Conceptual depiction of a lunar space elevator. Credits: Cool Worlds Lab via YouTube.com
As SSP posted previously, a space elevator serving Earth holds great promise for reducing the cost of access to space but remains out of reach at least for a couple of decades as there are no existing materials strong enough to support their own weight in Earth’s gravity well. But a lunar space elevator (LSE) is possible with commercial polymers available today and could be built for about $2 billion according to Charles Radley, a Systems Engineer and AIAA Associate Fellow. In a paper available on Academia.edu he shows how a “… lunar elevator is both feasible and affordable, and indeed profitable.”
A functional LSE would require a tether of low mass material that is also strong enough to support its own weight in the Moon’s gravitational field. In addition, it needs to be robust enough to transport payloads reliably and repeatedly over the entire working distance in cislunar space. The LSE would be a very long tether extending from the Moon’s surface up to a station at the system’s center of mass (COM) located at either of two Earth-Moon Lagrange points, L1 or L2. The physics of the system requires that the tether extend beyond the COM terminating at a counterweight several thousand kilometers higher. For the L1 system, the tether extends about 58,000 km up from the Moon to the station at the COM and then extends another 220,000 km up (toward the Earth) to the counterweight.
Several high tensile strength, low mass polymers developed in the 1990s that fulfill the system requirements are commercially available in large quantities today (e.g. T1000TM, DyneemaTM and ZylonTM * ). A 48 ton system composed of the tether, the L1 COM station, a lunar surface attachment fixture (SAF), counterweight and payload climbers could be launched on a single Falcon Heavy vehicle.
Starting at L1, the deployment would begin with the counterweight and SAF simultaneously played out in opposite directions (up and down in relation to the Moon, respectively) unspooling the tethers at rates that maintains the COM station at the L1 position. Upon the SAF reaching the desired location on the Moon, it would be affixed to the surface by drilling down to a sufficient depth to anchor the structure such that it could adequately withstand tension and lateral forces.
When compared to chemical rocket operations on the moon, there is a significant cost reduction in lifting materials off the surface if multiple climbers are used and the frequency of their trips up and down the LSE is maximized. The cost reduction is on the order of 9X, enabling the system to pay for itself in one month. Radley concludes that:
“These large cost reductions are game changing and will enable major expansion of human activities beyond Earth orbit, and establish profitable lunar based industries.”
The Liftport Group, a collaborator on the paper, is administering The Alexandria Project, a database repository collecting and organizing questions about the infrastructure needed for development of an LSE toward creation of a requirements document.
* T1000G is a trademark of Toray Composite Materials America, Inc.; Dyneema is a trademark of Royal DSM NV; Zylon is a trademark of Toyobo Corporation
One kilometer long spinning space station producing 1G of artificial gravity deployed from a single Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Credits: Zachary Manchester, graphic by Tzipora Thompson
This year’s NASA Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) award winners presented their ideas in a virtual poster session last week. Zachary Manchester of Carnegie Mellon University and Jeffrey Lipton at the University of Washington have come up with a rotating habitat to produce artificial gravity. But to do this without causing severe disorientation that would result from a short radius habitat, their novel facility is one kilometer long spinning to produce 1G at both ends. Manchester and Lipton’s innovation is a deployment mechanism that leverages advances in “mechanical metamaterials” to reduce mass while increasing expansion ratios such that the structure can be squeezed into a single Falcon Heavy payload envelope but when deployed, expands to 150 times its stored configuration size. The structure can be erected autonomously and without any assembly in space.
The key enabling technologies are a combination of “handed shearing auxetics” (HSA) and branched scissor mechanisms. HSA is described in a 2018 paper in Science by Lipton and other researchers where they “…produce both compliant structures that expand while twisting and deployable structures that can rigidly lock.”
“The station can…be spun at 1-2 RPM to generate 1g artificial gravity at its ends while still maintaining a microgravity environment at its center near the spin axis, providing the crew with the flexibility of living in a 1g environment while performing some work in microgravity.”
Conceptual illustration of a Habitat Autonomous Locomotive Expandable (HALE) mobile self sustaining habitat under propulsion near a planetary destination. Credits: unknown artist via Thomas Matula
Dr. Thomas Matula, Professor at Sul Ross State University Uvalde, Texas, has developed an economically based strategy for space settlement. His plan addresses the deficiencies in many proposed visions of human expansion beyond earth, namely the missing economic and legal aspects needed for sustainable settlement of the solar system. Matula discussed his approach with David Livingston on The Space Show September 14 and in a paper entitled An Economic Based Strategy for Human Expansion into the Solar System attached to the show blog.
Astrosettlement Development Strategy (ADS) can be boiled down into a four step economically based roadmap for space settlement which could be started with minimal private funding. Each step would achieve economic success before moving on to the next level. The four levels are Earth based research, industrialization of the Moon, developing and settling the solar system and interstellar migration.
