Every Heliphere system is designed into the same envelope: the 20ft ISO container — the one cargo unit the entire planet is already tooled to move, lift, and stack. A single standardised interface panel connects every module to every other, so a site is configured, not constructed.
A 20ft ISO container is the only cargo envelope the entire planet is already tooled for — and that is the decisive argument for the standard. By road it rides any skeletal trailer, and a sidelifter truck can self-deliver a module with no crane on site. By rail it locks onto container flatcars on every containerised network in the world. By sea it loads onto any of the ~7,500 container ships in service, down to the smallest island feeder vessel.
Siting needs are minimal: a compacted gravel pad or concrete strip footings at the corner castings, plus a mobile crane or reach-stacker for placement — a ~10–20 t lift for most fitted modules. For air mobility, a C-17 carries a fully laden 20ft box with margin to spare, and the military three-into-one shelter pattern — three sub-containers locking into one certified 20ft footprint — is the standard's sub-division path for tactical airlift. A module built and factory-tested anywhere can reach almost any point on Earth — port, railhead, desert pad, or ice shelf — using only handling equipment that already exists there.
| External | 6,058 × 2,438 × 2,591 mm (ISO 668 designation 1CC, the standard 20ft dry container). One TEU — the base unit of the entire global shipping industry. |
|---|---|
| Internal | ~5,898 × 2,352 × 2,393 mm, giving ~33.2 m³ of usable volume; door aperture ~2,343 mm wide × 2,280 mm high. |
| Payload | Tare ~2,200–2,300 kg; maximum gross mass 30,480 kg per ISO 668; net payload ~28,200 kg. A fully fitted Heliphere module design typically runs 8–20 t — well inside the envelope. |
| Stacking | Eight corner castings per ISO 1161, secured with standard twist-locks; structural testing per ISO 1496-1. Certified 9 high fully laden (213,360 kg allowable stacking mass at 1.8g on post-2005 builds) — multi-storey sites need no external steelwork. |
| High Cube baseline | Proposed Heliphere baseline: the 20ft High Cube (2,896 mm external, ~37.4 m³). The extra 305 mm of height becomes a dedicated overhead services zone above a full-height 2.4 m working volume — the same trick containerised data centres use. |
| Certification | CSC (International Convention for Safe Containers, 1972) safety plate with periodic re-examination; identification per ISO 6346. A CSC-plated module is, in regulatory terms, just cargo — it clears any port on Earth without special permits. |
The Heliphere Standard Interface (HSI) is Heliphere’s design standard for the module interface. Every module carries an identical recessed, weather-hooded connection panel in the same position on one end wall. Seven standardised buses — power, three water classes, air, thermal, and data — use industrially proven connector families, each colour-coded and mechanically keyed so that mis-connection is physically impossible. Modules compose like components on a backplane: any output can feed any compatible input, unused ports are simply capped, and adding a capability to a site means trucking in one more box and connecting jumpers — hours, not months.
The Heliphere Standard Interface — every module carries the same keyed, colour-coded connection panel, so any output can feed any compatible input and Helix's flow graph maps one-to-one onto real hoses and cables.
