3D Space Habitat Life Support

Case study

System parameters

Crew size 7

CO2 scrubber capacity 8.0 kg/day

Electrolysis O2 generator 9.0 kg/day

Water recycling efficiency 98%

Sabatier reactor
recovers H2O from CO2+H2

Cabin state

O2 (of cabin pressure)

21.0%

CO2 (of cabin pressure)

0.40%

Water reserve

500 kg

Mission day

0.0

Mass-balance verdict

Warming up…

How it works

This 3D cutaway runs the exact same real mass-balance integrator as the 2D version — nothing here is scripted. Cabin O2/CO2 are converted from kg to partial pressure via the ideal gas law over a 100 m³ module and used to color the cabin atmosphere volume live: green-tinted for healthy O2, reddening as CO2 climbs toward the real 0.5%/0.7% exposure limits.

2H2O → 2H2 + O2         (electrolysis: 1.125 kg H2O / kg O2)
CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 + 2H2O   (Sabatier: 0.818 kg H2O / kg CO2)
per crew/day: 0.84 kg O2 in, 1.00 kg CO2 out, 3.6 kg water used

Particles stream visibly from the crew cabin through the CO2 scrubber, into the Sabatier reactor (when active) and the electrolysis unit, and back — the same closed loop, just seen from any angle instead of a chart.

Case study presets — real historical system capacities: ISS's near-closed loop, Mir's partial recycling, Apollo/Skylab's open-loop LiOH canisters, Biosphere 2's undersized biological CO2 uptake.
Scrubber / generator capacity — maximum kg/day each subsystem can process; undersizing either relative to crew size drives drift toward failure.
Recycling efficiency — fraction of crew wastewater reclaimed back into the water reserve.

Real-world relevance: mission planners size ECLSS hardware with exactly this steady-state mass-balance math before a crew ever launches.

O2-rich flow CO2 flow Water flow

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