In the first step of Earth based research, Matula suggests developing a subscription based online role playing computer game with the purpose of creating a virtual simulation of a space settlement to model the social and economic aspects of communities beyond Earth. SSP has been following similar efforts already underway by Moonwards. Further research in this phase would look into space agriculture to understand the types of plants and dietary needs of space settlers and improving the efficiency of crop growth paving the way for self sustaining habitats. Matula has penned a different paper along these lines called The Role of Space Habitat Research in Providing Solutions to the Multiple Environmental Crises on Earth, also attached to the Space Show Blog, which could have duel use applications in addressing environmental problems on our home planet. There are already efforts underway in this arena with Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) utilizing greenhouse automation through the Internet of Things leading to reduction of water needs and an increase in crop yields.
“Developing the technology to green the Solar System will also green the Earth for future generations”
Next on the roadmap is lunar industrialization. The focus of this step is to use robotics and in situ resource utilization to minimize the mass of materials lifted from Earth and to create lunar manufacturing capability in a cislunar economy that can be leveraged to build space based habitats for expansion into deep space.
Developing the solar system comes next. Once an economic foundation of industrialization of the Moon has been established, large mobile habitats can be built at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points L1 and L2. Called HALE, for Habitat Autonomous Locomotive Expandable, these are 1km wide self sustaining habitats with 1G artificial gravity capable of low energy transit throughout the solar system including out to the Kuiper Belt, where they can use the resources there to add to their size or build copies of themselves.
The final phase combines mobile free space settlement with advanced propulsion to develop the capability of expansion into the Oort cloud and on to the stars.
“…propulsion technology could advance to a point that would allow mobile space habitats designed for the Oort Cloud to be transformed into the first generational starships.”
A conceptual illustration of the operational layout for a possible future cis-lunar ecosystem based on lunar water resources to refuel GEO satellites and support of a lunar base. Credits: Marc-Andre Chavy-Macdonald et al.*
Most forward looking space planners believe that lunar water will be one of the primary resources that will drive cis-lunar economic activities. But can the growth of a water-based ecosystem be modelled to make future revenue predictions? Using a new methodology that combines System Dynamics with scenario planning a team of researchers in Japan and France has done just that by quantifying the parameters of two scenarios likely to unfold in the near future: a lunar settlement called “Moonopolis” and a long term exploration effort named “Apollo 2.0”. The analysis was just published in Acta Astronautica in a paper entitled The cis-lunar ecosystem — A systems model and scenarios of the resource industry and its impact.
System Dynamics (SD) is time-based modeling to frame, understand, and discuss dynamic behavior of complex systems. Originally developed in the 1950s to improve a company’s understanding of industrial processes, SD is used in both the public and private sectors for policy analysis and to drive strategy.
In the study, the authors* find that three factors are essential for success: government support for R&D, private capital re-investment, and continued growth of the telecom satellite industry in geosynchronous orbit. With these stipulations a cis-lunar economy of $32 billion is projected after 20 years.
Key insights gleaned from this novel holistic model reveal the dynamics of a space resource economy and the interaction of of key technical, policy and socioeconomic variables along with their uncertainties to make future projections.
Incidentally, the authors partnered with a Japan-based company called iSpace on the study which has its own plans for a lunar city called Moon Valley. They are projecting that 1000 people could be living there by 2040.
* Authors of The cis-lunar ecosystem — A systems model and scenarios of the resource industry and its impact: Marc-Andre Chavy-Macdonald, Kazuya Oizumi, Jean-Paul Kneib, Kazuhiro Aoyama
Artist depiction of Starship on the lunar surface returning astronauts to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis Program. Credits: SpaceX
What will be the impact on the direction of U.S. space policy should SpaceX successfully demonstrate an orbital flight of Starship? Doug Plata, President and Founder of the Space Development Network believes that when Starship achieves orbit, policy makers should “…place Starship at the center of the country’s human spaceflight program…”. In an article in The Space Review he makes the case that if successful in its efforts, SpaceX may be edging us closer to a tipping point on deciding which path to take for the country’s human rated launch vehicle: Space Launch System (SLS) or Starship? This question is accentuated by recent news reports of yet another delay in the Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight of SLS which Ars Technica reports may not launch until the summer of 2022…assuming everything goes perfectly. Meanwhile, SpaceX continues its development of Starship at a breakneck pace, while simultaneously building the manufacturing infrastructure to “…crank them out by the hundreds”, says Plata. With the delay of Artemis 1, it is possible that SpaceX will demonstrate the first orbital launch of Starship before NASA’s first launch of SLS.
NASA has already selected SpaceX to return astronauts to the Moon via Starship as the Human Landing System for the Artemis program, although work has stalled on the contract due to Blue Origin’s lawsuit. But with a reusable Starship at a fraction of the cost, comparable heavy lift capability and a much higher flight rate, how long can SLS last? A case could be made for keeping SLS until SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster is human rated and Starship can be reliably shown to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and land safely. But this won’t be long given Elon Musk’s aggressive timelines. Will it continue to make sense to launch astronauts on SLS/Orion, transfer them to Starship in lunar orbit and descend to the surface of the Moon when the the whole mission could be accomplished without SLS at a fraction of the cost?
