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: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: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.