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

One word:

[penguinoid]

Start.

Re:One word:

[JonathanR]

I think we would be better off going 100% silver bullets. That would instantly fix everything.

Re:One word:

[GNious]

Comments like your always scare me - the last thing we need is for people to think that "100% solar" (or, "100% some powersource") is in any way relevant to meeting our powerneeds.

Step one

[SlowMovingTarget]

Step one: corner the maple syrup market.

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.

Sheesh. Five cases of Ebola and

[jpellino]

they start asking how to get off the planet? Lightweights.

Begin planning use of Lockheed's fusion power

[BenJeremy]

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.

Re:Begin planning use of Lockheed's fusion power

[able1234au]

Those wimpy environ-liberals are so weak they fear being irradiated by exploding rockets. Where is the fun in that. I look forward to having three eyes and a tail.

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?

[AdamThor]

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.

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.

Re:so......

[tloh]

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.

Power Source

[sycodon]

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.

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.

Re:Power Source

[Immerman]

Oh, and meant to mention: solar panels are really only promising in the inner solar system, and there's just not much worth colonizing inwards of Earth and its L-points. On Mars you only have 43% of the solar intensity, so you'll be getting only 130W/kg. At about 2 AU the asteroid belt will only see ~25%, and at over 5 AU the Trojans and Jovian moons are seeing less than 4%. And then there's everything beyond Neptune, where the sun is little more than a particularly bright star - lots of mineral wealth floating out there - I've heard estimates that the Oort cloud might extend as far as a light year from the sun.

Insurance

[Boronx]

Provide low-cost federal insurance for colonization and asteroid mining missions, like we do for nuclear power plants.

Re:How about...

[Will.Woodhull]

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.

Re:Biggest motivation?

[z0idberg]

The only problem with that is that their descendents will then come back in 200 years and beat our descendents in all the sports we invented.

Just impractical

[fyngyrz]

I have an idea...we could name a ship Botany Bay and send the worst criminals into space.

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.

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.