“At some point, it will be obvious that SLS is an unnecessarily expensive alternative to Starship”
With Starship’s anticipated payload capabilities of delivery of 100s of tons and large crews to the lunar surface, and recent advances in inflatable technology, a habitat with a footprint of about 21,000 sq. ft. is within reach. Plata believes that the billions of dollars slated for SLS would be better spent contracting with SpaceX for delivery of inflatables and their supporting infrastructure to the lunar surface. This could lead to a large international lunar base which may eventually become a permanent settlement.
Conceptual illustration of InstaBase – a fully inflatable lunar base capable of supporting an initial crew of eight. Credits: The Space Development Network via The Space Review
“But there is an important historic significance to Starship as well…the real historic prize to be seized is the establishment of humanity’s first foothold off Earth.”
Conceptual rendering of TransAstra Honey Bee Optical Mining Vehicle designed to harvest water from near-Earth asteroids: Credits: TransAstra Corporation
Advocates for mining the Moon and asteroids for resources to support a space based economy are split on where to get started. Should we mine the Moon’s polar regions or would near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) be easier to access?
Joel Sercel, founder and CEO of TransAstra Corporation, is positioning his company to be the provider of gas stations for the coming cislunar economy. In a presentation on asteroid mining to the 2020 Free Market Forum he makes the case (about 10 minutes into the talk) that from an energy perspective in terms of delta V, NEAs located in roughly the same orbital plane as the Earth’s orbit may be easier to access for mining volatiles and rare Earth elements.
Scott Dorrington of the University of New South Wales discusses an architecture of a near-Earth asteroid mining industry in a paper from the proceedings of the 67th International Astronautical Congress. He models a transportation network of various orbits in cislunar space for an economy based on asteroid water-ice as the primary commodity. The network is composed of mining spacecraft, processing plants, and space tugs moving materials between these orbits to service customers in geostationary orbit.
Illustration depicting the layout of a transportation network in an asteroid mining industry in cislunar space. Credits: Scott Dorrington
On the other side of the argument, Kevin Cannon of the Colorado School of Mines in a post on his blog Planetary Intelligence lays out the case for the Moon being the best first choice. All of the useful elements available on asteroids are present on the Moon, and in some cases they are easier to access in terms of concentrated ore deposits. Although delta V requirements are higher to lift materials off the Moon, its much closer to where its needed in a cislunar economy. Trips out to a NEA would take a long time with current propulsion systems. In addition, he thinks mining NEAs would be an “operational nightmare” as most of these bodies are loose rubble piles of rocks and pebbles with irregular surfaces and very low gravity. This makes it hard to “land” on the asteroid, or difficult to capture and manipulate them. In an email I asked him if he was aware of SHEPHERD, a concept for gentle asteroid retrieval with a gas-filled enclosure which SSP covered in a previous post, but he had not heard of it. TransAstra’s Queen Bee asteroid mining spacecraft has a well thought out capture mechanism as well, although this concept like SHEPHERD are currently at very low technology readiness levels.
SHEPHERD-Fuel variant harvesting ice from a NEA and condensing it into liquid water in storage tanks, then subsequent separation into hydrogen and oxygen (top). These tanks become the fuel source for a self-propelling tanker block (bottom) which can be delivered to a refueling rendezvous point in cislunar space. Credits: Concept depicted by: Bruce Damer and Ryan Norkus with key design partnership from Peter Jenniskens and Julian Nott
Cannon also makes the point that there is very little mass in the accessible NEAs when compared to the abundance of elements on the Moon.
“There’s more than enough material for near-term needs on the Moon too, and it’s far closer and easier to operate on.”
Finally, he believes that the Moon would be a better stepping stone to mining the asteroids then NEAs would be. This is because most of the mass in the asteroid belt is located in the largest bodies Ceres and Vesta. Operations for mining on these worlds would be more akin to activities on the Moon then on near-Earth asteroids.
Image of Vesta taken from the NASA Dawn spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL
What about moving a NEA to cislunar space as proposed by NASA under the Obama Administration with the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, investigates this scenario and suggests that at least the argument for these asteroids being too far away might be mitigated by this approach, although it would take a long time to retrieve them using solar electric propulsion, as recommended in the article. The trip time might be reduced with advanced propulsion such as nuclear thermal rockets currently under investigation by NASA.
Conceptual illustration of TransAstra’s Sun Flower™ power towers collecting solar energy above a permanently shadowed region on the Moon to provide power for ice mining operations. Credits: TransAstra Corp.
Update 28 August 2021: Take a deep dive into TransAstra’s future plans with Joel Sercel interviewed by Peter Garretson, Senior Fellow in Defense Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council podcast Space Strategy.
Image of Lunar Transporter (L-Tran) with Lunar Regolith Excavator (L-Rex) stored on board as they roll down a ramp from a lunar lander. Credits: screen capture from Redwire Space animation. All images below are so credited.
NASA has just announced the winners of the Breaking the Ice Lunar Challenge, an incentive program for companies to investigate new approaches to ISRU for excavating icy regolith from the Moon’s polar regions. The agency will be awarding half a million dollars in cash prizes and Redwire Space headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida won first prize scoring $125,000 for its elegantly designed two rover lunar excavation system. The criteria used by NASA to select the winners was based on maximum water delivery, minimum energy use, and lowest-mass equipment.
