Construction

Red Hen Industries has returned to SAM, and this time they brought more than a set rescued from a Hollywood landfill. founder Danica Vallone and manager Demian Vallone arrived with sculptors Steve, Kat, and Robert. This first of three crews will be on-site for one week, followed by the crew that will shoot concrete over the sculpted foam, and then the painters who apply the final look and feel of the Mars geology.

SAM team members Luna Powell, Matthias Beach, Sean Gellenbeck, and Kai Staats are on site, working in shifts to provide support and clean-up for the Red Hen team. This is following a month in specific preparation, each day crossing off items on the long list of TODOs, including the purchase of tools and products to support the foam carving, shipping a specific blend of concrete from the Arizona/California border, hanging 200 linear feet of plastic tarps from the roof structure to contain the foam bits and eventual concrete, and a system for containing the foam for eventual recycling or integration into “styrocrete” such that nearly none of the product ends up in the landfill.

Day 2 starts at 7 am tomorrow and runs again until 8 pm, and so on for nearly three weeks. Hollywood never sleeps!

The following is the weekly update written by Kai Staats to his team, as completed each week for the past three years.

SAM Working Group,

Matthias, Trent, Bindhu, and Kai (that’s me) found each other in Texas for the eclipse and an ad hoc post-viewing lunch. On the way back to Arizona Trent and Matthias visited the Midland human-rated vacuum chamber with intent to expand the CHaSE offerings for pressure suit and related equipment testing. I worked all day Friday on the drive out and back again Tuesday with phone calls and support of Luna’s research, coordination with Red Hen Industries, and more.

As we are all aware, following the highly successful Imagination I crew at SAM and our well deserved week off, we’ve been focused almost entirely on preparation for the final major construction effort at SAM—the Mars yard crater.

Here at SAM Luna, Matthias, and I have slipped into a modified work program—no longer pushing against an impossible list of TODOs at a breakneck velocity; rather we are moving day to day, hour to hour, focused on a sequential list of projects that need to be done in preparation for the Mars yard crater. Our list of TODOs is maintained more on the black board than in digital form, which is ok given that we are just one month from completion of this major build session and the Analog Astronaut Conference.

Luna has applied her expertise in research (and shopping) to a running list of key elements needed for SAM in the coming month. In particular, she has found the elusive Polybond cement mix required for shotcrete applied to the foam sculpt of the Mars yard crater, and after more a week of research and phone calls secured the required 76 bags, scattered as they are across the state.

Matthias has a solid list of TODOs, from Ops to the Mars yard to electrical work in the lung. Today Matthias and Kai made a Home Depot run to secure another trailer of primary supplies required for the Mars yard construction effort that begins next week. Matthias, Kai, and Luna will tomorrow (Thr) complete primary construction of the synthetic lava tube from rebar and a new, wood super-frame to provide greater stability before the spray foam and cement are applied.

Ezio and Franco made good progress on the new SIMOC Live stand-alone unit, a single Raspberry Pi Zero with sensors that serves both as a data collection point and web server for local or remote web visualization. It’s an impressive, compact unit that could easily be packaged in a case smaller than a deck of cards. First prototypes will be shipped to test agents and the Lunares habitat analog for extensive testing prior to the World’s Biggest Analog, in which each analog will receive a similar stand-alone or (more likely) an ad hoc mesh array (as was in SAM for Imagination I).

Jason has completed a revised and highly accurate 3D model of SAM (see top) following his visit in February. Bryan will tomorrow (Thr) deliver his updated Mars yard 3D model for use as a rough guide and visualization tool. I am working with Tasha (ASU) to build a set of hi-res images, again a guide for both the Red Hen and SAM teams.

Bindhu is working on an updated set of procedures for preparing SAM for team arrival, an updated Cuff List, design of the Med Bay, continued effort for the SAM photo book, an umbrella IRB, and more as these efforts carry into the summer between her adventures to Nebraska and Namibia.

Chris continues to support Ezio as they try to determine why the Raspberry Pi at SAM is going down every hour after a power outage (even with the UPS). Very frustration and confusing.

Sean is working with Dr. James Knox (formerly at NASA) for the CO2 scrubber design, preparing to host a 3 days workshop on algae here at B2 and SAM, and arriving to SAM in a week to assist Matthias with replacing the Mars yard poly panels in the midst of the chaos of the Mars yard crater construction.

Sadly, Ezio departs a week from Friday. He has been instrumental in the success of our SIMOC Live air quality monitoring and data collection program at SAM, and diligent in maintaining an organized approach to a highly complex project with many avenues to explore.

