Plant Leaching for Nutrient Recovery in Closed Loop Systems, Year 1

The use of plants for bioregenerative life support will require consumable supplies of plant fertilizer. One way to reduce the consumable need to recycle nutrients that are bound in the inedible biomass (e.g., leaves, stems, etc.) of harvested plants. The project will treat inedible plant biomass in bioreactors to retrieve soluble nutrients, and then treat the recalcitrant biomass with acid to recover less soluble nutrients from the waste (e.g., Ca, Mg, PO4).

Plant leaching and biological pretreatment can potentially be combined to reduce complexity and increase fertilizer production efficiency, Recovering plant nutrients and allowing closed loop plant (and food) production helps reduce dependency on resupply from earth while saving on launch costs for manned presence in space. Habitation beyond low earth orbit will require some form of closed loop plant/food growth, and recycling nutrients from inedible plant wastes will reduced consumables and resupply. The resulting nutrient stream can then be purified and added back to plant systems.

This is a mature technology (TRL 8) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.