Upon delivery by a lunar lander near a shadowed crater in the Moon’s south polar region, a multipurpose Lunar Transporter (L-Tran) carrying a Lunar Regolith Excavator (L-Rex) rolls down a ramp to begin operations on the surface. The rover transports the excavator to the target area where icy regolith has been discovered.
Image of L-Rex driving off of L-Tran
The L-Rex then drives off the L-Tran to start collecting regolith in rotating cylindrical drums on the front and back of the vehicle.
L-Rex collecting lunar regolith in fore and aft collection drumsL-Rex loading regolith into L-Tran for transport back to processing station
When the drums are full, L-Rex returns to the rover and deposits its load in L-Tran’s storage bed. L-Rex repeats this process over many trips until L-Tran is loaded to capacity at which point the rover returns to a processing facility to separate the water from the regolith.
L-Tran dumping a load of regolith into a hopper at a processing facilityAfter regolith beneficiation the separated frozen water ice is loaded into L-Tran for transport to secondary processing plant
Upon separation into purified frozen ice, L-Tran is once again loaded up with the product for transport to a station for storage or perhaps, further processing. No further details were provided but the final process is presumed to be electrolysis of the water into useful end products such as H2 and O2 for rocket fuel or life support uses, plus simply storage as drinking water for human habitation.
L-Tran loading water ice into hopper for final processing into end products or simply storage
The second place prize of $75,000 was awarded to the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado for its Lunar Ice Digging System (LIDs). The LIDS proposal has three rovers – an excavator, regolith hauler, and water hauler each of which would be teleoperated from a nearby lunar surface habitat.
Austere Engineering of Littleton, Colorado won the $50,000 third place prize for its Grading and Rotating for Water Located in Excavated Regolith (GROWLER) system. The system weighs slightly more then a school bus tipping the scales at an estimated mass of 12 metric tons.
A second phase of the challenge, if approved, could move the proposals into hardware development and a future demonstration mission toward eventual support of lunar habitats and a cislunar economy.
Checkout Redwire’s animation of their lunar excavation system:
Animation from Redwire Space’s Breaking the Ice Lunar Challenge proposal. Credits: Redwire Space
Conceptual depiction of the Pinwheel Magma Reactor on a planetary surface in the foreground and in free space on a tether as shown in the inset. Credits: Kevin Cannon
How can space settlers harness useful resources that have not been concentrated into ore bodies like what takes place via geologic process on Earth over eons of time? Could we artificially speed up the process using synthetic geology? Kevin Cannon, a planetary geologist at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), thinks it might be possible to unlock the periodic table in space to access a treasure trove of materials with an invention he calls the Pinwheel Magma Reactor. He has submitted a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts proposal for the concept. The device is a essentially a centrifuge sitting on a planetary surface with a solar furnace reaction chamber spun at the end of its axis. In space, a free flying system could be connected by tether.
PMR chambers are positioned at the end of the axis of a centrifuge. Credits: Kevin Cannon
In a Twitter thread Cannon sets the table with a basic geology lesson explaining why mining on Earth is so different from what we will need in space. The Earth’s dynamic crustal processes, driven by fluid flow and plate tectonics over millions of years, exhibit a very different geology then that under which the Moon, Mars and asteroids evolved. The critical minerals that could be useful to support life and a thriving economy in space settlements are present in far lower concentrations in space then on Earth.
Current plans for ISRU infrastructure on the Moon and asteroids are only targeting a small set of elements like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, silicon and iron (below, left).
Illustration of the periodic table showing currently targeted elements for ISRU on the left. On the right, the most mined elements on Earth (colored gold) and critical elements (orange) useful for an advanced society. Credits: Kevin Cannon
But an advanced society expanding out into the solar system would benefit from many critical minerals (above, right) that are not easily accessible because of their far lower concentrations. For example, energy production will need uranium and thorium, energy storage systems require lithium and electronics manufacturing is dependent on rare earths. So how to unlock the periodic table for these critical materials?
If we are to live off the land by harvesting useful materials to build and sustain space settlements we’ll need a totally revolutionary mining process. The PMR was designed with this in mind. The procedure begins by loading unprepared rocks or regolith into the chamber followed by heating via a solar furnace. Next, the chamber is spun up in the centrifuge where super gravity concentrates the desired minerals. Cannon believes that the PMR could also be used to extract water from regolith on the moon or asteroids.
“If hydrated asteroid material or icy regolith are put in at low temperatures, they’ll be separated by super-gravity and can be siphoned off.”
Of course the technology needs to be validated and flight hardware developed to determine if the PMR can be a tool to speed up the geological processes to concentrate useful materials for humans, who can then use them to synthetically propagate life in space. Cannon sums it up:
“Obviously a lot of work to be done to prove out the concept. But I think that a process flow of synthetic geology -> synthetic biology is the way to solve the concentration problem in space and enrich any element we want from the periodic table.”
