the experiment showed that prolonged confinement led to sleep disorders, fatigue, and depression. before the first crew can be sent to mars for the long haul. space agencies need to figure out how to overcome the tedium, personality conflicts and emotional toll of extended separation from loved ones. - [marc] crews going to mars will be training together for at least a couple of years. so they're gonna work out the kinks. they're gonna find out how to work together, because that's the real key in any kind of situation like this. - [narrator] with mars simulations like this, we'll definitely be able to solve the technical and psychological challenges of establishing the base on mars and forge a path to the future of life in space. (upbeat synths begin playing) in the futur researcherst the international ma base make a remarkable discovy. a particular rock specimen complete changes the way

humanity thinks of its place in the universe. the sample confirms that ancient fossils, similar to those found on earth, also exists on mars. this rock reveals that the complex rces that cause life to evolve are not uncommon. in principle, life, possibly even complex and intelligent life. may have evolved across the universe. (adventurous synths begin playing) - while the first research station on mars is likely to be small and scrappy. a long term base with dozens or even hundreds of people. would need more in the way of complex facilities and buildings. however, transporting the materials to build large scale, heavy duty habitats from earth unfeasible. how can we build a permanent outpost using what's already on the red planet? i'm in brooklyn, new york, to meet a design team with the unique solution.

- [michael] so this is a mars ice house. - that's a habitat? - that's a habitat. - rebeccah pailes-friedman and michael morris run the forward thinking firm. space exploration architecture, also called search+. they won nasa's international mars habitat design competition. - [michael] what we do is we design habitats for humans to be in outer space. - [rebecca] we use indigenous materials, materials that are native to the planet and we create a beautiful living experience. that's also functional for the astronauts. - [narrator] but that's easier said than done with the red planets lethal environment. - [michael] the primary goal will be to protect against radiation from both solar rays as well as cosmic galactic rays. the best material to protect against radiation is actually water. which makes up most of our atmosphere. - [narrator] and mars does have plenty of water ice to work with.

on earth, we're largely protected from harmful cosmic radiation. thanks to our thick oxygen-rich atmosphere and magnetic fields. but with barely any atmosphere, the surface radiation on mars is hazardous. high energy particles from the cosmicays dama human dna and can increase the risk of diseases like cancer. - so like our atmosphere, protecting us here on earth. we thought, why not build an ice house? we created this double shell structure for additive protection, but also to have a bigger space. - that is so cool. - part of our objective was like, if we go all the way to mars, why should we live in a cave or a concrete bunker? people should be able to look outside, look at the strangeness of the landscape, but they should also receive the daylight, which is very similar to our own here on earth. they have 25 hour days and they have about 50% of the light that we receive here on earth. - [narrator] with a long term settlement,

we'll need dwellings that are more complicated than what you can build with just ice. the search team has a mind blowing solution to that too. using the mineral rich martian soil, regolith. - [michael] this is mars x house. x house, the objective was to build with martian regolith or concrete. we mined the exterior shell from the soil and we mined the interior pressure bubble out of high density polyethylene that we drew from the atmosphere. so it was actually mining the sky and mining the soil to eate one building. - [narrator] another crucial innovation is that this habitat is constructed before the astronauts arrive. - it's built by the time they get there. and then when they get there, they can just do the work that they need to do. - [narrator] and the team has devised one far t method for building these pre-fabricated dwellings remotely. - all the buildings that we've been designing are all 3d printed. - w. that is so cool. - search+'s plan calls for construction robots

to be nt to rs in advance to build the habitats using 3d printg technology. - there are no constructn workers on site. we have to anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong and design that beforehand. - [narrator] but these incredible structures, aren't just computer models. the design team is working with state-of-the art 3d printers to make versions of them in real life. using a mix of materials, similar to martian soil. the printers build actual freestanding versions of search+'s structures. the future of this breakthrough technology is much closer than i could've imagined. - we'll be building a habitat on the surface of mars by 2028. - incredible. and - - so that, i know that doesn't sounlike close, but that sounds pretty close to us. - i mean and that sounds incredible to me. that's absolutely amazing. - [narrator] innovative designs using materials found on mars will pave the way for the first settlers to arrive, to move-in ready homes.

