Posted on

Lava Hive: ISRU Mars habitat

Stepwise illustration of the casting process to produce the Lava Hive; (1) deposition of foundation base, (2) regolith is gathered and sintered into a flow channel, (3) molten basalt from the sand/regolith is poured into the channel and allowed to solidify, (4) the next layer of regolith is spread across, and another channel sintered, (5) layer by layer the structure is constructed, (6) loose, un-sintered regolith is excavated from the structure, revealing the completed dome. Credits Aidan Cowley, et al.*

In a paper posted on Academia.edu, the 3rd prize winner for the 2015 NASA 3D Printed Mars Habitat Centennial Challenge called Lava Hive is described by a team* of European researchers. The habitat is produced by additive manufacturing via a ‘lava-casting’ construction technique and utilizing recycled spacecraft structures. Innovations include ‘re-use’ of discarded landing vehicles as part of the central habitat, 3D printed adjacent structures connected to the central habitat and use of a novel ‘LavaCast’ process to fabricate solid structures resistant to radiation and thermal cycling.

Illustration of the Lava Hive. The central habitat core is shown with the smaller 3D printed satellite structures clustered around it. Credits: René Waclavicek, LIQUIFER Systems Group, 2015

The Lava Hive Mars settlement has a number of advantages including a modular design with the ability to expand or adapt to changing mission requirements while “living off the land” with a simple ISRU process utilizing Martian soil, thereby reducing the amount of mass that would need to be launched from Earth.

* Authors of this paper are: Aidan Cowley, Barbara Imhof, Leo Teeney, René Waclavicek, Francesco Spina, Alberto Canals, Juergen Schleppi, Pablo Lopez Soriano

Posted on

Dome: an innovative Martian base concept

Image of Dome during the day. Credits: InnSpace

InnSpace, a team of space dreamers in Poland has developed a Mars base concept called “Dome” which was selected among the best projects entered in the First Colony on Mars competition, organized as part of the Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival.

The innovative design uses shape memory materials that respond to the significant temperature swings on Mars. Adjusting to the daily extremes, petal-shaped portions of the dome extend toward the base center providing exposure to natural light while creating an enclosure for additional space and radiation shielding. The moving sections include self- cleaning solar panels.

Once the sun goes down, the petals return to their initial location adding insulation to the habitat during the cold of night.

Creative use of technology envisioned by InnSpace and others applied to the extremes of off-Earth environments will be essential for space settlement.

Image of Dome at night with central petals retracted. Credit: InnSpace
Posted on

Lava tubes big enough for large space settlements on the Moon and Mars

Image of Lava tubes on the surface of Mars as photographed by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/G Neukum / NewScientist

Space advocates have long speculated that lava tubes on the Moon or Mars would provide an ideal protective enclosure for space settlements. The benefits include protection from radiation, micrometeorite bombardment, temperature extremes…the list goes on. Now, in a study published in Earth-Science Reviews, researchers at the the Universities of Bologna and Padua have found that lava tubes on these worlds could be 100 to 1000 times larger then on Earth, because of their lower gravity and the resultant effect on volcanism. Such roomy and stable subsurface chambers would be ideal for spacious space settlements.

Image of Olympus Town, a fictional colony built inside a lava tube on Mars from the National Geographic series of the same name. Credits: Framestore / Wired
Posted on

Ideacity: a 1000 person self sustaining Mars colony

Image of the Ideacity Mars colony concept. Credits: InnSpace / humanMars.net

A team of friends in Poland who happen to be architects, roboticists and makers decided to do something cosmic: they created InnSpace, a project literally out of this world. And by the way, they decided to apply their creative talents to the Mars Colony Prize Competition commissioned by the Mars Society last year. Their entry called Ideacity, a Mars settlement of the near future, won 5th prize.

To ensure the colony was designed with a diverse range of viewpoints, the team interviewed 167 experts from various backgrounds. They asked pertinent questions on political issues, services delivered from Earth and social aspects that would affect the design and organization of the colony. The results helped them to improve the concept, but they also found that technology will not completely replace human beings.

Posted on

Mass value: metric for space settlement

Image credit: Richard Bizley, bizelyart.com / National Space Society

In a paper published in New Space last March, Peter Hague describes a figure of merit he developed to drive policy decisions to help accelerate space exploration and space settlement. The aim of the paper was to generate a single metric for every potential space mission on a common scale for comparison purposes. This ‘mass value’ is the amount of mass that would need to be placed in low Earth orbit (LEO) to perform the same mission using a baseline method. That method would use only storable propellants and Hohmann transfer orbits – no gravity assists, aerocapture, high energy propellants or ISRU.

This approach puts a price on all the add-ons which expand the mission beyond the baseline. One can then use a single normalized scale to calculate how much mass to LEO you would save by making propellant on Mars for example, or by taking advantage of a certain launch window to get a gravity assist.

A hands-off government entity could subsidize space expenditures at a flat rate per kg of mass value, confident they are promoting space development without having legislators involved in engineering decisions.

Aggregating all the missions by a nation, company, or other entity could be used to calculate an analogue of GDP for a space civilization. While this does not measure everything we care about – scientific merit, human occupation, etc – neither does GDP. It does capture the overall capability to move around the solar system; and as such, is as useful for charting our journey to becoming a Type II civilization on the Kardashev Scale as it is for analyzing individual missions.

Thanks to Peter Hague for the material in this post. We’ve heard a rumor that there may be a book forthcoming on the subject. Looking forward to it!

