Shutdown!

All good things must come to an end, and the end of my stay in Mars Base Zero happened on Tuesday. I ate the last of the potatoes in the morning, and in the mid-afternoon Frankie cut the ribbon on the door and let me out. There were a few media people (some from the Newsminer--our local newspaper--and from Channel 2 news--one of our local TV stations). We spent about an hour talking and then went off and got a hamburger--and a baked potato. No, not tired of potatoes!! Though I guess it helps to be hungry when you eat them.

Late in the last week (week 5) I had dug up all the remaining potatoes to see how many there were. I calculated I had enough to last through Tuesday morning, so on Friday afternoon (10/22/04) I notified the people who had wanted advance notice. The potatoes turned out to be a little shy of what I craved; even though I was eating close to my daily average (ie 1325 kcal/day, or 272 less than my average for the entire time--which turned out to be more than my average on 2 of the weeks). But I managed to stretch it by tightening my belt a little.

My food ran out in a fairly co-ordinated fashion. I was a little low on carrots and beets, and very low on onions for the last 3-5 days. By Monday night these were all gone. I also finished the cabbage, though I had a fair amount of that on Monday.

I did have a few things left: about 40 ping-pong ball sized tomatoes (mostly green--they have been ripening about as fast as I've been eating them); swiss chard; as much lettuce as when I moved in (!!), a few turnips and a huge cauliflower.

Overall I consider the venture was a huge success. If you take the area and figure it was essentually planted for 3 months if I wanted a perpetual supply of food I would have had to stay 90 days, not 39. But this was exactly what we expected; we were hoping for a minimum of a month. So our data shows better than expected productivity. Though we always hope for more! Though our next trial may very well be less, since we are going to attempt to reduce our reliance on potatoes slightly (down to 60-75% of calories).

Our current design for Nauvik has a crop area of nearly 2,000 square feet (depending partly on how you stack the shelves). We had 686 square feet planted in Mars Base Zero this year (table 1). This area provided 43% of the food needed for 90 days [39 days actual/90 days to grow = 43%]. 686 square feet divided by 43% = 1,584 square feet, and is our estimate of how many square feet Nauvik would have to be, based on our productivity this summer. In 2002 we produced a fair amount more food per square foot than we did this year (by ~30%--the summer of 2002 was a much better summer for growing potatoes). This would give a minimum size for Nauvik as 1,100 square feet.

Table 1: The Crop Areas of Mars Base Zero

Square	Length (East/West)	Width (N/S)	Area (ft²)
A	11' 0"	11'3.5"	124.2
B	10' 7.5"	11' 4"	120.4
C	11' 5"	11' 3"	128.4
D	11' 9.5"	11' 7"	136.6
E	11' 6"	10'11"	125.5
% of F*	11' 7"	11' 1"	51.4

*% of F is the percent which was planted, which is estimated at 40%.

There are a couple of caviats to this. First, and most important, is the low quality of the diet. Although fairly balanced (see discussion below), we need to develop more sources for primary calories (94% of calories from potatoes is pretty bad); as we do this our yield per square foot is expected to fall. A source of oil (eg canola seed) would be very, very nice. Chickens and/or fish would greatly improve the diet. All these factors will result in more square feet needed to support a person. Having proven a minimum number of square feet this year, next year we will begin attempts to improve the diet. This is expected to be a rather lengthy process, for there are a lot of factors involved; many, many crops are possible, do we add chickens or fish (and if so, what do we grow to feed them). We will continue to keep our focus very narrow, aiming for a minumum acceptable diet grown in the smallest area possible.

Average nutrition eaten was fair. By entering the daily average of all foods eaten (see Table 2) into my diet program it told me how my nutrition was. I did fine on most vitamins and minerals, but there were some things that were very low. Although the program showed vitamin B-12 as being 0, this isn't entirely accurate. Soil has microorganizms in it that have B-12, and just by eating freshly picked root crops you'll get some. I had been told that some of my food had vitamin B-12 in it, so to verify this I went to the USDA Nutrient Lab. Turned out my program was correct; I am not getting any B-12 from the vegetables I was eating.
I was only getting 18% of the RDA of vitamin E. This would have been a lot better if I'd managed to eat more of the sunflower seeds (only one plant of 5 produced any seed, and that one only yielded about 1/2 of a head--the rest hadn't ripened). Riboflavin was low at 37%. I need to eat more beet greens to offset this. Calcium was low at 31%, though there are some reports that you need drastically less calcium on a vegetarian diet. Selenium was low at 18%, but this could be offset pretty easily by having more in your soil; you need such tiny amounts that even a modest amount in the soil would provide you with plenty. Sodium was low (48%) until I imported salt, which is a story in itself. In the future we will have to figure out more foods that have a high salt content to keep from sodium deficiency. Lastly zinc was low at 32%, which is like selenium and can be enriched in the soil to offset deficiencies. Overall the diet was pretty healthy, though quite low on calories (1,612 kcal/day average). I probably wouldn't have been comfortable eating much more, though by the end I was pretty used to eating nearly 4 pounds of food a day so a modest increase would have been ok. Overall my diet was probably about the same quality (though lacking different nutrients) as when not inside. Since I was eating a daily vitamin pill that covered almost all the things I was lacking, and by importing salt I got the sodium, I managed to keep my average nutrition well above RDA on everything exept sodium.