Conceptual illustration looking up the length of a Moon Town residential habitat built in a trench going down the crater wall. Plants cover its roof, walls, and foundation. Credits: Kim Holder, CC-BY 4.0. NOTE: all images are similarly credited
SSP has posted about Moonwards in the past. Kim Holder, creator of the realistic virtual lunar colony online game was recently interviewed on Hotel Mars by John Bachleor of CBS Eye on World and David Livingston of The Space Show. Kim’s website is starting to mature to a point where I thought it was time to get an update and a deeper dive into her vision of our future living on the Moon. I caught up with Kim last week via email.
SSP: Thanks for taking the time to collaborate on this post Kim. You’ve said that accurately depicting and roleplaying the activities of living on the Moon in a colony called Moon Town built by, and shared by, the players will help show the world the benefits of space development and a positive future. Why do you think a role-playing online game is the best vehicle to accomplish this vision?
KH: Because interacting over time with a detailed simulation allows people to absorb what it means. It allows people to pick up knowledge about space development as they play. That’s a kind of learning that sticks. And the more players expand the vision, creating an ever cooler place with more things to see and do, the more they will feel a connection with that vision. They will naturally think about it more, talk about it more, pass on things about it to their friends and family. The kinds of dialogues they are able to have about it will gain depth and breadth, the more they work on it and see how others have worked on it.
“We need to understand what’s coming and make sure we do this right.”
It’s long been said that simulations of this kind will become a major means of education and research once the software and hardware to make them matures. Well, we’re arriving at that day. It’s a question of properly designing them now, to best serve our needs. I think space development is clearly the best choice of theme for the first such simulated environment, and a game based on creation and collaboration is the best design paradigm for it. I’d say there is no issue in the world so misunderstood and undervalued. We need to understand what’s coming and make sure we do this right. Otherwise it will take longer to see the massive benefits, and there are lots of things that could go really wrong.
Depiction of an android accompanying a resident in the shared kitchen, dining area, and spa facility of a neighborhood in Moon Town
SSP: You’ve done a lot of research to make the future technology of Moonwards scientifically accurate to give users a realistic prediction of what it will be like to live and work in space. Why is this important?
KH: There’s lots of places out there where people can enjoy a space fantasy, and I’m a fan of a bunch of them. But to bring home why it’s important to devote big resources to space development, we have to leave no doubt that the benefits we portray will really happen once enough space infrastructure exists. I’ve generally been conservative about what’s portrayed so there’s no gap where someone could say it’s not gonna happen because this or that is fanciful. This is of course difficult because there’s so much we don’t know.
It’s the medical stuff that’s especially hard to account for, as you well know, John. In order for people to enjoy the game it has to portray a beautiful, exciting place. If it doesn’t do that nobody will be interested and it won’t achieve anything. I decided not to build the town in a lava tube, the place widely recognized as the safest, easiest place to build at scale on the moon. The most important reason I chose a large, young crater instead was to present that beautiful, exciting place. However huge a cavern is – and lava tubes on the moon could be hundreds of meters wide and thousands long, in theory – I didn’t feel it could be filled with a city nearly as attractive as one in a crater. No matter that it gives complete protection from radiation and dust, and it’s relatively easy to pressurize the entire thing. Once we can, I’m pretty sure we’ll make big fancy cities in craters or mountains, not tunnels. We’ll do what it takes to create a healthy place to live that has the sunshine and big outdoor views humans have evolved with. I’ve had arguments with people about that but I stick to it. It gives me an opportunity to discuss what systems would be needed and how they could be made on the moon. It gives people a relatable way to learn about such things, and to ponder both the vast scale of this undertaking, and that it’s entirely feasible.
“This isn’t about exploring space. This is about changing human existence. We have to demonstrate this can really be done.”
As people play this game, I want real questions to well up in them for the game world to properly answer. If you want people to really question whether this kind of vast industry and construction is both possible and desirable in space, a place of beauty and wonder has to instill those questions. Then, they must be answered thoroughly with the best science we have. Moonwards isn’t shy about scale, we show things that couldn’t be built without a robotic workforce rivaling the human workforce that built the Panama Canal. When someone is convinced something like that can really be made, that person becomes a true convert. This isn’t about exploring space. This is about changing human existence. We have to demonstrate this can really be done.
Image of a Moon Town resident outside in a capsule spacesuit, on the roof of the first park, with its giant window. The main park is in the distance, its giant stone arches protecting the space from radiation but letting in lots of sun
SSP: Moonwards is open source to encourage collaboration among “Makers” to build out the community of Moon Town. Who are these Makers and what qualifications do they need to participate?
KH: The communities we’ll be wooing directly will be those of space science and industry, and amateur game developers. We need a few more things done before actively bringing in a select few from those communities. The first set of Makers will advise us on design and test our collaboration tools. They’ll use those tools to add things to the game world once we’ve got the version that makes the process a pleasure. Beyond that point, the task is to grow a culture of Makers who decide themselves how the town develops. We just support that process – giving them more and better tools, adding new game destinations for them to work on (eventually starting with an O’Neill cylinder once Moonwards is established), helping polish what they make, and building a rapport with them so together we make the best vision of the future we can.
“Makers develop the major parts of the town, all the things that really require sound engineering.”
