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.

Comments

Baby steps

[__aaltlg1547]

Step 1: research on the ISS focused on biosphere components and food production.
Step 2: build a new station to experiment on establishing a small biosphere
Step 3: Expand it to the point that it's food and air sufficient for humans
Step 4: Build a moon base and apply what you learned in LEO to make it self-sufficient

At the same time, work on high efficiency, low reaction mass propulsion systems. This is the real killer. If you can't crack the problem of long distance propulsion systems, we're stuck near earth where we can or make fuel.

Re:Baby steps

[CRCulver]

After the US has spent years and billions of dollars on e.g. biosphere research with the technology available to them at the time, the Chinese for example might just wait and see, and then outpace the US with more advanced technology available to them after the US has exhausted itself. The problem with taking the first step into a technology-heavy field, where the political will to continue investment might collapse after one or two presidential administrations, is that later entrants can coast on your achievements. So, why bother?

Re:Baby steps

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it's their strategy for destroying the US. They make no bones about it; it's in many unclassified Chinese military publications.

Robots

[Jack9]

This is almost the same as asking how we are going to transition to a galactic civilization. From the mile-high-view, quit trying to put humans in places where they have trouble surviving for any period of time. You have to port an ecosystem with you and can still lose it all in a single incident. We haven't even conquered our own biome yet (at least not without a number of side effects). Spaceships with humans is not the answer. Everyone born on Earth will likely die on Earth (with rare exception). This isn't wrong or worrisome insofar as there are no good alternatives yet. System wide or interstellar, it's the same problems at different scales. Ain't nobody helping you halfway between neptune and pluto, nor between the stars.

Durable energy storages that are as simple to fabricate as possible, should be at the top of the list for expansion into the solar system. We basically know what materials are available and what energy sources we can play with. We have long-range communication down to the best case for overriding automation, but our computer science doesn't have a lot of science behind software reliability. One result has been that our automata aren't too bright yet. Let's keep working on understanding the mind while bumping up the work on machine learning. Work on genetics for the far-future possibility of launching biological samples interstellar distances (naturally we will test them in our own solar system first, if we get the chance).

You want an idea? How about we fund NASA?

[bobbied]

You want to encourage exploration/exploitation of space? Fund NASA and point them in the desired direction..

Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal. Dig up a pile of past interplanetary missions and let's start funding them too. Saturn and Jupiter all have possibilities that we need to go look at. How about making a survey of near earth asteroids? What are they made of, is there something there we can use, refine or utilize so we don't have to get it all off the surface of the earth and into orbit? NASA has already suggested all these things and more.

Why are you asking the public for ideas, just FUND NASA and let NASA collect ideas and run with the good ones. All they need is the money....

Re:You want an idea? How about we fund NASA?

[arth1]

NASA is terrible. They take too long to do anything,

Yet, they actually do something.
Once companies takes pictures of Neptune or puts a man on the moon, I'll be suitably impressed.
Until then, they're leeches riding on NASAs skirt, playing around in LEO using NASA-derived designs, and not pushing any boundaries except executive bonuses.

I wish I could believe he was serious.

[HiThere]

I wish I could believe he was serious.

What else is there to say. When I've been lied to enough I stop believing. Sometimes cynical is just realistic.

Re:One word:

[kuzb]

even if we were to go 100% solar tomorrow, we wouldn't have enough energy for this world. Period. The idea that we can simply just go all solar is naive to the max. We would actually be better off going 100% nuclear.

Re:Power Source

[Rei]

On the other hand, when it comes to propulsion, nukes are the bees knees. No form of currently-achievable propulsion yields a higher Isp than a fission fragment rocket, with the exception of photonic / magnetic sails, which are impractically low thrust for interplanetary travel. Some day I'd love to run some simulations as to whether you could have a spallation-driven subcritical dusty fission reactor get rid of much if not all of the moderator mass (power to drive the accelerator should be copious from a fission fragment reactor), and whether you could run one in an infrared nuclear lightbulb mode (making use of the electrostatically-contained dust's extreme surface area and low IR absorption spectrum to get high output, rather than using extreme, unmanageable temperatures to get high output as in a traditional nuclear lightbulb concept), thus opening up non-dirty high thrust power modes for surface operation (airbreathing, simple fuel heating, etc, including using electricity from fragment deceleration to run a microwave beam to help ionize the air/fuel and make it more opaque to IR) and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)

Re:Power Source

[FatLittleMonkey]

No form of currently-achievable propulsion yields a higher Isp than a fission fragment rocket

We're so far from FFR, we might as well talk about fusion drives, or Harold White's warp drive.

and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)

My previous comments apply to NEP vs SEP. SEP has better power/mass ratios until you are somewhere near Jupiter, and realistically probably somewhere past Jupiter.

Basic plan

[Chas]

Step 1: Build permanent habitation in orbit. In a way that can easily be converted to a "space dock".

Step 2: Use it as a launch pad for permanent habitation on the Moon. Build the infrastructure, build large (mega-engineering projects). Once it's done, THEN move people in permanently. Use this method as the basis for expansion elsewhere in the solar system.

Step 3: Once permanent habitation has been done within Earth-orbit, send out automated devices to construct a similar space dock in Mars orbit, and possibly one in Venus orbit.

Step 4: Use the Mars dock as a launch pad for permanent habitation on Mars using the Moon's habitation as a template. Due to Venus' EXTREMELY unfriendly atmosphere, I'd likely say convert the Venus station into a solar power-to-battery facility.

Step 5: Once the Moon and Mars colonies are firmly established, use the template for occupying the moons of the outer planets.

Basically the orbital facilities would be staging areas for occupation of the various planets/moons. They serve as fall-back points in case of catastrophe. And, once the colony was safely established, they'd become fuel depots.

Going with a "launch from orbit" model also saves fuel and wear and tear on interplanetary vehicles.