Cheers!
kai

“When Danica Vallone of Red Hen Industries and I first discussed her proposal for how to build the SAM Mars yard, over dinner with Grant Anderson in January, I had already spent several months pursuing a more traditional rebar, metal lath and concrete or fiberglass mold approach. The right vendor for the right price had eluded me, with prices doubling since my first calls in 2021. In my mind foam felt too soft and something of a crumbling mess that could never successfully simulate the many features of a Martian landscape.

In the midst of our mutually busy schedules we traded my project needs against her team’s prior examples, then dove into the complex logistics for what would be a breakneck velocity in construction to finish in time for the Analog Astronaut Conference at Biosphere 2, third year in a row. We had to construct 180 linear feet of a Mars crater wall around a 2,600 sq-ft facility—fully sculpted, covered in concrete, and hand-painted in just 13 days. Nuts!

Once I was convinced this was not only possible but that it was in fact the ideal combination of media, we had to figure out how to get everything in place, in time. Danica had to pull sculptors, plasterers, and painters in southern California with absolute calendar precision between myriad other, established projects including a gig at South-by-Southwest and the total solar eclipse. My team had to wrap-up restoration of our Operations Center, install a point-to-point WiFi transmitter; complete, install, and test SIMOC Live v2.0; install the new hydroponics rack, host the third crew at SAM, and build a synthetic lava tube from rebar, chicken wire, and burlap cloth. Why not?

We then dove into the long shopping list provided by Red Hen in preparation for Mars yard construction including two semi-truck loads of foam blocks, buckets, garden hoses, rolls of paper, massive plastic tarps, a new 60 gallon air compressor, and a pallet of a Polybond cement mix shipped from the Arizona-California border, and more.” –Kai Staats, Director of Research for SAM at Biosphere 2

We know that human will very likely live partially if not entirely underground on Mars, in habitats constructed in massive lava tubes or structured buried beneath a few meters of Martian regolith—all in the name of radiation mitigation.

Therefore a lava tube was integrated into the SAM Mars yard from the opening discussion. When the Mars yard was to occupy the entire indoor space, the lava tube as to be roughly 25 feet deep and 12 feet tall. But with the SAM workshop taking form and the Mars yard redesigned to fit 2,600 sq-ft (roughly half of the total, usable indoor space), the lava tube was reduced to 15 feet deep by ten feet wide and a sloping 7 foot to 4 foot height. Even this relatively small space is completely engrossing once inside, and ample to pitch a pressurized tent, which is exactly what we intend to do.

While we investigated several construction techniques and various materials, we decided rebar and steel mesh (“chicken wire”) covered in high density spray foam was the way to go (see Sculpting SAM: Days 4-6).

Two full truckloads of foam arrived, the blocks being 4’x4’x8′, 2’x4’x’8, and 2’x2’x8′ per our carefully planned order and design. They will be placed in their intended position for the Red Hen sculpting team, carved, then glued in place before being covered in sprayed concrete (“shotcrete”) and painted.

The process of carving the foam generates a heavy amount of waste, a form of plastic that is not readily recyclable. The SAM team researched ways in which the waste can be used and learned about “styrocrete”, a kind of concrete mix that blends styrofoam with sand, aggregate, and cement to form structural blocks. It is the intent of the SAM crew to capture and store every bit of the foam during the carving process, and then deliver the remnants to a concrete manufacturing facility.

We’ve been fully consumed with the fabrication of the Mars yard and preparation for our third crew to be sealed inside of SAM, such that these blog entries have fallen behind. We promise to catch up soon!

The work at SAM continues, with our third crew Imagination I entering SAM on March 10 for a six days, five nights mission of a very unique design and objective.

The Mars yard is now fully framed with 200 linear feet of 8 foot tall plywood walls that await the arrival of two semi-truck loads of foam blocks, to be sculpted into a synthetic Mars crater.

A new hydroponics prototype is complete and operational with transition from ebb ‘n flow to NFT (nutrient film technique) for an improved delivery of nutrients with no water exposed directly to light to reduce algae growth.

A point-to-point wireless bridge now brings stable, high-speed data from SAM to the SAM Operations Center, and a rebuilt SAM email server provides a new time-delay email server for the crew members sealed inside.

Two more days before training the crew!

Stay tuned!

Matthias, Luna, and Kai installed a four walled boundary and backstop for the massive foam blocks that will be carved into the new 2600 sq-ft Mars yard.

With the completion of the SAM Operations Center and Mission Control, it is imperative that we establish a point-to-point, ops-to-habitat wireless data feed in order that crewed missions are provided stable email communication, and for remote environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) monitoring.

With the first two missions at SAM (Inclusion I and II) the data feed was provided by a dedicated cellular hotspot with the dedicated email server placed in the adjacent Mars yard. It worked flawlessly despite the ad hoc nature of that particular configuration.

