Researchers revive the dream of a Martian habitat in Arizona in miniature

To anyone who thinks this is cool: Check out Cody's Lab on YouTube, who's spent the past two years working on his own Mars simulation base solo in Nevada and makes excellent videos about it. It's called "Chickenhole Base".

I have dreamt about buying some cheap land in the desert and building a giant sealed dome. In theory once "charged" with water, you shouldn't need any more water input, as long as you can condense it out of the air. I imaging a bunch of solar panels outside so I can run A/C or underground heatpump to moderate the temp and "make it rain". Then you can grow some food in there as well and "recycle" your waste products. I doubt I could be fully self-sufficient since a large enough dome would be prohibitively expensive, but would be a pretty cool way to live I think.

I kinda get the feeling that most of the issues with these projects are well understood and already solved.

Basically it's probably at a stage where somebody just needs to 'do it' - like on the moon as a starting point, and see what happens.

And on the moon you could park an escape ship nearby if things went really badly South, and get back home in reasonable time.

Anybody got a heavy lifter so we can start bringing up the prefabbed bits? :)

The fantastic storytelling unfortunately falls flat on its face here:

> So far, they’ve worked on a shoestring budget, having received about $100,000 from private donors and a tech incubator. They’ll need another $250,000 or so to fully equip the facility, Staats says. He hopes that money will come from investors, companies paying to use the facility, and grants.

tl;dr University of Arizona has restored a test greenhouse as the centerpiece for closed ecosystem research [0]. They plan to connect several other closed units to serve as housing and labs. The 'simulation' involves stepping down the use of CO2 scrubbers as they grow more and more plants to convert the atmosphere, with special attention to the entire lifecycle (ex decomposition releases lots of CO2, so they are apt to turn on scrubbers unused during the maturation phase). The program is currently 1/3 funded.

[0] https://samb2.space/about/