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White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization"
MarkWhittington writes Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for "bootstrapping a solar system civilization." Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose. The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.
Start.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Fund NASA to explore the advantages (and mitigate issues, such as waste heat) of using fusion in space vehicles. Let's get new designs in play now, so we can get the ball rolling fast when these compact generators are practical and real. Ion thrusters, magnetic fields, life support... having hundreds of megawatts of power makes the entire solar system within reach for manned space travel.
Um, because one way you've got a chance to engineer your process until you get it right, and the other way you're a loser? Because "has exhausted itself" is loser thinking all by itself?
Indeed! The actual key in our current generation is to provide consistent direction and funding to NASA. As it is, every president comes in, makes some big talk about the Moon or Mars or something, no resources are allocated, and the next president in line makes a different set of commitments.
A framework for a large-scale goal that is capable of withstanding our political situation is the thing we lack.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
I won't speculate on the intentions of OC. But bringing up oil does raise a very legitimate item of concern. For much of the 20th century, petroleum has been the critical resource that drove or enabled much of our civilization and technical infrastructure. If we are going to look skyward, we have *GOT* to start thinking differently about the resource(s) that we are going to use. Unless big oil is willing to shell out the cash for researching the exploration and mining of hydrocarbons in the Jovian system, our government has got to step up and look at what we need to power space travel on an industrial scale.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Nothing will happen until you can build and loft a real power source that can generate hundreds of megawatts of energy to drive the ships and once there, power the outposts.
Solar can be part of that but putting up a solar farm to generate enough power to provide for an actual colony would take hundreds of tons of material as compared to a compact nuke or a fusion device like recently discussed by Lockheed. Think Nuke Sub reactors.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Why? You haven't had a frogman living on the ocean floor either. So what? Some dreams never made any sense, and the whole kit and caboodle of Cosmism never made any sense. The sooner you'll get rid of this toxic nostalgia for goofy ideas that make no sense, the better.
Provide low-cost federal insurance for colonization and asteroid mining missions, like we do for nuclear power plants.
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