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.
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!
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.”
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:
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.
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.
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.
Industry should improve ties and partnerships with domestic and allied parts, subcomponent and subsystem manufacturers to strengthen trust and resilience in space supply chains.
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.
Artist’s impression of a space elevator. Credits: Steve Bowers / orionsarm.com
The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) has just published a position paper on the technology readiness of this alternative to launch vehicles subject to the constraints of the rocket equation. Recent advances in material science of single crystal graphene and other alternatives show potential for fabrication of tethers long enough and with the required strength to enable space elevators by the late 2030s. The authors present a case that the demand for launching enough mass to support ESA’s Moon Village, space based solar power and Elon Musk’s vision for Mars colonies far exceeds projected conventional rocket capabilities. Space elevators could fill this need while being better for the environment.
Artist concept of a city on Mars. Credits: Nick Hvostik
In an exclusive report in Variety, Imagine Documentaries along with Proctor and Gamble are co-financing a futuristic film of a family’s relocation from Earth to the red planet and how they adjust to their new space settlement. The film is based on a concept by Stephen Petranek, author of “How We’ll Live on Mars”. Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Imagine Documentaries co-head Justin Wilkes will produce the film. Variety quotes Wilkes as saying “We’re not calling it science fiction, we’re calling it science factual”. The team will consult with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, among others to “…forecast practical technologies”.
Imagine Entertainment’s founders Brian Grazer and Ron Howard; Imagine Documentary President Justin Wilkes. Photo credits: Imagine Entertainment.
Ceramics sintered using a MGS slurry system employing classic pottery (potter’s wheel), slip casting, material extrusion (robocasting/direct ink writing), 3D printing (layerwise slurry deposition with binder jetting) and as a reference dry pressing. Credits: David Karl et al.*
Development of the methods for in situ resource utilization on Mars requires validation ahead of time. Making durable and useful ceramics is one such material processing technique that would be valuable. In a paper just posted on the arXiv preprint server to be published in the journal Open Ceramics, David Karl at the Technische Universitaet Berlin and others* present findings on a study of such methods using Mars global simulants (MGS) as a proxy for clay on the Red Planet. These simulants, provided by Kevin Cannon’s Center for Asteroid and Lunar Surface Science (CLASS) Exolith Lab at the University of Central Florida, deliver superior strength when compared to other ISRU materials, as mentioned in a recent Tweet by Cannon.
The paper also documents the results of a sophisticated additive manufacturing technique called layerwise slurry deposition (LSD) using the MGS. As mentioned in the paper’s Introduction, “To highlight the importance of clay as a medium for human civilizations and thought (along with illustrating the usefulness of the unfired/fired concept, as cuneiform tablets are found in unfired as well as fired state), cuneiform tablets from 3D scans were reproduced as inspirational artifacts, illustrating the excellent LSD printing resolution”.
(Top left) Flowchart of MGS slurry production (described in detail in [5]), (top right) schematic of 2 the layerwise slurry deposition and (bottom) processing path for cuneiform tablets from 3D scans of 3 original cuneiform tablets made during the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC), produced as technological 4 demonstrators for LSD and inspirational artifacts for Mars colonization. Credits: David Karl et al.*
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* D. Karl, F. Kamutzki, P. Lima, A. Gili, T. Duminy, A. Zocca, J. Günster,A. Gurlo, Sintering of ceramics for clay in situ resource utilization on Mars, Open Ceramics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oceram.2020.100008.
A nuclear thermal rocket concept. Credits: NASA/Wired
In a paper presented at the 8th Symposium on Space Resource Utilization (2016), Bryan Palaszewski analyzes multiple mission architectures for human voyages to the inner and outer solar system. The planet Mercury has permanently shadowed craters at its poles which likely contain frozen water enabling ice mining for rocket propellant and oxygen for breathable air to sustain settlements. The outer planets and their moons are reservoirs of significant amounts of useful gases such as hydrogen, helium 3, methane, ethane, and ammonia which can be utilized as in-situ resources. Through nuclear propulsion and living off the land with ISRU, travel times can be reduced and payloads increased for both robotic and human missions. With a positive vision for eventual space settlement, Palaszewski concludes the paper with “These technological innovations will enable Krafft Ehricke’s vision of a polyglobal civilization“.
Artist concept of dining in space. Credits: Disney/Eater
In a recent Twitter thread Kevin Cannon shares his thoughts on the logistics of feeding an expanding population as humans settle other worlds. His “food quality” model compares different food preparation venues in an effort to highlight the challenges of feeding folks in in remote locations such as space settlements (and no, there likely won’t be food trucks in space).
Rough index of “food quality”. Credits: Kevin Cannon / Twitter
The obvious goal is sustainable, high frequency food replenishment utilizing in situ resource utilization (ISRU). Cannon recently published a paper in which he modeled the calorie needs and land requirements for a martian settlement that reaches a population of one million people becoming self-sufficient within a hundred years. A wealth of research relevant to space settlement can be found at his website kevin.cannon.rocks.
