For a successful human spaceflight strategy, resources such as water, oxygen, food and also rocket propellants, energy, construction materials for space habitats and many different types of consumables must be generated and appropriately recycled within future planetary or interplanetary outposts. The combination of the two approaches, extraction and recycling, is the focus of the Planetary Infrastructure Research Laboratory.
For this purpose, the facility is divided into two working groups:
The focus is on innovative plant cultivation systems using state-of-the-art CEA technology as well as breadboard tests for the development of future technologies for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the Moon and Mars, and the establishment of possible synergies between ISRU and bioregenerative life support systems.