In the fall of 2023 the University of Arizona provided SAM Ops with a dedicated fiber optic drop that is mostly outside of the standard UA network, meaning we manage the provided network from the demarcation in. This provides us with a good bit of autonomy and room to expand our infrastructure as we stand-up servers internal to our Operations Center and at SAM too.

For the third crew at SAM, Imagination I, we completed the second prototype of SIMOC Live, a version of SIMOC that receives live data from an ad hoc, mesh network of sensors hosted by Raspberry Pi Zero computers. Each of the nodes, in this iteration, are mounted on a plate of aluminum which is itself mounted in four locations across the habitat: lung, Test Module, Engineering Bay, and Crew Quarters.

The data is immediately visible on a touch-screen display in the SAM Engineering Bay, and then via a light-travel time delay (1.3 seconds for the Moon; 7-20 minutes for Mars) in Mission Control where the data is projected onto a wall-mount silver screen.

This invaluable project brought Ezio Melotti and Franco Carbognani from Italy, Christopher Murtagh from Canada (via Mexico), together with Matthias Beach and Kai Staats of the SAM team at Biosphere 2. How all of these people came together is a story in and of itself.

Chris was once a user of Yellow Dog Linux and then became the systems administrator for Terra Soft Solution, Kai’s company of ten years that produced the leading YDL operating system. Kai has relied upon Chris’ expertise for more than twenty years across a few startups and dozens of projects, from super computers at Argonne National Lab to film rendering in India to life support monitoring on Mars.

Franco and Kai met quite serendipitously in Cork, Ireland where they both attended the International Space University Summers Studies Program 2017. Franco was then and remains now a Senior Engineer at VIRGO, the Italian gravitational-wave observatory. At that time Kai was working through Northwestern University as a data analyst for LIGO, the American gravitational-wave observatory. Franco brought to ISU his expertise in ad hoc networks and miniature sensor arrays for the IOT (internet of things) thesis project. Two years later Franco introduced Ezio to Kai to assist with SIMOC development. Ezio is a leading core Python developer with more than twenty years experience in developing the language, code development, and training. Regular SAM team member Matthias brings a strong background in IT infrastructure build-out and was fully at home pouring concrete, standing up communications towers, running cables, and testing ethernet drops. Kai Staats has a strong background in super-computing architecture, basic sys admin, and like Matthias, IT infrastructure build-out.

For everyone to converge at Biosphere for SAM was … a dream come true. We could not ask for more experience, expertise, and enthusiasm. Thank you!

Demian Vallone awoke at some ungodly hour only to stand outside the high bay doors of a Hollywood sound stage in the middle of a massive downpour while riggers and stage hands debated how, exactly, to load a massive Utah desert set onto the rented stick truck. He then drove from Los Angeles, California to Biosphere 2 fueled by little more than energy drinks, a journey that took more than ten hours. Late Thursday evening Demian arrived to SAM. Friday morning the forklift was delivered, then Demian, Kai, Matthias, and Ron Wood of the Biosphere 2 staff unloaded the multiple sections, one of which was quite tricky at 16 feet long.

Red Hen Industries is a full-service design and fabrication house with experiential designers, builders, inventors, and producers. Red Hen is contracted to design and build the SAM Mars yard and terrain park, what will be a world-class facility for experiential education and research.

This first piece of the SAM Mars yard was not part of the original design. This synthetic Utah landscape was built for a short-lived photo shoot, then found its way to SAM via Red Hen founder Danica Vallone who saw a unique opportunity to keep it out of the landfill, and at the same time, provide SAM with a good starting point.

Red Hen is a leader in reuse and recycle, and part of a group featured in this recent NPR story.

Following the test trolley runs, the Reduced Gravity Simulator was disassembled and taken down for a final coat of paint. Each component was labelled, cleaned, and painted. With the cooler temperatures the paint needed two full days to dry. Matthias, Luna, and Kai developed a system to lift the massive armatures to their higher, final position.

Following a full day of removing the basalt (simulated Mars regolith) by Matthias and Luna, each took turns tossing a pull line over the Mars yard roof support structure (we won’t mention the number of tosses required), then pulling a 600lbs nylon line over. With two pulleys for a 2:1 block and tackle lift, Kai used his climbing harness and belay device to hold the armatures steady between lifts by Matthias and Luna.

Once at the height of the small angle iron shelf already secured to the building support beams, the top and bottom U bolts were fastened. As with the first, lower position, aligning the ends of the armatures was relatively simple. Using the nuts on the U bolts themselves, the armatures were moved with a high degree of accuracy, to within 1/8th of an inch tip to tip.

The four sections of track were replaced, the machine screw holes aligning perfectly.

In this new, higher position, the original test trolley is a bit awkward to sit upon, but remains functional as an overhead system. The first gravity-offload will be built and tested soon.