Paper short abstract:

Melissa is a European Space Agency project of micro-ecological plant for spaceflight, providing crew with air, water and food and recycling waste using microbes. We unpack the eco-futurist politics of anticipation at stake in this vision of a minimal, earthless, and thoroughly human-controlled biosphere.

Paper long abstract:

The history of intersection between space research and the life sciences includes a number of attempts to build closed artificial ecosystems that anticipate space travel and colonization using infrastructures able to sustain human and non human life outside Earth. Our presentation focuses on the Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (Melissa) which has been orchestrated and funded by the European Space Agency for 25 years and whose pilot plant is in Barcelona (UAB). Melissa consists of a succession of bio-reactors harnessing the capacities of microbial strains and communities to treat waste and produce biomass and oxygen, with the aim of providing astronauts with the amount of air, water and food they require for many years. Drawing on a socioethnographic investigation (interviews, observation of the infrastructure), we will account for how Melissa paradoxically intertwines a future of space conquest (i.e. emancipation from terrestrial resources) and a future of sustainability (better management of the limited terrestrial resources). We propose to depict the eco-futurist politics of anticipation at stake by suggesting that Melissa is about building a minimal, earthless and human-controlled biosphere which still provides humans with all the "services" they need. Far away from the composting practices described by Abrahamson and Bertoni (2014) in terms of multispecies contamination and co-learning, Melissa suggests the utopian anticipation of a synthetic biosphere that would exclude all the opacity, diversity and future-making capacities of microbial life to the profit of the sole expansion of human control - with critical consequences for collective futures well beyond the Melissa project.