SYDNEY: Australian-led scientists have designed a new space habitat that might one day allow astronauts on the Moon or Mars to be 90 to 95 per cent self-sufficient.

The development of such as system could save billions of dollars in shuttle trips to re-supply lunar or space colonies and brings closer the vision of a human habitat on Mars.

The technology could also have applications on Earth to develop more sustainable farming techniques and improve recycling processes.

Some systems to recycle water and air have already been developed and rudimentary versions are presently used in the International Space Station (ISS). However, the proposed new lunar habitat "combines our existing knowledge" of physical, chemical and biological processes to provide an "overall picture of how a minibiosphere would work," said James Chartres aerospace engineer at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. He gave a talk detailing the design at the Australian Space Science Conference held in Sydney last month.

The project is in some ways similar to the failed Biosphere 2 experiment, built in Arizona, U.S., in the late 1980s. Over an area of 12,000 m2, Biosphere housed a closed ecological system, incorporating a mini 'ocean' with coral reefs, as well as a grassland, desert, mangrove, rainforest and agricultural areas. Eight people survived in the habitat for two years, but a lack of food and low levels of oxygen hampered the experiment. Chartres detailed plans for a smaller, space-bound concept, dubbed Luna Gaia.

Devised by an international team of 30 space scientists, Luna Gaia would be a 'closed-loop' environment, meaning that almost all material within the system is recycled with very little need for input from outside sources. The current design caters for a team of 12 astronauts under isolation for up to three years.

Currently, recycling that occurs on the ISS is driven by chemical reactions. A big challenge to developing a totally integrated system is developing a biological recycling system said Chartres. He argues that for efficient recycling, microorganisms are required.

CONCORD, New Hampshire -- It's barely 8 a.m. as Chris Carberry stands in the middle of a field in the early morning sunlight, shivering slightly. He's waiting for Barack Obama, who is due to speak in about two hours. Obama volunteers are wary. Could Carberry be a researcher from the Clinton campaign? Or a dangerous nut? No, Carberry is a motivated man determined to see through his mission: to find out where each of the presidential candidates stands on Mars.

New Delhi plans to undertake 60 outer-space missions, including one to the moon, over the next five years, said Prithviraj Chavan, a junior minister in the prime minister's office, at the opening of the meeting.

India is seeking advances in satellite navigation, communications, space transportation and earth observation, Chavan told the 2,000 delegates in this southern Indian city.

"All this will provide increased opportunities for commercial and scientific cooperation with India," said Chavan, standing in for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is recovering from prostate surgery.

The delegates, including scientists, astronauts, satellite manufacturers and launchers, are to discuss how to profit from the expected strong growth in the space industry over the next decade.

Paris-based market research firm Euroconsult estimates the sector will grow to 145 billion dollars over the next 10 years, from 116 billion dollars in 1997-2006, as space-faring nations launch more satellites and deep-space probes.

Advances in space exploration can be expensive and risky, said Chavan, adding: "In the face of many pressing priorities, we can ill-afford the duplication of efforts and resources.

"The question today is not whether we should cooperate but rather, can we afford not to cooperate?"

India has already launched satellites to map natural resources, predict the weather and to boost telecommunications in rural areas, and is looking to put its almost five-decade-old space programme to commercial use.

This year marks the half-century of the space age ushered in by the October 1957 launch of the Sputnik-1 by the then Soviet Union, NASA administrator Michael Griffin noted.

In 2057, the centenary of the space era, "we should be celebrating 20 years of man on Mars," Griffin told an international astronautics congress in this southern Indian city where he outlined NASA's future goals.

The international space station being built in orbit and targeted for completion by 2010 would provide a "toehold in space" from where humanity can travel first to the moon and then to Mars, Griffin said.

"We are looking at the moon and Mars to build a civilisation for tomorrow and after that," Griffin added in his remarks at a conference session attended by heads of the world's space agencies.

President George W. Bush in 2004 announced an ambitious plan for the US to return to the moon by 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for manned missions to Mars and beyond.

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft is scheduled to land on the northern plains of Mars next year to determine if the Red Planet could support life.

The agency's Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit resumed their three-year-old mission this month after surviving giant dust storms that nearly destroyed the twin robots.

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.  Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.

Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather's spacesuit--think more Spiderman, less John Glenn.  Traditional bulky spacesuits "do not afford the mobility and locomotion capability that astronauts need for partial gravity exploration missions. We really must design for greater mobility and enhanced human and robotic capability," Newman says.

Newman, her colleague Jeff Hoffman, her students and a local design firm, Trotti and Associates, have been working on the project for about seven years. Their prototypes are not yet ready for space travel, but demonstrate what they're trying to achieve--a lightweight, skintight suit that will allow astronauts to become truly mobile lunar and Mars explorers.