Posted on

NEO Robotic Friend for crewed asteroid reconnaissance

The crewed asteroid exploration vehicle NEO Robotic Friend in two different operational modes. Credits: Luca Levrino, et al.*

In a paper presented at the 65th International Astronautical Congress, Toronto, Canada in 2014 and posted to Acedemia.edu, a team of students* from Italy and Germany discuss an innovative small unpressurised vehicle designed for mobility and maximization of human agility for safe crewed exploration of near earth asteroids (NEA). They named their brainchild NEA Robotic Friend (NRF).

Though conceived when NASA was focused on the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) architecture with the emphasis on developing technology to expand beyond the Moon toward eventual missions to Mars, the NRF could have practical applications in the next phase of space settlement when humans have established a beachhead on the moon and are ready push out into the solar system.

The vehicle was designed to enable safe human proximity EVA operations around a NEA independent of the type of asteroid. Another primary design objective was to investigate, test and validate the use of key technologies for deep space exploration including the ability to collect surface and core samples storing them so that they could be analyzed on Earth. Finally, the platform was envisioned to have the ability to perform in-situ experiments, with real-time data analysis.

* The reference paper was the result of a project within the Alta Scuola Politecnica, joining together students from Politecnico di Torino and Politecnico di Milano. The authors are Luca Levrino, Chiara Gastaldi and Maria Antonietta Viscio from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Alessandro Ciani, Margherita Censi, Alessandro Cingoli, and Paolo Maggiore from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Ricardo Repenning from Technische Universität München, Germany

Posted on

Want to eat like a Martian in an environmentally friendly manner?

The Martian Diet. Illustration of a plate with various foods
Credits: Kevin Cannon / https://eatlikeamartian.org/

Kevin Cannon shows you how with his Eat Like a Martian project. In a Tweet today, the planetary geologist and postdoctoral researcher at University of Central Florida announced plans for revamping his website as well as other R&D and educational outreach activities to be managed by undergraduate students. According to the website, “The ‘Martian Diet’ offers environmental and ethical benefits over traditional Western habits: no mass suffering of caged animals, and sharp cuts in land, water, energy use, and carbon emissions.”

Posted on

Student concept for a crewed lunar rover in support of Artemis

Image depicting EMPRESS. Credits: SEDS-UPRM

When the first woman and next man return to the Moon under the Artemis Program, they will need a mobile scientific platform to assist with exploration of the lunar south pole. Under the Revolutionary Aerospace System Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition, a team of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez (UPRM) won 1st Place in the contest with their Exploration Multi-Purpose Rover for Expanding Surface Science (EMPRESS). The rover would land at Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole in 2023 taking samples and exploring the region in preparation for the first crewed Artemis mission in 2024.

The rover is envisioned to include two robotic arms and a suite of seven scientific instruments to characterize the lunar surface composition as well as other high priority astrophysical investigations. One the proposed instruments is a neutron spectrometer that could sense the amount of hydrogen in the regolith using data from maps compiled by the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) which will survey the lunar south pole for the presence of volatiles and water ahead of the Artemis Missions. This could pave the way for ice mining operations and eventual space settlements in a cislunar water economy.

University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez winning SEDS team of the 2020 RASC-AL Virtual Forum. Credits: RASC-AL

Posted on

The current state of the U.S. space industrial base

Credits: USSF-DIU-AFRL

The U.S. Space Force, Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit just completed a workshop on the state of the U.S. space industry. The virtual event, hosted by New Space New Mexico, brought together more than 120 representatives across the federal government, industry, and academia to access the current health of the America’s space industry and to provide recommendations for strengthening that industrial base. The resulting report called “State of the Space Industrial Base 2020” has just been released this month.

The workshop focused on 6 key areas thought to be the locus of future space industry activities:

  • Space policy and finance tools
  • Space information services
  • Space transportation and logistics to, in and from cislunar space and beyond.
  • Human presence in space for exploration, space tourism, space manufacturing and resource extraction
  • Power for space systems to enable the full range of emerging space applications
  • Space manufacturing and resource extraction

Recommendations included:

  1. Industry should aggressively pursue partnerships with the US government to develop and operate joint commercial, civil and defense space capabilities. These partnerships should jointly fund developing capabilities that benefit from but are not heavily reliant on US government investment and revenue for their commercial viability.
  2. Entrepreneurs with innovative and potentially dual-use technologies must improve the protection of their intellectual property from unintended foreign assimilation, including protecting their networks from cyber exfiltration attempts, and avoiding exit strategies that transfer intellectual property to foreign control hostile to US interests.
  3. Businesses should engage across the US educational system to guide and develop the future STEM workforce to fuel the future space economy, to include funding for undergraduate scholarships/loans for STEM students, internships and providing space professionals to support instruction in space subjects.
  4. Industry should improve ties and partnerships with domestic and allied parts, subcomponent and subsystem manufacturers to strengthen trust and resilience in space supply chains.
Posted on

Self-replicating fungi radiation shielding for deep space settlements

Without adequate shielding, humans will be bombarded with lethal galactic cosmic radiation in deep space. Credits: NASA / scitechdaily.com

Galactic cosmic radiation poses a significant risk to humans in deep space. If a type of shielding could be found that could be “grown” through biotechnology starting from microscopic sources, significant savings in mass needed to be launched from Earth could be realized. It is already known that certain fungi can convert high-energy radiation into chemical energy through a process called radiosynthesis, analogous to photosynthesis in plants. Fungi have been found thriving in extremely radioactive environments such as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and even on the exteriors of spacecraft in Earth orbit.

In a paper just uploaded to the preprint server for biology bioRxiv, results of a study carried out on the International Space Station have shown that a microbial lawn of the fungus C. sphaerospermum can be cultivated in microgravity and not only consumes and thrives on radiation, it provides shielding that if scaled up, could sufficiently protect humans in deep space settlements.