So, while initially we’ll be seeking out a small group of people with qualifications that leave no doubt they know how to design this simulation properly, once that group takes the lead in creating content, it will be their opinion of submissions that determines who joins the Maker ranks. We’ll set up the means for anyone to submit proposed content. A critique process will assist with refinements. If your submission meets standards, it’ll be approved and you become a Maker, with all the privileges that go with that. Anyone who does their homework and learns from feedback can acquire that status.
You see, Makers develop the major parts of the town, all the things that really require sound engineering. All such things need good review before being included, and also an active community that integrates new stuff into the whole, considering the overall design and needs of the town. There will be plenty of things that are the ordinary day to day parts of a living town that any player can create and add, and that’s just up to them, and anyone else who shares a space with them. They can make their own home and its contents, things for their neighborhood, shops and markets, even things like animals, robots, and human characters. Makers are a different deal. They expand the town itself and have a big voice in new cities. where to locate them, and how to portray them.
View from outside the ecosystem research lab, showing the ilmenite reactors producing iron and oxygen in the distance. Two robotic rovers are visible center right.
SSP: In the (hopefully near) future when the Full Town Life is realized, visitors will be able to cooperate using a Collaboration App to develop ideas and projects in a workshop space with a suite of 3D modeling tools. How do you envision this functionality furthering space development? Can you give some examples of how it would be used?
KH: (Rubs hands.) Well, I talked above about how Makers will be a culture of informed people able to make good realistic designs for space. So, let’s say a few of them are playing with ideas for systems to transport ore from mines to processing reactors. We’ll start with trucks designed for that. Maybe they wonder if conveyor belts are better for production beyond a certain scale. They draft something for that, and once they are done for the day, the work-in-progress is on display in the studio section of the main habitats. Someone passing by looks at it and realizes they haven’t accounted for the dust that will be flying around in much greater quantities in mining areas. They attach a note about it to the gears that are too exposed, perhaps including a quick 3D sketch of a protective casing, or a link to a library item that could be adapted for a fix. Someone else passes by, thinks it over, and leaves a note with a calculation of what production level would justify this and whether it makes sense. A third person takes a look, and adds a comment to the note about production levels concerning how ore quality could impact the calculation.
“…nothing stops real researchers from using our code and assets to help create simulations adequate for real engineering modeling.”
By the time the original team comes back to work on it some more, someone has proposed an alternate solution using a sort of cable car system with movable posts, and begun working on it in a nearby area of the studio. Someone’s suggested different kinds of buckets used to get the ore from the trench or shaft to the conveyor belt that then clip onto the belt and are taken away. They ask to officially join the team. Someone has provided a miniature map of the main mining zones for use in mocking up the routes for the conveyor belts so they can be optimized, and attached it to the project.
These things can all happen because people actually walk past other people’s work in the game. When they do, they are already in an environment that allows them to play around with the model and attach all sorts of things to it, without changing the version the team behind it is working on. Good design will create the best possible environment for collaboration we’ve ever had.
How much of that will transfer directly to the real world is impossible to say. We have hopes that with growth the quality and capabilities of the simulation aspect of the game will be so high, things created this way will genuinely shape real world designs. This is one of the reasons for the main project to be open source – that way nothing stops real researchers from using our code and assets to help create simulations adequate for real engineering modeling. Then, that can be contributed back to Moonwards and we can adapt it so the game is a better simulation. It can become a virtuous cycle.
Aside from whether real technology might actually be drafted in Moonwards, definitely people will pick up how to engineer by playing. There is huge potential for mentorship, training in creative problem solving, and evaluation of concepts in an environment that makes communicating complex ideas so much easier.
SSP: Eventually, there will be the capability of hosting events such as concerts, live plays, gallery displays, special interviews or discussions. Why would this be an attractive place for visitors to experience events like these?
KH: The kinds of events that I imagine being really successful will draw on the environment, and the nature of the community. Let’s focus on large events, on a scale that requires high bandwidth to work. It’ll take a while to create that capability, but it’s the part that’s really fun.
“With amazing realism quickly becoming possible even in real time 3D rendering, … such events could be fantastic.”
If you go to a concert or a play, the avatars of the audience could be scaled down to be an inch tall, and be free to fly around a space half a meter high by 10 meters wide by 3 deep, arching around the front of the stage just a meter from the performers. You could see the avatars of the viewers closest to you, and anyone you came with, but those farther away could appear just as little lights. The performers could jazz up the event by switching at will between all kinds of avatars, and adding anything they want to the environment. With amazing realism quickly becoming possible even in real time 3D rendering, and live recording of real people in full 3D also quickly maturing, such events could be fantastic.
Of course, Moonwards is a tiny project compared to other ventures pushing into 3D platforms. But we have two advantages that could be a big deal. First, we are the first venture of this kind to be principally open source. Add-ons can be proprietary (some of ours will be, as will the server code), but the main bulk of the project will remain open source. This is attractive to people wishing to experiment with the medium, or who wish to be sure their personal data isn’t being exploited, or who would rather the Metaverse (aka the 3D web) doesn’t grow up to be dominated by a few giant companies, like social media is. It’s possible that could be a decisive factor in who grows over the next decade.