but what will happen when the supplies they brought with them run out? they'll need food and oxygen to survive in this alien hostile environment. for humans to create civilizations anywhere in space. we'll need to build self-contained and self-sustaining ecosystems that work like our own planet. but how can we build water cycles and farm and desert wastelands, like the moon and mars? i'm outside tucson, arizona, where researchers have been conducting decades of groundbreaking research to achieve this ambitious feat. - [joaquin] this is a grand experiment in earth sciences. started about 30 years ago, trying to understand how the earth works. they decided the only way they could truly understand how the earth controls itself, is by creating a facsile of it. this is called biosphere 2, as we live in biosphere one. - [narrator] dr. joaquin ruiz is the director of biosphere two.

- [justin] it almost reminds me of like a palace. (laughs) not like a laboratory or research environment, but more like a science palace. can you tell us about what's going on here in high level? - sure. right in front of us is the rainforest, you have a big ocean and then you have a desert. - [narrator] it was an audacious idea. build a small scale version of earth, in completely closed quarters. in a matter of years, they recreated a wide array of ecosystems that originay took billions of years on earth to evolve. to succeed, biosphere 2 needed to be completely self-contained and sealed off with nothing brought in or taken out. - [biosphere volunteer] we have to recycle the nutrients. we're recycling our water, our air. we're recycling everhing. - [narrator] in 1991, 8 volunteers of biospherians lived inside biosphere 2 for two full years.

like a future habitat on mars, biosphere 2 had to be perfectly thought out and highly engineered. the health and safety of future explorers depended on its success. any habitat on mars would need to remain completely sealed off from the toxic environment that surrounds it. but keeping it sealed and structurally sound is a near impossible task. sudden changes in internal air pressure could destroy the structure itself. so, the engineers of biosphere 2 came up with this innovative solution called the lung. and deputy director john adams takes me inside. - [john] we're going into the lung of biosphere 2. and when it was originally constructed, they designed it to be hermetically sealed. but they knew that they had to deal with changes in pressure. and this is the device, that they came up with to compensate for that. (door unlatches) - [justin] whoa.

- [john] this is just a remarkable structure from an engineering perspective. - [justin] i didn't expect to walk in and see this. - [narrator] the lungs are connected to the rest of t biosphere by a series of tunnels to continuously balance the air pressure inside. - [john] what we're standing inside of is an extremely large diaphragm. and that diaphragm helps to modulate pressure inside the facility as it has a counterweight and aluminum dish. - yeah. - flexible rubber membrane. the combined weight of those two is 40,000 pounds. and the only thing that's keeping it up in the air, as you see it right now is differential air pressure. - wow. that is etty insane. - [narrator] this weighted rubber diaphragm regulates the two basic kinds of air pressure at work. as the temperature outside gets up, the air inside the biosphere warms and expands. inside the lungs, the increasing air pressure pushes up against the weighted flexible diaphragm. withouthe diapagm's flexibity, their presse

would shatter the glass of this here habitat. in space, an incident like this would be deadly. as the air in the biosphere 2 cools and contracts at night, the weight of the diaphragm presses down. by reacting to the changing of air pressure, the biosphere 2's lungs continuously adjust. applying the right amount of force to keep the air pressure even, throughout the closed system habitat. - [john] this is where air travels back and forth. as we modulate the pressure changes within the facility. - [narrator] on the red plant, temperatures can fluctuate more than one hundred degrees celsius over the course of a single day. which means a feature like these lungs, is essenal to any future mars habitats. and to sustain life, these habitats must cycle and recycle the air for humans to breathe. and also grow plants for food. on earth, this process links animals and plants.

animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. plants absorb that co2 and discharge oxygen. the biosphere, this fundamental cycle is recreated with the recreate with the rainforest. researcher laura meredith is conducting an experiment to test its resilience. - [laura] alright, so i'll show you the rainforest. (soft piano music begins) so this is almost 30 year old tropical forest. - [justin] this is beautiful. - [laura] yeah. it's nice. even three weeks into drought, it's pretty green. some of the trees are dropping their leaves. the soils are drying out. but really i think this rainforest is showing us that it has quite a bit of resilience. - [narrator] in the rainforest, plants absorb humans waste carbon dioxide the inhabitants breathe out. this subsequently helps the plants grow and in the process also creates oxygen for the inhabitants to survive. growing a stable, resilient plant ecosystem

will be essential to the survival of any future inhabitants of the moon or mars. however, the first biospherians weren't so lucky. 16 months in, the oxygen levels dropped precipitously. it turns out there was something the original designers, underestimated. microbes. microbes in the soil and in biosphere 2 cement. absorbed more oxygen and released more co2 than originally estimated. nearly leading to disaster. fortunely for e biosphians, they intervened and used additional machinery to pump in oxygen. in space, an oversight like this would be catastrophic. which is why it's important to simulate and fully test a system like this, before building a biosphere on another planet. - because it's a closed system. you really need to understand how your ecosystem works. biology is really incredible in its resilience, and that's something that you would really wanna have as a component of your ecosystem on another planet.

- can we create a closed living system like this one on mars? - it's an immense challenge to put together all the complex components, but i am sure that we can create one. (upbeat synths begin playing) - [narrator] thanks to the original founder's dream. biosphere 2 is a reality. and while this living laboratory has had many challenges, biosphere 2 is providing crucial insights into ways humanity can build self-contained ecosystems. it's innovations like this that will forge a path to future long term settlements on the moon or mars. - [justin] i think it's really gonna take the entirety of society's focus for us to really sta expediting the process of getting people to mars. but i think one of the things, that a few scientists brought up that i spoke with, was this idea that we should focus on keeping our home here habitable and not trying to run to other places.

- [narrator] some argue, why spend billions of dollars to get to mars when we could be using this money in ingenuity to solve existing problems on earth, like poverty, disease, and climate change. - ould we ee this anet? if we can't figure out how to live wisely and live well on this planet. i think we've been given quite a treasure here in this little third rock from the sun. - but kathryn also thinks humans are destined to set foot on the red in some way. - i think it's certainly technically possible to have a sustainable habitat on mars. and it's very, it's conceivable that it could happen within the next couple decades. (computer beeping rapidly) - [micel] the technical challenges are pretty immense. it's gna take thousands of people to work on this and concentrate on it at the same time. but we feel that it's important that humans see these planets firsthand and we will actually, we'll learn more. - [narrato others look at the greater good that can come from the breakthroughs. - it's not gonna be cheap. it's gonna be difficult.

and we're gonna need to push towards a common goal to get people to mars. and hopefully beyond eventually, and every time we are able to accomplish something like this, we can then brg that technology back to earth. and the more advanced these technologies get, the more advanced the technologies on earth get. and i think that's hugely beneficial. - [narrato and the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe, could have a profound impact on humanity. - i think the odds of us being the only life on the universe is very low. (laughs) i think there's life somewhere. so that's again, why it's critical for us to actually continue to explore, to continue to look outward. because i do think eventually we're gonna findomebody else. - [narrator] as a scientist that's long dreamed of exploring space, i'm excited about overcoming the challenges that will lead us to become a true space exploring civilization.

- [justin] getting humans on mars and settling and a civilization. i'd love to see that in my lifetime. will i see it in my lifetime? i'm pretty sure. (dramatic music ends) (slow percussion music begins) (computer beeping) (slow percussion music ends)