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NewSpace features the dawn of the age of space resources

Illustration showing concept of operations of the RedWater mining system for water extraction on Mars developed by Honeybee Robotics. Credits: Mellerowicz et al. via New Space

The editorial in the latest issue of New Space, coauthored by two of SSP’s favorite ISRU stars, Kevin Cannon and George Sowers, describes the dawning age of space resource utilization. Cannon, who guest edits this issue, and Sowers are joined by the rest of the leadership team of the graduate program in Space Resources at the The Colorado School of Mines: Program Director Angel Abbud-Madrid and professor Chris Dreyer. The program, created in 2017, has over 120 students currently enrolled. These are the scientists, engineers, economists, entrepreneurs and policymakers that will be leading the economic development of the high frontier, creating the companies and infrastructure for in situ resource utilization that will enable affordable and prosperous space settlement.

How can regolith on the Moon and Mars be refined into useful building materials? What are the methods for extracting water and oxygen from other worlds for life support systems and rocket fuel? Is it legal to do so? Will private property rights be granted through unilateral legislation? What will space settlers eat? The answers to all these questions and more are addressed in this issue, many of the articles free to access.

One of my favorite pieces, the source of this post’s featured image, is on the RedWater system for harvesting water on Mars. This technology, inspired by the proven Rodwell system in use for sourcing drinking water at the south pole, was developed by Honeybee Robotics, just acquired by Blue Origin earlier this year. End-to-end validation of the system under simulated Mars conditions demonstrated that water could be harvested from below an icy subsurface and pumped to a tank up on the surface.

We need to start thinking about these technologies now so that plans are ready for implementation once a reliable, affordable transportation system comes on line in the next few years led by companies such as SpaceX and others. Sowers has been working on thermal ice mining on cold worlds throughout the solar system for some time, predicting that water will be “the oil of space”. Cannon has been featured previously on SSP with his analytical tools related to lunar mining, the Pinwheel Magma Reactor for synthetic geology and plans for feeding millions of people on Mars.

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Self-replicating “living” machines for lunar settlement

Conceptual illustration of a self-replicating machine. Source: Wikipedia

In a 2020 paper in the journal Biomimetics, Alex Ellery who heads the Space Exploration Engineering Group in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, lays out a case for engineering mechanical systems that emulate biological life in the same vain as a Von Neumann universal constructor. This concept, conceived by the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann in 1940s prior to the invention of the computer, is a machine that can make copies of itself given a set of instructions, sufficient materials and a source of energy.

Ellery begins by examining theories on the origin of life on Earth to distill down the essence of how inanimate material was transformed into living systems. He then goes on to define the basic characteristics of how organisms use energy to process materials to evolve and reproduce. Applying these principles to mechanical systems he envisions bioinspired machines be used to propagate self-replicating factories on the Moon in a lunar industrial ecology. Materials mined in situ by robots would be processed using solar energy via automated additive manufacturing processes analogous to living organisms reproducing to expand the facility.

“Adopting the notion of a biological ecosystem, we can envisage a modest self-sustained metabolism.”

In an examination of what life is, Ellery makes the analogy between ribosomes, the basic macromolecular machine that performs protein synthesis in living cells, and a 3D printer called the Replicating Rapid Prototyper (or RepRap), a key element of his research. Through additive manufacturing this device can print some of its own plastic components.

RepRap 3D printer comprising a Cartesian robot with extruder head (Figure 2 in the paper) capable of printing copies of some of its own plastic components.. Credits: Alex Ellery

Eventually, Ellery’s goal is for the device to be able to fabricate most of its own parts including the metal components. However, a fully autonomous self-replicating machine will required considerable advancements in artificial intelligence and automation. Initially, prefabricated complex components such as electronic circuitry, actuators, and sensors may be supplied independently as “vitamins” from Earth and assembled automatically during fabrication to enable automatic manufacture of the robots. Ellery introduces his team and describes his research at Carlton University in this short video.

Self-replicating factories designed for the production of space settlement infrastructure have been covered previously by SSP. Hybrid approaches that include humans in the loop to guide the process may be a near term solution until AI and robotic technologies become fully autonomous.

Some have postulated that if Von Neumann probes have been used by alien civilizations to colonize the galaxy there may be ways to detect them.