Second, our tribe is those who love space and futurism. If you want to hang out at events with our kind of people, then come to our events. Nobody else will offer a lecture about the formation of Lalande Crater in which the audience is inside a simulation of the impact event.
SSP: In May Moonwards launched a contest to begin upgrades to the virtual infrastructure of Moon Town. Called “Create Lunar Infrastructure in Moonwards Baby!” or CLIMB!, the initiative was intended to draw in Makers to bring the game alive, with proposals submitted over the summer to compete for prizes. How is the contest going?
KH: OK, part of me is tempted to skip this, but another part thinks it’s better to answer. Making this game has been hard up to now. Really, it’s going a lot better than it was – a lot – and we’ve already gotten farther along than most startup video game ventures get at this point. Still, we are a small team on a shoestring budget who go through many unexpected turns. Other tasks meant we were obliged to launch the contest later than we should have, with less resources than we’d have liked. Then an opportunity appeared to enter a business plan contest run by the National Space Society, taking place during the same time as CLIMB!. (Check it out – https://spacebizplan.nss.org/details/). That meant the person working on the contest – me – instead turned full time to writing the business plan. That includes moving up some revisions to the layout of Moon Town so they can be shown off in the plan.
We made some good contacts during the brief time we were actively promoting CLIMB!, but it seems clear there won’t be submissions this year. We’ll take what we’ve learned and make a bigger, better contest next year. We feel having regular contests for new content of various kinds will really help bring in Makers and spread the word.
SSP: Much of the laborious tasks in Moon Town are done by robots. What will the inhabitants do there and what will be the economic benefits and incentives for average people to want to migrate there permanently?
“The answer to what people will do there is, what they are passionate about.”
KH: Ah the future – so much to think about. To scale up industry and transport in the Earth-moon system to the point where some goods from the moon can be sold for a profit on Earth, you really have to go all out with automation. You have to make maximum use of the fact the moon has no biosphere to harm, and turn all labor over to robots that can work in really dangerous environments. Once you manage to have robots make more robots using materials on the moon, and energy beamed from space solar power arrays powers the factories and transport, prices will drop and drop until you can compete with industry on Earth. Ok, if you buy that, then Moon Town is going to be the robot Mecca of the future. Robots don’t just do most of the laborious tasks, they do them all. Running a closed ecosystem on a world so hostile an unprotected person would die in less than a minute requires great care. People just plain aren’t trusted to always do everything important right. Robots do all that. The answer to what people will do there is, what they are passionate about.
I mean, it isn’t like robots won’t have taken most jobs on Earth by that time too. We’re going to have to decide how to assign value to things in a way that rewards merit in a world like that. What can humans do that even intelligent robots can’t? Things that have great emotional value to other humans. Things that help us define who we are. Arts. Sports. Caregiving. Spirituality. Exploration.
Now, that isn’t necessarily to say that a lot of average people will migrate permanently. At least, not to the town we are portraying first. It’s not a huge place, there is a lot a person would have to give up to live there. [See next question]. The city that comes after it would be better suited to welcome average people. The human population of Moon Town will be researchers and top engineers who benefit from being able to take a close look at their work on-site, artists, athletes, and a few administrators. Moon Town plans to embed depictions of their lives as stories woven into the world. Oh, also people with major disabilities who are taking advantage of how Moon Town permits body alteration on a level not legal on Earth, especially advantageous in a controlled, low gravity environment. And some people taking a shot at immortality. Literally.
SSP: Its been said that a space settlement will not be completely self-supporting and independent of Earth until children can be born and raised there. Moonwards deals with human health in the Moon’s 1/6 gravity environment through the use of centrifuges to dose inhabitants for 3 hours a day of 1G conditioning to mitigate the known deleterious effects of lower gravity to human health. But there appears to be no mention of children in Moonwards culture. Given Moonward’s rigorous scientific accuracy, is the lack of children because of our knowledge gaps with respect to the gravity prescription? Will this evolve over time as the Moonwards community is informed by advances in space medicine?
KH: Yes, it’s because of the knowledge gaps. It’s definitely completely unclear whether it’s possible to bear and raise healthy children on the moon. We also can’t anticipate in any way how we might work around that, if it isn’t possible. I’ll be comfortable depicting children in the O’Neill cylinder in orbit. We’ll get to that simulation in due course. With that option sitting there, why get into how to do it on the moon?
(PS – 3 hours a day is of course a total guess and was chosen to be relatively easy to work into gameplay. Media in the game will explain things like this.)
SSP: Speaking of centrifuges for human health in low gravity environments, your design of the health “Carousel” assumes a radius of 16 meters. This relatively small size, as you have acknowledged, could lead to severe Coriolis effects potentially resulting in severe disorientation and nausea. Have you considered a larger centrifuge design such as the one proposed by Gregory Dorais with a radius of 75 meters which could reduce the impact of Coriolis effects, and since Moonwards is depicted far enough in the future that this type of technology could be achievable?
KH: To be fair, the centrifuge portrayed right now is one of the first, in a hab that can’t accommodate anything bigger. The bet is that people who use the apparatus regularly adapt to the way it affects the inner ear, and then are able to use it without issue. This is the theory Al Globus puts forth, with a decent amount of evidence to back it up, based on experiments with centrifuges over the years. But as the town expands, centrifuges are made bigger and bigger.