| Bus | Specification | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Electrical — primary DC | Proposed 380 VDC distribution bus; touch-safe high-current connectors (250–400 A, IP67); IEC 62477 / UL 62368 safety framework. | Nearly every source and load is DC-native — PV, batteries, electrolysers, LED lighting. A shared DC bus removes two to four conversion stages per energy path, and 380 VDC is the established telecom and data-centre standard. |
| Electrical — secondary AC | 400/230 VAC three-phase 50 Hz (60 Hz variant for Americas builds) via IEC 60309 industrial connectors, 63 A and 125 A frames. | Keeps every module compatible with commodity industrial equipment — pumps, chillers, instruments — and lets urban sites tie to grid power as a backup input. |
| Potable water | DN25 (1″) food-grade stainless dry-break coupling, blue-coded and mechanically keyed; ~2–4 m³/h per connection. | Dry-break couplings seal both halves before separation, so nothing contaminates the potable circuit. The unique diameter and keying make cross-connection to grey or black lines geometrically impossible. |
| Greywater | DN50 (2″) cam-and-groove coupling (EN 14420-7), grey-coded, self-sealing check valve at the panel; ~10–20 m³/h. | Cam-and-groove is the universal industrial fluid-transfer standard — compatible fittings are stocked everywhere on Earth, so field repair is trivial. |
| Blackwater | DN80 (3″) cam-and-groove coupling, black-coded, panel-mounted knife-gate isolation; vacuum and macerator-pump compatible. | 3″ camlock is what the world's sanitation industry already speaks — a site can fall back to conventional waste handling during commissioning, then close the loop in normal operation. |
| Air | Paired DN315 spiral-duct spigots (EN 1506) with quick-release band clamps, motorised isolation dampers, HEPA-capable filter frames; ~1,400 m³/h per pair. | Air is a loop resource, not just ventilation: CO₂-rich air feeds grow zones and humid exhaust is a water-recovery input. Isolation dampers let Helix quarantine a module's atmosphere on a quality-gate breach. |
| Thermal (glycol loop) | DN40 supply/return pair, 35% propylene glycol; flat-face non-spill couplings; −20 °C to +90 °C; ~30–70 kW per pair. | Every module either rejects heat or wants it. A single shared glycol standard turns waste heat into a routable resource that Helix can dispatch like any other loop flow. |
| Data + safety interlock | Dual 1000BASE-T Ethernet on M12 X-coded IP67 connectors, wired as a redundant ring carrying MQTT; separate hard-wired dry-contact interlock loop (E-stop, pressure breach, fire). | Dual ports give every module two physical paths to the edge node — a single cut cable never blinds Helix. Life-safety trips run on copper, independent of any software stack (IEC 61508 practice). |
None of this is speculative packaging. Function after function has already been engineered into the ISO container and shipped at scale — Heliphere’s contribution is making those functions feed each other.
Complete controlled-environment farms — thousands of plant sites, lighting, climate, nutrient dosing and automation — ship as a single high-cube box and grow food from the Arctic to the desert.
Food production is already a container product. Heliphere’s food modules extend the category and plug its inputs and outputs into the other loops.
Seawater reverse-osmosis plants producing hundreds of cubic metres a day are pre-engineered, assembled and tested inside one container — commissioning happens at the factory, not the site.
Exactly the delivery model Heliphere’s water modules assume: arrive tested, connect, run.
Grid-scale battery storage now packs multiple megawatt-hours of cells, thermal management and fire suppression into a standard 20ft container; utility sites are built by placing and cabling rows of them.
The energy-storage industry independently converged on the 20ft ISO envelope as its universal module — the strongest external validation of the architectural bet.
Militaries deploy kitchens, showers, laundries and clinics as ISO-footprint modules that survive rough intermodal and tactical handling — and subdivide the 20ft footprint when aircraft are the only way in.
Human life-support functions have decades of proof inside ISO envelopes. Defence, a core Heliphere market, already procures this way.
Hundreds of servers with integrated high-density liquid cooling ran inside a 20ft box two decades ago; modular edge data centres are standard product today.
Precision environmental control — tens of kilowatts of heat rejection inside tight temperature and humidity bands — is a mature engineering pattern, not a research problem.
Permanent, crewed Antarctic stations are built as assemblies of around a hundred containers — laboratories, quarters, kitchen, hospital, power plant — inside a protective shell raised above the ice.
Standard modules inside, environment-specific armour outside: the exact pattern for cold-climate and space-analogue sites.
Modules placed end-to-end or side-by-side along a single shared utility corridor; HSI jumpers daisy-chain each bus down the line, and the site grows by appending boxes at either end. Every module remains individually liftable and swappable.
Two parallel rows of modules with their HSI end walls facing a central covered service street. Every connection lives in one protected, walkable corridor: shortest jumper runs, all couplings serviceable out of the weather.
Modules stacked two to three high on their own corner castings and twist-locks — the ISO frame is certified for nine-high, so no external structure is needed. Heavy modules sit low; light ones ride high.
Modules arranged around a central shared volume — a commons, greenhouse atrium, or airlock node — with each HSI panel facing inward to the protected core. The courtyard doubles as social space and circulation spine.
Modules or small clusters separated by tens of metres, linked by buried or armoured HSI trunk runs. Physical separation provides fire and blast isolation, N+1 redundancy across duplicated modules, and a harder target profile.
These are reference designs — configurations the Heliphere standard specifies, sized from published equipment specs and commercial precedents, not hardware in production. Every module fits the same box and carries the same interface.
