We don't really know how to create a self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, with everything on-hand. And the residents won't even all die if someone accidentally pokes a hole in the wall in the Antarctic prototype base.
Because they didnt want air going in or out of the biosphere they had to figure out a way to account for the massive change in volume as the air temperature inside changes between super hot days and cold nights, otherwise you'd blow the windows out of the thing during the day.
Shocking ...
Including humans seems to have caused most of the problems there. If you actually wanted to experiment with closed biological systems in a useful way then I'd recommend doing a bunch of trials with a less cantankerous species of large omnivorous mammal, like the goat.
>including humans seem to have caused most of the problems
I chuckled a bit at your reply hvd.
The hardest, seemingly intractable problems in the world aren't engineering problems, they are human ones. If we want to level up as a species those are the ones we will need to figure out how to solve.
At first, that seems completely impractical due to the enormous fuel costs but it turns out that if you are in this for the long term there is a way around that.
Getting around the solar system is expensive if you are in a hurry, but if you can take your time it can be cheap.
It is not just actual planetary bodies that a spacecraft can orbit. It turns out there are also orbits around Lagrange point. Some stable, some unstable.
If you want to get from planet A to planet B cheaply and aren't in a hurry, what you can do is first put your cargo container in an orbit around an appropriate A/Sun Lagrange point, then nudge it into a carefully chosen unstable orbit.
The unstable orbit gets farther and farther away from the Lagrange point. At some point, it crosses an unstable B/Sun Lagrange orbit, with a low enough delta-V between the two that a nudge can move it from the former to the later.
It then gets closer and closer to that B/Sun Lagrange point, until you reach a point where another nudge can move it into the same orbit as B, just ahead or behind. Another nudge gets it to B.
How long this takes depends on A and B, and it is all over the place. Some combinations take a decade or two. Some take hundreds of years. Some take thousands.
This then is a plan for a long term thinking civilization to colonize their solar system (I'm going to assume that they also call their planet "Earth" and a major moon of it "Moon"). First, get yourself a serious presence in Earth orbit and Moon orbit, and maybe also on the Moon. Anything you can make in one of those places that is needed for your deep space missions is a win because you won't have to get it out of Earth's gravity well.
When you've got to the point that you can produce a steady stream of unmanned space cargo containers loaded with non-perishable items in Earth orbit or Moon orbit, you can start moving them to appropriate Lagrange points, and nudging them into appropriate unstable orbits for the places you want to colonize.
It will take a long time, but when you have a good number of shipments accumulated at a place you want to colonize, you then send your colonists using the fast, expensive route. Note that your colonists only need to take enough supplies for the trip itself. (And they don't need to take return fuel if not everyone is going to stay, as that can be included in the pre-sent cargo).
Here are a few articles on this [1][2][3].
[1] http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/publications/papers/IPSAndOri...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...
[3] http://www.dept.aoe.vt.edu/~sdross/papers/AmericanScientist2...
Lifting objects from Earth's gravity well is expensive. There would be a better case for building extensive industrial base on the Moon, with its 0.16g gravity, and supplying all the distant bases from there.
You can, for example, plausibly build a space elevator on the Moon [1] with contemporary materials (even Kevlar would suffice), thus lowering the price tag enormously.
I fully support such activities.
Latency between Earth and the Moon is just enough to make realtime command a bit too rough to use I'd imagine, so I imagine we'd need at least low level autonomous tasks of "move resources from landing pad to storage" and "prepare build site" with enough intelligence to detect when these tasks hit an exception.
On top of that, I suspect we'd need enough robotic automation to be able to build, maintain and run whatever the thing is. That probably means several specialized robots (packing dirt for a foundation, deploying construction pieces, a crane) as well as some general robots for when things do go off script (haul away a broken robot, right a fallen pylon, remove debris).
Does this feel like something achievable in the next decade or two? Are there large pieces we're missing?
If attrition of the robots turns out to be a factor, it could still be solved like this: expect that an average robot can survive 6 months on the lunar surface. So send twenty of them to the remote base, build a cave for the reserve robots and "burn" through the reserve slowly. Every 4-5 years, send a human crew to replace or repair the dead robots.
Can be done, the main question is the price tag.
That is what needs addressing. That level of automatisation is the hard part about space.