I’m currently planning a thorough revisit to the town’s design. We are at a juncture in development where it makes sense to change and refine the models of the town, and I intend to take that pretty far. This time, the first habs built will be upright cylinders with rounded ends such that it’s possible to ride a bike around the walls so fast that you are pressed towards the wall with a force of one gravity. Nod of the hat to Jeff Greason for pointing that out. Then the first centrifuge will go in, not sure of the radius but at a guess, 40 meters. The bigger habs will be able to accommodate ones much larger still. But those will be in the hands of the Makers. I’m just making the first few things, and giving ample space for others to expand.
SSP: Currently, space exploration and development is primarily funded by government entities and is regulated by the Outer Space Treaty. As such, these activities are by nature geo-political. You’ve chosen not to deal with these challenges that will inevitably shape our future in space, and leap frogged ahead with the assumption that those issues have been solved. Is the hope that people will be so attracted to the abundant resources and opportunities that Moonwards has to offer, that they will overcome their differences and come together to make it happen?
“Let’s focus on getting across how much better life will be if we pull this off. That’s what matters.”
KH: Heck, I don’t just assume they’ve been solved. I assume the very best decisions have been made along the whole journey, to lead to the very best outcome for space development.
The exercise here is to explore our potential. It’s also important to see how this could go wrong, but as soon as you get into that, you fail to communicate the thing that matters most. This isn’t another chapter in geopolitical expansion, akin to the colonial era. This goes right off the map of anything humanity has ever experienced. Let’s focus on getting across how much better life will be if we pull this off. That’s what matters.
Visit Moonwards to download the game free of charge and start collaborating. Although somewhat dated, check out Kim’s appearance with Dr. Livingston, Haym Benaroya and myself on the Moonwards Panel at the 2017 Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress in Monterey, California.
Conceptual illustration of a planetary sunshade blocking a fraction of sunlight from reaching Earth at the L1 Lagrange point. Credits: Planetary Sunshade Foundation
The Planetary Sunshade Foundation (PSF) would answer “Yes!” to both questions. In a paper presented at the AIAA ASCEND conference in 2020 on the group’s website, the authors* lay out a well researched case on feasibility. The technology needed to build such a megastructure, envisioned to be located at the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point, will depend heavily on resource extraction on the Moon and Near Earth Asteroids as well as in-space manufacturing, both of which are anticipated to be mature industries by mid-century.
Building such a megastructure will be a huge undertaking and would require significant funding as well as international cooperation among world governments. PSF and many other groups (including President Joe Biden) take the position that global warming is an existential threat and therefore mitigating its effects are worth the costs. The foundation says on their website that “We have only ten years to dramatically decrease the use of fossil fuels, or be forced to respond to catastrophic global warming.” Other credentialed climate scientists interpret the same data differently disagreeing that if we don’t act now the impact will be catastrophic. They believe that a more gradual transition based on innovation and adaption would make more economic sense.
Dr. Steven Koonin, who served as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama, in his book “Unsettled” uses data from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show that the impact on the U.S. economy near the end of this century due to the worst scenario of predicted global temperature rise would be minimal. Therefore, in his view the warnings of an “existential threat” are not supported by the data.
Bjorn Lomborg takes the position that rather than making an abrupt change to our economy of reducing carbon emissions to zero by mid century, which is projected to impose significant economic costs and lower standards of living, we need to ramp up our investments in green energy innovation. This would include research and development in renewable energy technology such as solar and wind power, improving battery efficiency, nuclear power and other options to more gradually migrate away from fossil fuels.
The idea of placing a sunshade at L1 to cool the planet is not new, as evidenced by a few examples listed as references in the PSF paper. One of the references published back in 2006 by Roger Angel, Professor of Astronomy and Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, examines the “Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1)”. Angel realized that embarking on such an ambitious endeavor should only be initiated to avert serious climate change “…found to be imminent or in progress.” He concludes that “The same massive level of technology innovation and financial investment needed for the sunshade could, if also applied to renewable energy, surely yield better and permanent solutions.”
Such major undertakings among world governments are by nature political, but if agreement is eventually reached by stakeholders on the urgency to build a planetary sunshade, the option will be available to humanity in the near future should it become necessary. The planetary sunshade is technically possible with future technology advances and has the potential for other benefits. For example, if the structure is made from thin-film photovoltaics, it would be possible to collect enough solar energy to provide hundreds of terawatts of power which is many times the current needs of Earth (currently 17TW). PSF believes the sunshade megastructure “…could generate civilization-transforming energy supplies.” The authors even suggest that a toroidal colony like the one conceived in the NASA 1975 Space Settlement Design Study could be constructed nearby to house workers supporting the manufacture of the sunshade and be “…combined to create banded toroidal settlements as well, scaling linearly, depending upon the population needs of the settlement.”
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* The authors ( A. Jehle, E. Scott, and R. Centers) of the paper “A Planetary Sunshade Built from Space Resources” as of last year were graduate students in the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Centers and Scott are Director and Systems Engineer, respectively on the PSF Team.