Seawater RO train with energy recovery, atmospheric water generator, rain-catchment conditioning, and transfer pumps — biome-configured for maritime, arid, or tropical sites.
Low-pressure RO/UF polishing, remineralisation, UV and chlorine-residual disinfection, ~10 m³ potable reserve, distribution pumping, per-branch metering and leak detection.
Screening and grit removal, membrane bioreactor with aeration, ultrafiltration, activated-carbon polishing, and UV disinfection — output splits between direct reuse and potable polishing feed.
Vacuum-toilet interface, solids separation, heated anaerobic digester, biogas scrubbing and buffering, digestate polishing; solids containerise directly for the Materials loop.
Urine stabilisation, struvite precipitation, nitrification, ion exchange, and pharmaceutical polishing — produces certified-quality liquid fertiliser concentrate for the Food loop.
Mechanical vapour-recompression brine concentrator, crystalliser, and salt bagging; distillate returns to the potable pathway and mineral solids go to the Materials loop.
Full air-handling unit: filtration bank, catalytic trace-contaminant reactor, UV-C stage, dehumidification with condensate capture, heating and cooling coils, zone damper manifold.
Regenerable solid-amine and molecular-sieve CO₂ beds, electrochemical capture stack, CO₂ compression and buffering, routing manifold to grow zones and mineralisation.
PEM electrolyser stack, O₂ drying and buffer cylinders, H₂ export to the energy loop, gas-detection safety chain, and a medical-O₂ backup concentrator.
CO₂ injection and distribution, high-capacity dehumidification with condensate recovery, canopy circulation fans, grow-light heat rejection, ethylene scrubbing, VPD control.
Counterflow plate heat exchangers, regenerable carbon and HEPA polishing beds, controlled vent and recirculation dampers; the sealed variant swaps venting for make-up gas injection.
Vertical hydroponic and aeroponic rack walls with nursery station, LED arrays, recirculating nutrient dosing, dehumidification, and a Helix edge sensor node.
High-PPFD growth racks configured for dwarf wheat, potato, and soy, with elevated CO₂ dosing and intensive thermal management — calories, not vegetables, are the hard problem.
Recirculating fish tanks (~10 m³ total), drum filter, moving-bed biofilter, UV sterilisation, degassing and aeration, and integrated plant grow beds.
Two climate cells in one box: black-soldier-fly rearing trays with nursery, mushroom fruiting rooms, substrate pasteuriser, and frass and substrate handling.
Flat-panel and tubular algae photobioreactors with LED illumination, plus a sterile fermentation vessel, harvest centrifuge, and drying line.
Wash and pack line, dehydrator, mill, blast chiller, and insulated cold store, with food-safety monitoring tied into Helix.
Core bay plus a deployment magazine of folded arch frames, ETFE membrane rolls and stacked NFT channels that unfold from the door end into a ~120 m² tented, sunlit canopy — the growing area of eight boxes from one, with sunlight carrying the lighting load.
Two full-length accordion stacks of 46 leaves along the side walls, electrical spine down the centre; the wings fold outward through the side walls into a ~100 kWp, ~520 m² array. Two boxes make the HELIPHERE ONE field.
Liquid-cooled LFP battery racks, 250–500 kW power conversion system, battery management, fire detection and suppression, and dedicated HVAC.
PEM electrolyser stack, water deioniser, H₂ drying and compression, O₂ capture manifold, and safety venting with leak detection — the site's surplus-power sink.
PEM fuel-cell genset with product-water capture, plate heat exchangers, a stratified hot-water store, and a hydronic distribution manifold.
Microgrid switchgear, hybrid inverters, solid-state breakers, per-zone smart PDUs, Helix edge node and EMS compute, and a black-start battery.
Anaerobic digester vessels, biogas cleanup, a 20–50 kWe biogas CHP genset, and an exhaust CO₂ capture line to grow zones — loop closure, not primary generation.
Indirect two-loop design study: 8 MPa CO₂ primary fluidising a 250 kg TRISO bed, gyroid IHX, 20 MPa recuperated sCO₂ Brayton with CHP — 3.0 MWth → ~1.15 MWe net plus ~1.1 MWth of glycol heat inside the container width at ~28 t. Passive three-tier decay-heat removal, drums plus B₄C particle injection for shutdown. First-order design basis at ±40 %, with a defined verification programme.
Weigh station, bag opener, trommel screen and sort line, NIR resin scanner, twin-shaft shredder, waste-heat dryer, and sealed per-fraction storage bays.
