The longest farm.

A crewed Mars transit runs about 1,100 days. At a NASA-baseline protein intake of 0.8 g/kg/day, a four-person crew consumes roughly 235 kg of dry protein over the mission. Mass you would rather not launch. Every kilogram grown in-flight is a kilogram you do not lift off Earth's gravity well.

Tenebrio molitor is, by every metric we can measure, the most launchable protein source studied. It converts substrate to body mass at 1.6:1, completes its rearing cycle in 80 days, and is 52% protein on a dry basis. It needs little water and less space, and it tolerates the cramped, variable conditions a spacecraft actually offers.

Crucially, mealworms metabolise lignocellulosic waste: the inedible plant matter a closed-loop habitat already produces. The frass they leave behind is a clean substrate for plant growth. Feed in the waste stream, harvest protein, return the residue to the garden: the loop closes.

That advantage compounds with distance. In low Earth orbit, resupply is cheap and in-situ rearing covers a tenth of demand. On the lunar surface it covers a half. On a conjunction-class Mars mission, where resupply is impossible for years, it must cover most of it. The further you go, the more the smallest farm matters.

Bioregenerative life support is not new. ESA's MELiSSA loop and Beihang University's Lunar Palace 1 have spent decades proving that closed ecological systems can sustain crews. What the field lacks is a production-grade insect protocol: husbandry that survives contact with a real operation rather than a sealed experiment.

That is the gap Entolab fills. We bring five years of T. molitor husbandry at production scale, and the only commercial software stack designed for batch-level insect operations, the same Platform our terrestrial customers run.

The program will author rearing protocols, microgravity tolerance studies, and integrated bioregenerative life-support architectures, in collaboration with agency and academic partners. We contribute the playbook and the data; partners contribute the flight opportunities and the science questions.

PRIOR ART · ESA MELiSSA · BEIHANG LUNAR PALACE 1 · OONINCX 2015 · KATAYAMA & TAKO 2018 · ENTOLAB INTERNAL 2024–26