1. Develop a fully closed-loop life support system for human space exploration.
To create a regenerative system that continuously recycles water, air and waste into oxygen, clean water and food—enabling long-duration missions such as a crewed Mars habitat.
2. Understand and model the fundamental biological and chemical processes needed for closed-loop survival.
To map, quantify and control microbial, physico-chemical and plant-based processes so they can be engineered with reliability and predictability.
3. Create technologies and operational architectures that guarantee crew safety, robustness and long-term stability.
To ensure any regenerative life support system can operate autonomously, with redundancy, minimal risk, and high resilience in extreme environments.
4. Transfer space-driven circular technologies to Earth.
To generate high-impact terrestrial applications—such as advanced water recycling, nutrient recovery, waste valorisation, controlled-environment agriculture and real-time environmental monitoring.
5. Build and maintain an international scientific and industrial ecosystem.
To unite universities, research institutes, agencies and companies across Europe and beyond to accelerate innovation in circular systems for both space and Earth.
6. Train the next generation of experts in life-support, circularity and environmental systems.
To support long-term capacity building via PhD programs, operational pilots and interdisciplinary research.
The overall project strategy can be downloaded here.
No, MELiSSA can be used for transit phase and surface habitat. The approach of MELiSSA is organized by functions: Oxygen production, water production, urine nitrification, food production,… So depending of the missions requirements we will used a part, or the complete loop. The comparison and selection of the preferred architecture is done via the ALiSSE criteria: efficiency, mass, energy, safety , crew time.
Any design of a circular system requires a top view. In other words, as all the building blocks of the loop are connected, you cannot design one block without thinking of the complete loop impact. The efficiency of each building block is crucial and a circular approach is not enough you need to consider a metabolic one, this is why we are often speaking of an artificial ecosystem.
Now, the challenges are not “limited” to efficiency only, you need to consider impact of reduced gravity and space environment too.
An international consortium
MELiSSA is a long-term European research program built around a consortium of more than 30 partners: universities, research institutes, space agencies and industrial companies working together on regenerative life support technologies for space and Earth.
A modular ecosystem of five “compartments”
The technical work is structured in five interconnected compartments that together form a closed-loop ecosystem:
Compartment I – Waste treatment
Processing and stabilising organic waste and wastewater from the crew.
Compartment II – Microbial conversion
Photo-heterotrophic microorganisms transforming waste products into useful compounds.
Compartment III – Nutrient regeneration
Nitrifying bacteria converting nitrogenous waste into plant-available nutrients.
Compartment IV – Higher plants
Crops that produce oxygen and food while contributing to water purification.
Compartment V – The crew
Humans as central consumers and producers of air, water, food and waste in the loop.
Each compartment is studied and tested on its own, and then in integrated configurations that mimic a complete life support loop for a future Mars habitat.
Pilot facilities across Europe
Core MELiSSA processes are validated in dedicated pilot facilities at partner sites across Europe and in extreme environments such as Antarctica. These pilots bridge the gap between laboratory research, space applications and terrestrial demonstrators.
Central coordination and knowledge transfer
Program coordination and strategic guidance are provided in close collaboration between ESA and the MELiSSA community. The MELiSSA Foundation plays a key role in managing IP, industrial partnerships, education and technology transfer towards terrestrial applications.
From space research to industrial lines
To accelerate impact on Earth, MELiSSA also supports dedicated industrial lines in areas such as advanced water treatment and heat recovery, urine-to-fertiliser conversion, sustainable sanitation, controlled-environment agriculture and digital tools for monitoring and simulation.
Research institutions
Universities, laboratories and public research centres working on biology, water treatment, microbial processes, environmental engineering, modelling, agriculture or life-support technologies.
Industrial partners
Companies developing technologies in water recycling, sanitation, waste valorisation, controlled-environment agriculture, sensors, bioreactors, monitoring systems or energy-efficient processes—especially those seeking dual-use space/Earth applications.
Space agencies & public bodies
Agencies, municipalities and public organisations interested in deploying circular technologies, piloting innovative systems or contributing to long-duration space exploration strategies.
Start-ups and innovators
Early-stage companies with novel ideas or breakthrough technologies that can strengthen the circular, regenerative or autonomous aspects of the MELiSSA ecosystem.
Students and early-career researchers
Through internships, PhD programs and research fellowships in MELiSSA laboratories and partner institutions.
International collaborators
Institutions outside Europe can join through cooperation agreements when their expertise strengthens the scientific or technological objectives.
The proper answer to this one is probably:
Why man has no try to duplicate the Earth functions earlier ? In other words, although humans are fully depending of the Earth ecosystem functions (e.g. oxygen, water, food, ...), we have today no back-up. Anyone who looks a bit more carefully to the challenges of artificial ecology will rapidly perceive the enormous difficulties. We have seen over the years many similar projects : CELSS, CEEF, CERES, BIOSPHERE 2… almost all of them had to stop due to incorrect evaluation of the challenges, and necessary amplitude and duration of the efforts.
You can always flight a piece of hardware and realize after it did not work. This approach is empiric and extremely expensive. This is no the MELiSSA one. Within MELiSSA we do prefer an intensive characterization of our processes on ground, then a participation to a competitive tender.
This allows the project to be regularly evaluated, and to have a very good ratio of success of our flight experiment. The most convincing one is the MELiSSA project reactivity during ARTEMISS flight, despite a few weeks of delay on the launch pad, we succeed to start the four bioreactors, adapt in flight the protocols and bring convincing engineering results.
Nine experiments have been already performed on board ISS and Foton. Almost all of them have been selected during International competition (e.g. ILSRA). This competitive approach guaranty a high quality work. These results are published. The last one was the ARTEMISS , where the transformation CO2 to O2 kinetics was demonstrated. The next ones are for plants (WAPS) and for Urine (URINIS).
Only partially, the rest will be provided by higher plants (e.g. tomato, potatoes, wheat, soybean, spinach, …). Spirulina presents however a major advantage to have a high concentration in proteins and can act as a very nice food complement.
Almost everything starts from the vision of a Space Engineer, Mr. Claude Chipaux, around 1987, in the company MATRA (today AIRBUS).
Very rapidly he involved a few scientists and/or colleagues, Pr. Marcel Lefort-Tran, Dr. Guy Dubertret, Pr. Max Mergeay, Pr. Willy Verstraete, and Mr. Daniel Kaplan. This motivated groups successfully convinced ESA (i.e. Jean François REDOR, Chris SAVAGE, Roger BINOT), to start a small activity on the interest of closed loop life support system.
The first publication was presented in October 1988, and the first ESA contract was signed in March 1989. In parallel, a very basic experiment was performed on board the Chinese rocket Long March in August 1987, supported by CNES, and the first two MELiSSA PhDs were recruited by MATRA (e.g. Jean Francois Cornet and Christophe Lasseur). To our knowledge the first MELiSSA trainee was Remy Filali in CNRS Gif sur Yvette.