Table 2: Foods Eaten During 39 Day Closure

Food	Total Grams Eaten	Average Daily Grams Consumed
Beets	620	15.9
Bush Beans	73	1.9
Cabbage	3,533	90.6
Carrot	2,078	53.3
Cauliflower	207	5.3
Lettuce	471	12.1
Parsley	42	1.1
Potato	53,730	1,377.7
Pumpkin	141	3.6
Onion	789	20.2
Spinach	51	1.3
Strawberry	25	0.6
Sunflower	11	0.3
Swiss Chard	464	11.9
Tomato	2,978	76.4
Turnip	2,533	64.9
Wheat	84	2.2
Kcal	60,696	1,612
Wt eaten, g	67,766	1,737
Wt, less pot	14,036	359.8
Wt, pounds	149	3.8

Media blitz! We had a quite unexpected bunch of media attention. Universe Today started it, by publishing a very nice article. Then the Fairbanks Daily Newsminer published a couple of great articles. Then the Anchorage Daily News put us on the front page, Channel 2 News had my coming out in the evening news, and the Fairbanks Daily Newsminer put us on the front page on Wednesday (the day after I came out). All great coverage. For those who contributed, Many Thanks.

After exiting Mars Base Zero on Tuesday I didn't have time to shut it down. Indeed it was Saturday before the facility was completely shut down and winterized. Since it was snowing on Tuesday, I asked Eli to help out by spending the night in Mars Base Zero to make sure the furnace kept going, which he generously agreed to do. He also helped out on a couple other evenings, as we cleaned up the ecosystem (harvesting the rest of the crops, cleaning some of the pots out of square F, getting most of the compost hauled to the compost pile, dumping the water, etc), did a little work on the north wall/ceiling (put up 3 sheets of plywood) and closed the facility down (disconnected the plastic from the end and bottom so it will drape straight down [otherwise it would catch snow and pull down], drained the furnace, etc).

During the last few days inside I dug square C and left it with holes, all ready to plant potatoes. In early May I'm hoping one of our members will be able to stop by and plant the potatoes (I will be out of town). From May 21 to May 31 we will be holding Workfest '05. During the Workfest we will be planting most of the rest of Mars Base Zero. In July we hope to plant the last square. Then in August, when the potatoes in square C are ready to harvest, we are hoping for another closed run. If money permits, we may even run into the winter--and if we manage to raise about $2,500/month we'll be able to keep going all winter (this money is primarily to pay for the lights, which use huge amounts of power). We won't be able to have one single person closed inside this whole time, but instead we will probably do a whole series of closures, varying in length from 5 days to possibly as long as 2 months. There will likely be non-closed periods between closures. This will allow the garden to recover from heavy consumption, and it'll allow us time to regroup (keeping in mind that it only produced 43% of the food necessary to continuously support a person).

Also during the Workfest we will be doing more work on the roof (which will entail finishing the insulation; putting the plywood sheath over it; and putting up shingles), and possibly hooking up permanent power (though the ground may be too frozen to install the electric pole--if so we'll try to do it in August). We hope to get square F set up so we can plant closer to 80% of the area--probably by building planting trays. We may build a loft area over square A and upgrade that square by cleaning it out better, build shelves on the west wall, get the workbench set up for growing things on and perhaps set up a chicken coup and/or fish tank. All this is pretty ambitious and we likely won't have quite enough manpower available to finish everything.

There are a couple of subsystems we still have to get working properly. We don't have an acceptable way to deal with human wastes, though we did manage it this year (in 2002 it was simply stored and then disposed of after closure). Compost is not ready yet; we need to get our compost pile working a bit better. We will also need a second one, so while one is being shoveled onto the garden as crops are harvested, the second one is curing.

We have a huge amount of data. I recorded an average of nearly 400 data points per day or around 15,000 for the entire stay (mostly dealing with the harvest, for example this potato)
https://isecco.org/projects/celss/marsbase/2004/plant_data/potato_1.html
This gives a lot of data that could be used to write scientific articles. More than I'll have time to write, I'm sure. So I have asked a couple of members if they were interested, and have had great response. There are still more possibilities; if you are interested in co-authoring an article let me know.

I leave the facility this winter with 3 chores undone. Since I had 69 things listed I think I did pretty good to get nearly all of them done. The things I didn't manage to do were plow E; clean up the arctic entry and build the loft over square A. I finished the other 66 items, averaging nearly 2 per day. Granted some of these were pretty minor, but considering the last time I stayed inside I didn't finish any chores I was pretty glad to manage these. The chores ranged from cleaning the desk to starting the feces composter.

We now have a total of 46 days of closed operation; 7 days in 2002 and 39 days this year. By the time we have a total of a year of closed operation we should have a much better idea of exactly how big to build Nauvik, and we can finalize our design. Then it will be a matter of raising enough money to actually build it--and another big bunch of money to run it. But that is likely to be many years away yet.

I have updated a few files; here are the links:
Foods eaten: sixth week
Mars Base Zero Diary
Questions (lots more from week six!)

And of course Update Week Six, which is this information!

As usual you can access all this information throught the links page.
https://isecco.org/projects/celss/marsbase/2004/04_index.html

Through the dirt, to the Stars!
Ray C.
Mars Base Zero inhabitant no more :(

P.S. Photos of Closure II next week!