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 one of the more practical low-mass protein candidates studied for closed-loop systems. 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, but every one of those assumptions needs controlled testing.

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 might close, if the biology behaves under mission constraints.

That advantage compounds with distance, but the numbers are scenario models, not flight claims. In low Earth orbit the case is weak because resupply is available. On the lunar surface and Mars transit, where resupply becomes harder, the question becomes worth testing seriously.

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 can help narrow. We bring five years of T. molitor husbandry in working rooms and a private-beta software stack for batch-level insect operations, the same records discipline we use on terrestrial batches.

The brief is meant to shape rearing protocols, microgravity tolerance studies, and integrated bioregenerative life-support architecture questions with academic and payload partners. We contribute terrestrial husbandry and record structure; partners contribute the science questions and, eventually, test opportunities.

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