Category Archives: Space Settlement

Living in Space, Space Settlement, The Moon

Estimating the safety of Moon tunnels + The in-space colony concept

A group at Purdue University has released an interesting study of lava tubes on the Moon in which they examined the possibility that there are ones big enough and stable enough to hold cities:

moon-blair-lavatubes-purdue[1]

This diagram illustrates a lava tube protecting a city the size
of Philadelphia. Purdue University/courtesy of David Blair

Lava tubes are

tunnels formed from the lava flow of volcanic eruptions. The edges of the lava cool as it flows to form a pipe-like crust around the flowing river of lava. When the eruption ends and the lava flow stops, the pipe drains leave behind a hollow tunnel, said Jay Melosh, a Purdue University distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences who is involved in the research.

There is indirect evidence that lava tubes exist on the Moon. A number of large holes, for example, have been seen on the Moon and it is speculated that these could be where the roofs of lava tubes have collapsed. See Lunar and Martian Lava Tube: Exploration as Part of an Overall Scientific Survey, Daga et al. (pdf).

The Purdue study considered the case of really large tubes:

David Blair, a graduate student in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, led the study that examined whether empty lava tubes more than 1 kilometer wide could remain structurally stable on the moon.

“We found that if lunar lava tubes existed with a strong arched shape like those on Earth, they would be stable at sizes up to 5,000 meters, or several miles wide, on the moon,” Blair said. “This wouldn’t be possible on Earth, but gravity is much lower on the moon and lunar rock doesn’t have to withstand the same weathering and erosion. In theory, huge lava tubes – big enough to easily house a city – could be structurally sound on the moon.”

Blair worked with Antonio Bobet, a Purdue professor of civil engineering, and applied known information about lunar rock and the moon’s environment to civil engineering technology used to design tunnels on Earth.

The team found that a lava tube’s stability depended on the width, roof thickness and the stress state of the cooled lava, and the team modeled a range of these variables. The researchers also modeled lava tubes with walls created by lava placed in one thick layer and with lava placed in many thin layers, Blair said.

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Personally, rather than on the Moon I would prefer to live in a large, island-sized, in-space habitat like that promoted by the late Princeton physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill . Rotation could provide a full 1 g of spin-gravity, no lunar dust to hassle with and breath, sunlight all around, and there would be a greater sense of freedom of movement. That is, why work so hard to get out of earth’s gravity well just to jump down another one?

Every so often, someone on the web discovers the great space colony artwork from the workshops that studied such structures: How we’ll live in space, according to people in the 1970s – mashable

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Interior including human powered flight. Art work: Rick Guidice.
Image via NASA Ames Research Center.

At the time, such ambitions were believed justified by the big drop in space transportation costs that would come when the Space Shuttle began to fly. The Moon would still be useful – as a source of the materials to build such huge structures. It’s low gravity would allow building materials literally to be thrown into space by mass drivers, i.e. electromagnetic catapults.

Unfortunately, the hyper-complex and fragile Shuttles failed to lower space transport costs at all. The original fully reusable design for the Shuttles was down-graded by budget cuts and the Shuttles became only partially refurbish-able, requiring a standing army of thousands to work for months to return one to flight.

Today we finally are seeing new approaches to reusable space vehicles that intend to achieve full reusability and fast turnaround. We could see the cost of getting to space drop by factors of 100 in the coming decade.

Low cost spaceflight combined with new technologies like 3D printing and advanced robotics will make it affordable to build large scale structures in space.  Today’s space pessimism towards concepts like in-space colonies will give way to taking them granted just as we take granted the giant structures on earth that once would have been considered fantasies.

Living in Space, Space Settlement

Space settlement experimentation in northern Canadian

Speaking of space settlements, there often comes up the question of what are the best earth analogs. Communities on small islands, the early New World settlements, and Antarctic science bases are typical suggestions. A New Scientist article suggests Canadian Arctic mining towns. Such towns can form very quickly in very isolated and difficult environments – and sometimes disappear very quickly as well: New Urbanist: Off-world colonies of the Canadian Arctic – New Scientist.

