lot of green light and use more of the red and blue wavelengths, because of this, each of the gardens tends to glow a bright magenta pink.

In previous experiments, Deep Space Engineering has successfully grown a variety of plants, including (but not limited to) lettuce, cabbage, capsicums, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, and tomato. This provides a staple plant based diet for the crew onboard the station, with an entire segment being dedicated to this to ensure the food supply is not depleted. Many of the plants have been harvested and eaten by the crew members, after samples of each had been taken to ensure there were no harmful microbes growing on the produce. To Date, no harmful contamination has been detected, and the food has been safe for the crew to eat, with many stating there is no difference in taste between produce grown in space compared to that grown planet side. After relocating to Texas, Deep Space Engineering intends to add antioxidant-rich foods to provide a small amount of protection of radiation in space as they are aware that the radiation in the proposed sector will be significantly higher than that in New York.

7.3.2: Water Wicking

Veggie utilizes passive wicking to provide water to the plants as they grow. This is to reduce the work load required in maintaining a garden onboard a space station. With the use of the recycled water from the water recycling plant, it also ensures there is no need for importing supplies to maintain the growth of food. Wick watering is done by simply running material from the clay-based growth media and fertilizer, down through a drainage hole and into a reservoir of water. As the soil in the pot dries, the wick draws water from the reservoir and rehydrates the plant. As each garden is plumbed into the station, refilling the water reservoir is not required to maintain each garden.

7.4: Water Recycling Plant

Chesterfield Stations water recycling plant is a simple system of a pressurized storage tank water supply that is distributed to the crew for drinking and food rehydration via a water dispenser. The water dispenser is designed to be compact and modular, which allows for the option to upgrade with an adapter kit to interface it with water storage bags. This offers mass and volume savings of water storage tanks, pressure tanks, and avoids the duplication of a water dispenser.

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