Newman anticipates that the BioSuit could be ready by the time humans are ready to launch an expedition to Mars, possibly in about 10 years. Current spacesuits could not handle the challenges of such an exploratory mission, Newman says.

NASA weighs radiation danger in units of cancer risk. A healthy 40-year-old non-smoking American male stands a (whopping) 20% chance of eventually dying from cancer. That's if he stays on Earth. If he travels to Mars, the risk goes up.   The question is, how much?  "We're not sure," says Cucinotta. According to a 2001 study of people exposed to large doses of radiation--e.g., Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors and, ironically, cancer patients who have undergone radiation therapy--the added risk of a 1000-day Mars mission lies somewhere between 1% and 19%. "The most likely answer is 3.4%," says Cucinotta, "but the error bars are wide."

The odds are even worse for women, he adds. "Because of breasts and ovaries, the risk to female astronauts is nearly double the risk to males."  Researchers who did the study assumed the Mars-ship would be built "mostly of aluminum, like an old Apollo command module," says Cucinotta. The spaceship's skin would absorb about half the radiation hitting it.  "If the extra risk is only a few percent… we're OK. We could build a spaceship using aluminum and head for Mars." (Aluminum is a favorite material for spaceship construction, because it's lightweight, strong, and familiar to engineers from long decades of use in the aerospace industry.)

JIM LEHRER: Now, the mission of NASA. The space agency announced today that it plans to launch the latest shuttle mission sooner rather than later. But even as NASA prepares for another launch, it's making plans for a very different future.

NewsHour correspondent Tom Bearden has our Science Unit report.

TOM BEARDEN, NewsHour Correspondent: The space shuttle, the icon and workhorse of America's human space program, is just three years from retirement, so NASA is now looking to the future, planning a whole new chapter in manned spaceflight, a whole new fleet of rockets and crew capsules, and a demanding new mission to send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually to mount a mission to Mars. It's a vision that was laid out by President Bush in 2004.  GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States: We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the Moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own.

TOM BEARDEN: NASA is currently designing the vehicles that the agency hopes will put astronauts back on the Moon by 2020, almost 50 years after Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind." Jeff Hanley manages NASA's program to develop new manned spaceflight systems.

JEFF HANLEY, NASA: Mars is the edge of the edge of the frontier. And the frontier is where we really test the limits of human endurance and really push technology to the extent of being able to improve life back here for the rest of the planet's inhabitants.

In three years, the US will lose the ability to send astronauts into space, and it will have to rely on Russia to travel to the International Space Station, the head of NASA said.  The space shuttles, which debuted in 1981, will be retired in 2010 and new spaceships will not be ready until four-and-a-half years later.

"I think personally that it is unseemly for the greatest nation in the world, today's pre-eminent space-faring nation, to be in a position where we have no other choice but to buy rides from Russia," said NASA administrator Michael Griffin in an interview with Reuters.

"I just don't think that's a good spot," added Griffin, who was at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida for the launch of the shuttle Atlantis, one of 16 flights before the shuttle program shuts down.

This mission is to install the third of four sets of solar power panels on the station in preparation for the arrival of European and Japanese laboratories later this year.  But while Russian capsules can take astronauts to the space station, US shuttles are the only space vehicles capable of delivering the larger components of the $US100 billion ($A119.1 billion) space station, an orbital research outpost that is slightly more than halfway built and is a project of 16 nations.  The situation may be even worse than it appears for the world's sole remaining superpower. A law intended to stem weapons proliferation prohibits NASA from buying space hardware and services from Russia because of aid it is believed to have given Iran in developing missile technologies.

Created by NASA a decade ago, the institute is headquartered at the Baylor College of Medicine, where it draws on experts from more than 60 universities and smaller research groups to help overcome the health obstacles of a deep space mission.

The search for life beyond our own home planet presents an amazing and profound opportunity for umanity. In so doing we seek to answer the age-old question, are we alone? For the first time in history, our civilization has created the technologies to allow us to extend our own senses beyond this planet. So far we have done this by sending our automated emissaries to the other worlds in our own solar system and by using immense telescopes to peer far beyond what our own eyes can see.

Recent discoveries have fueled our interest in the possibility of life elsewhere: the presence of ice on our moon's poles by the Lunar Prospector; the Galileo's evidence of oceans on Europa (and now Callisto too!); and the Hubble Space Telescope's views of collapsing protostars in the Orion nebula.  These tools have allowed us to expand our understanding of the universe at a pace and scope unmatched by any previous generation.  These tools have also allowed us to act upon our dream of actually locating life far beyond our own birthplace.