Atmosphere & Water
Recover water, control carbon dioxide, regenerate oxygen, monitor contaminants, and maintain safe pressure and humidity.
Read the deep dive →FEATURED SYSTEMS PROJECT
Project ALCHEMY
Designing a progressively self-reliant human settlement by connecting life support, food, energy, local resources, manufacturing, medicine, and habitat engineering into one system.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION
What would it take to make a distant settlement truly livable?
ALCHEMY treats settlement as a systems-engineering problem. No single technology makes a colony sustainable. The settlement survives only when its major loops support one another, contain redundancy, and can be repaired with the resources available.
Food & Biology
Develop crop systems that provide nutrition while contributing to water, air, and nutrient cycling.
Read the deep dive →Local Resources
Extract oxygen, water, minerals, and construction feedstocks from the destination instead of importing everything.
Read the deep dive →Manufacturing & Repair
Build a repair economy around reusable feedstocks, digital designs, additive manufacturing, machining, and inspection.
Read the deep dive →Energy
Provide reliable primary power, storage, backup generation, and load prioritization for life-critical systems.
Explore energy technology →Human Health
Account for radiation, reduced gravity, isolation, medical capability, sanitation, sleep, exercise, and long-duration human factors.
The Solar System Settlement Initiative
Compare the Moon, Mars, Venusian cloud habitats, Mercury, Titan, Enceladus, asteroid resources and rotating orbital cities using one systems-engineering framework.
Explore the Solar System Settlement Initiative →Related thinking: Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Isaac Arthur's independent educational series considers the design of orbital habitats, long-range travel and the social questions raised by space settlement. MKP offers its own engineering analysis and links to his original work with attribution.
Explore the credited SFIA recommendations and discussion questions →
ALCHEMY principle: close the loops
Every waste stream should be examined as a potential resource. Every critical function should have a backup path. Every imported consumable should be treated as a target for eventual local production or recycling.