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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.
Prison colonies!
where did they find oil now?
Start.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Step one: corner the maple syrup market.
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.
they start asking how to get off the planet? Lightweights.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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.
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....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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."
it isn't just rockets in space that is the problem. when you need 20 pounds of fuel to carry every pound of material to orbit you have a design limitation that needs to be changed.
We need better earth to orbit tech. once we have that the rest becomes much much easier. The ISS took 36 separate launches and we basically have a 10,000 sqft house.
Solve SSTO and watch as we can suddenly start launching more stuff up there.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Unless you have a few trillion dollar coins stashed away somewhere that'll fund thousands upon thousands of chemical rockets, it's just not possible to do this
this is, of course, 100% true.
but, in light of this administrations total incompetence on so many issues, i think the plan is just...
"hey, dream whatever ideas, we will get funding and then make announcements and speeches about how smart we are, and it doesn't even matter if they ideas succeed or not, we will just say they did!
it's our intentions that count, not results."
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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.
You do realize that a thousand Falcon 9 flights would fall well short of 100 billion dollars at current prices? That would be enough launch capability to get a modest number of people or gear to Mars and about an order of magnitude more to the Moon. Most of that mass would be propellant, water, and air/food, meaning little additional cost beyond the launch costs for significant parts of the missions.
What will enable exploration and development on a modest budget scale is use of local resources or (ISRU - In Situ Resource Utilization). For example, once the local infrastructure is in place to extract propellant, you don't need to bring your own return trip propellant.
Provide low-cost federal insurance for colonization and asteroid mining missions, like we do for nuclear power plants.
Play Command HQ online
To be fair, they are pushing economics boundaries. Which are the only boundaries really holding us back from colonizing the system (and then galaxy).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
We already had a SSTO it was called the Saturn V.
Uh, no. You're confusing HLLV (heavy lift launch vehicle) with SSTO (single stage to orbit). Saturn V dropped two stages on the way to orbit.
The original Atlas was the closest we've come to an actual flying SSTO, it only dropped the two outboard engines, the tankage and sustainer engine made it the rest of the way.
Now, as a thought experiment you could take the Saturn V second stage and replace its five J2 engines with a Shuttle SSME (and move a bulkhead to allow for the different LH2/LOX burn ratio) and it would make orbit as a single stage. Ditto with the Shuttle External Tank and six SSMEs. But none of those would have reentry and landing capability, and if it's not reusable there's not much point to SSTO.
As for not seeing the point, it must be sad to live in a mind with such limited imagination. My condolences.
-- Alastair
The propellant, by itself, is not costly.
The rocket big enough to launch a meaningful mass of payload when only 5% of what it carries actually makes it into orbit is absurdly, exorbitantly expensive.
Launching tiny payloads isn't that hard. It still costs a lot, per unit mass, but the absolute costs are affordable.
Launching small payloads (a few tons) is pretty bad, price-wise. You may be able to combine your launch with a few others on a medium-sized launch vehicle, but it's still not something that can be done lightly.
Launching medium payloads (a few dozen tons) is basically the state of the art. Actually, nothing flying today can loft even two dozen metric tons, and the best launch vehicles under construction right now can only manage a few times more than that. Even these barely-into-double-digit-payload-tonnage launches are expensive enough that a company can do well making a few such launches a year, while undercutting all their competition and plowing a ton of money into R&D. Governments and large corporations are pretty much the only clients.
Launching large payloads of over a hundred tons hasn't been possible since the Saturn V stack lofted an entire mobile-home-sized space station into orbit. We have nothing that could manage this today, or even on the near horizon; we might have such a thing within two decades.
Launching something huge - for example, anything even close to the size of the ISS, much less anything bigger - will require either an extraordinary breakthrough in rocketry or a completely new launch system.
The biggest human-built object in space right now is the size of a large house, and sleeps six. It took dozens of launches over more than a decade to get it this far, at a cost exceeding the GDP of many nations. It has almost no propulsive capability and is not self-sufficient over long periods. If we ever want to put something much bigger and better in space - even just as a series of small-to-medium launches, like it was - we are going to need to bring the cost to orbit *WAY* down.
Now, in fairness, SpaceX has a pretty good angle on that. As you say, the propellant isn't terribly costly. If we can avoid throwing away the entire rocket with each launch, that will have an enormous effect on the cost of getting stuff to space. With that said, though, we'll still be stuck with a max payload to orbit barely in the triple digits until we come up with a better way to reach orbit than relying on chemical rockets.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Republicans.
Tell them the space program is an effort to protect the one percent from ebola, and to get away from all them do-gooder, pesky Democrats. And all them immigrants. That would shake the money tree.
Will
The subject line says it all, but just to clarify it a bit more, the global power requirement for 2020 is projected to be under 22 TW (we use 20 TW or so right now, depending on how you measure it).
In contrast, mean solar insolation on the planet is around 150,000 TW at ground level. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out from this that our civilization's power needs are completely insignificant compared to the power arriving from the Sun, by orders of magnitude.
Of course we can't harness those 150,000 TW, but 22 TW could be captured using very little acreage (0.015% of the Earth's surface) in any sunny desert, and there are lots of those available. Only a tiny fraction would be needed.
So, I don't know where someone got the idea that solar energy cannot meet our needs, it's so hugely wrong that it's funny.
But wait, the above figures are at ground level . Do you realize how much power could be harnessed in Low Earth Orbit and beamed down safely at low power density? (Design studies for this have already been made.) The amount of power available in LEO is so mind-blowingly enormous that doing a calculation becomes completely pointless. It's astronomic. And we don't have to stop at LEO.
Sorry to burst the bubble of your misconceptions, but you're wrong. Solar energy is, for all human intents and purposes, limitless.
I don't find such statements credible unless they put the money where their mouth is on the issue. If they blew what they've blown on the war on drugs on the space program we'd have a colony on mars. Think about that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I don't think we can make a spaceship large enough to hold congress and the supreme court at this time. Your idea will have to wait.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Presently working or theoretical? If you want "presently working", then that would defeat the point of asking for suggestions, would it not? If you want theoretical, there's tons. I kind of like the Launch Loop concept - sort of like a space elevator except that it doesn't require unobtanium, avoids or reduces the countless other problems with space elevators (micrometeorite damage, oscillation modes, power transfer, lightning and ionospheric discharge, and about 50 other things), and it gives you much more ideal/customizable orbital momentum, plus is 1-2 orders of magnitude more energy efficient at lifting cargo (space elevator climbers have to rely on beamed power, there's no practical way to send it through the cable, and beamed power over great distances where one receiver is only a few square meters at best is very low efficiency) AND offers a far higher launch rate.
Earth-based space elevators, the stuff of sci-fi nerd dreams, really are an awful solution when you start looking at the details. There's far better solutions out there.
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This article argues that Elon Musk is in many ways like Werner Von Braun or the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev (who pushed the Soviets into space). One thing I got from this article was that the original and primary motivation for building rockets was to make weapons. Von Braun and Kovolev almost singlehandedly pushed their own countries into building rockets to put people into space. Without them, we might not have had satellites as quickly or at all. Placing satellites into orbit and putting humans into orbit was once considered crazy. American government officials considered Von Braun to be eccentric, but they didn't care as long as he gave them better ICBM's. Now our entire civilization is built around satellite technology, and our moon shots have brought us technology advances such as the microchip.
When we talk about putting more humans it can sound a little crazy. However I don't think it is any more crazy than having people climb Mt. Everest, having bases in Antarctica, or sending three small ships westward into the unknown ocean to find a new world. We humans have an inbuilt desire to explore. To ignore that is to go against our fundamental nature.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)