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Interstellar Lab could bring a Mars-ready, closed-loop village to the Mojave Desert

Space Settlement

Interstellar Lab could bring a Mars-ready, closed-loop village to the Mojave Desert

The Experimental Bioregenerative Station will be the first closed-loop, envrionment-controlled village on Earth. (Courtesy Interstellar Lab)

A Paris-based research group aims to build Mars simulators in California’s Mojave Desert. Designed as the first “closed-loop, environment-controlled villages” on Earth (although others have certainly tried before), the Experimental Bioregenerative Station (EBios) by Interstellar Lab will serve as a hospitality and science center for astronaut training, agricultural analysis, and tourists interested in learning how to live within the confines of extreme sustainability. 

Founded in 2018 by entrepreneur and investor Barbara Belvisi, Interstellar Lab’s mission is to study how humans could best live on Mars while simultaneously improving life on Earth amidst climate change. “Mars can help Earth right now,” reads the home page of their website. The firm’s seminal project, the EBios, would contain “regenerative life support technologies” like water treatment, waste management, food production, and nature preservation that would allow people to live completely off the grid as if they were in space. The site will be open as a tourist destination for part of the year.

Belvisi told Venture Beat that she’s already identified four possible sites within the Mojave Desert—the driest of its kind on the continent—where the EBios village could be built. She hopes to nail down a property by February. Belvisi’s team is made of up a handful of engineers, scientists, and an architect. They’ve already created a vision for the first EBios village (a very BIG-like design concept) which would be able to support up to 100 people. Glass-clad domes housing lush greenery would connect to futuristic-looking transport systems and clustered buildings covered in a metallic sheen.

So far, information on the acreage of the project has not been made public. Interstellar Lab is still in the process of raising money for the design and construction of the first EBios village, according to Venture Beat, and they are already in talks with NASA about its potential use for space-based government research. Belvisi wants to build a second EBios in Cape Canaveral, Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center.

Interstellar Lab said it wants to start building the Mojave Desert-location in 2021.

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