I share a fondness for this topic and generally agree with your assessment; in fact in 2021 as part of a NASA challenge I was working on a project to design a closed-loop food system for long-duration space missions. One thing to note is that in any such closed system, the amount of material you have to carry initially scales exponentially with respect to your fraction lost per cycle.
Interestingly enough, I think having access to this technology would have a lot of effects beyond space; it would make humanity more robust in existential risk scenarios, and complex distributed manufacturing would have a large transformative (and IMO beneficial) impact on socioeconomic and political systems on Earth.
I share a fondness for this topic and generally agree with your assessment; in fact in 2021 as part of a NASA challenge I was working on a project to design a closed-loop food system for long-duration space missions. One thing to note is that in any such closed system, the amount of material you have to carry initially scales exponentially with respect to your fraction lost per cycle.
Interestingly enough, I think having access to this technology would have a lot of effects beyond space; it would make humanity more robust in existential risk scenarios, and complex distributed manufacturing would have a large transformative (and IMO beneficial) impact on socioeconomic and political systems on Earth.
Perhaps you would find this post interesting too:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4viLtxnwzMawqdPum/time-consistency-for-the-ea-community-projects-that-bridge
Kind Regards,
Arturo