Interactive Calculator
The Reality Check
Pick your household size. The page calculates what you use every day, then scales it up to what 150 people would need to survive a year in space.
How many people live in your home?
Count everyone who sleeps there, drinks the water, and eats the food.
Your Household
— people, daily consumption
Annual totals
Water
—
Food
—
Waste
—
Toilet paper
—
150-Person Colony — 1 Year
Same daily needs as your house, multiplied out. No trips to the store. No deliveries. And zero slack if something breaks.
Total consumable mass
—
Water + food + oxygen only. Before packaging, hardware, or redundancy.
Why Recycling Changes Everything
Water is the heaviest thing you have to launch. Recycling is the only reason the math works at all. The ISS manages 93%, and that's with just six people.
Without Recycling
—
of water for 150 people, 1 year
Every single drop launched from Earth. At roughly $2,720/kg to low Earth orbit, that's — in launch costs just for water.
With 95% Recycling
—
of water needed — plus the recycling system
The ISS gets ~93% with 6 people. Scaling that to 150 means backup systems, spare parts, more pumps, and more filtration stages. None of that hardware exists yet.
The recycling hardware itself weighs about a ton, and the filters and pumps need regular replacement. See The Water Equation and The Food Ceiling for why these numbers don't shrink much further.
The Bottom Line
—
And that's only the consumables. It doesn't count spare parts, medical supplies, or any of the equipment that keeps everything running.