Rotating-drum in-vessel composter, forced-aeration blowers, exhaust biofilter, curing bay, screening deck, and multi-depth temperature, O₂, and moisture instrumentation.
~20 m³ heated mesophilic digester, macerator feed system, gas holder, H₂S scrubber, digestate separator, and gas composition analysis.
Auger-fed slow-pyrolysis reactor (450–600 °C), feed hopper and dryer, syngas combustor, char quench and bagging station, and O₂ safety interlocks.
Plastics granulator, wash and dry line, filament and pellet extruder, large-format and FDM printers, CNC mill, and a hand-tool workshop for on-demand spares.
Jaw crusher and sieve deck, mixer, compressed-earth block press, sealed CO₂ carbonation curing chamber, and a compression test rig.
Full-length-stowed folding-gantry construction printer (two 11.6 m spans) fed by the site’s own by-products — local fines, biochar, recycled polymer, CO₂-cured or geopolymer binder — printing the habitat shell (quarters, living space, labs, workshops) that the modules plug into.
Helix edge node and MQTT broker, site comms, workshop bench, and spares inventory — the control plane that runs quality gates, routing, forecasting, and audit reporting, offline-first.
Crew quarters, galley, and sanitation as conventional containerised accommodation; sanitation plumbs directly into the water and materials loops, and galley scraps go to composting.
HELIPHERE ONE is the design exercise that sizes everything else: a four-crew outpost of eleven 20ft containers — nine in the block plus two HE-01 panel magazines that unfold into a ~200 kWp PV field — arranged as a back-to-back H-block around a covered HSI service street. It is the reference design — every number below is a design target drawn from NASA BVAD values and the module capacities above.
Nine 20ft modules in a back-to-back H-block around a covered HSI service street, fed by two HE-01 panel magazines unfolded into a ~200 kWp field beside it. Every connection lives in one protected, walkable corridor.
| Module | Count | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Grow Module (HF-01 class) | 2 | Fresh produce and partial staples: ~10–20% of crew calories, most fresh mass and micronutrients; transpiration recovered to the water loop. |
| Water Module | 1 | ~90–95% site water closure; produces potable water, irrigation water, and N/P/K nutrient concentrate for the grow modules. |
| Air & Thermal Module | 1 | Air quality for habitat and grow zones; harvests crew and crop water vapour as condensate; moves waste heat to where it is useful. |
| Energy Module | 1 | Buffers the ~200 kWp HE-01 field with a ~400 kWh battery; overnight autonomy; schedules deferrable loads into solar surplus. |
| Solar Module (HE-01) | 2 | Ship as panel magazines and fold outward into a ~200 kWp, ~1 000 m² field beside the block — margin over the ~150 kWp requirement. |
| Materials Module | 1 | Returns ~50–80% of organic waste mass as compost, biochar, and process gas; composting CO₂ routed to grow zones. |
| Ops & Helix Module (HX-01) | 1 | The control plane: quality gates on every inter-module connection, routing, forecasting, alerting, and audit reporting; offline-first. |
| Habitat Module (HH-01) | 2 | Living space for four; sanitation plumbs directly into the water and materials loops; galley scraps go to composting. |
The power budget shows what dominates: ~26–30 kW average continuous, ~45 kW peak, and ~630–700 kWh/day, of which grow lighting — two modules at ~8 kW over an 18-hour photoperiod — is ~270 kWh/day, the single largest load. HVAC and thermal take ~5–8 kW, water treatment ~2–3 kW, materials processing ~1–2 kW batch-scheduled into solar surplus, habitat domestic ~4–6 kW, and Helix ~0.5 kW. Supply is the two HE-01 modules’ ~200 kWp field, a ~400 kWh battery for overnight autonomy, and a backup genset for multi-day weather events. An HF-07 fold-out greenhouse alongside moves the fresh-produce canopy onto sunlight and takes the largest load off the budget.
Move the slider to see how the reference architecture scales with crew size. All figures are reference-class estimates derived from NASA BVAD per-person values and the module capacities above — design targets, not performance guarantees.
Reference-class estimates. Site-specific sizing depends on climate, diet targets, and environment class — the coefficients here assume a temperate site at HELIPHERE ONE closure targets.
The boxes are deliberately boring. The intelligence that routes, gates, and audits every flow between them is where the system lives.