An example mentioned is Fermont, Quebec, which is known

for the huge self-contained structure containing apartments, stores, schools, bars, a hotel, restaurants, a supermarket and swimming pool which shelters a community of smaller apartment buildings and homes on its leeward side. The structure was designed to be a windscreen to the rest of the town. It permits residents (other than mine workers) to never leave the building during the long winter, which usually lasts about seven months. The town, designed by Maurice Desnoyers and Norbert Schoenauer, was inspired by similar projects in Sweden designed by Ralph Erskine, notably that of Svappavaara, a copper mining town in Sweden. The building measures 1.3 kilometres (4,300 ft) long and stands 50 metres (160 ft) high.[4] [Wikipedia]

The V-shaped structure can be seen in this image:

VilledeFermont-00-large[1]DMA architectes

From the New Scientist article:

The town is also home to an extraordinary architectural feature: a residential megastructure whose explicit purpose is to redirect the local weather. Known as the Mur-écran or “windscreen”, this structure is an astonishing 1.3 kilometres in length, shaped roughly like a horizontal V or chevron. Think of it as a climatological Maginot Line, built to resist the howling, near-constant northern winds.

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However, [Elon Musk] is not talking about building a Martian version of London or Paris. In a sense, we are already experimenting with off-world colonisation – only we are doing it in the windswept villages and extraction sites of the Canadian north.

 

Activism, DIY space, Space Settlement

Mars One finalists refute accusations from one of their own + Making Mars settlement real

The Mars One project is getting hammered on the web by these two articles that include accusations against the project made by one of the entrants who made the cut to the Mars100 group:

However, other Mars1000 finalists respond with a rebuttal to each of the accusations: Current Mars100 Finalists refute Elmo Keep’s Mars One “conspiracy theory.” — Medium.

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As I’ve indicated before, Mars One is essentially an aspirational project. It aspires to create a Mars settlement but it is dependent on others to make a settlement technically feasible at a price that a private effort could conceivably afford. There is nothing in the Mars One plan about developing its own rockets, spacecraft, settlement hardware, etc. Mars One is all about creating a business model that can raise sufficient funds to pay the company (or companies) that supply the rockets, spacecraft, etc. to take a group of private individuals to the Red Planet.

Currently, it is only SpaceX that looks like it could supply affordable transportation to the Red Planet in the next decade or two. Elon Musk has often said, as in the interview at MIT last fall shown in the video below, that Mars settlement is the primary goal of the company:

The long term ambition of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, or civilization on Mars,

Full reusability of rockets and spacecraft is what makes it not crazy to talk about reductions in space transportation costs by factors of 10 to 100:

Well, it is a chicken and egg situation, the reason why there’s low demand for spaceflight is because it’s ridiculously expensive, and so at some point someone has to say, okay, we’re going to make something that’s much more affordable and then see what applications develop. That’s what has to happen.

The situation in rocketry is like if an aircraft – imagine if aircraft were single use, then how many people would fly? The flight rate would be really low. If you buy a 757 it’s like $250M, or maybe $300M, and you need two of them for a round-trip. No-one is paying half-a-billion dollars to fly from Boston to London, and if that were the case there’d be like a very small number of flights for scientific and military purposes and people would say, wow, the market for aircraft is so tiny, people really love going by boat – it’s nonsense.

If we have rockets that are reusable, we could – fully-reusable and can get to a decent flight rate, the potential is there to get a two order of magnitude reduction in the cost of space transport, which is, I think, vital for establishment of a self-sustaining civilization on another planet or even on the Moon or some sort of L5 colony or whatever, but you really need to get the cost down – we need a two order of magnitude improvement, at least, in the cost of transport. In fact, relative to the estimates of what it costs to do a manned Mars mission, I think like some of the lower estimates are at the $100B to $200B level, for a four person mission, we need more like a 10,000 fold reduction. I mean, so people can afford to go.

(As long as NASA ignores reusability and focuses only on a big and stupendously expensive rocket, the agency will never afford to go to Mars even for a simple flag and footprints mission with three or four astronauts.)

Elon is aiming for a price of $500k for a person to move to Mars. He sees that as an amount that many people could raise by cashing out all their assets.

He apparently has had no direct contact with Mars One and has stated that the organization’s emphasis on one-way trips is misguided. It won’t be affordable to go to Mars unless the transports are two-way:

I think there’s plenty of people who will sign up for a one-way trip to Mars. It’d certainly be enough, but I think the question is, is it a one-way mission and then you die, or is it a one-way mission and you get resupplied, that’s a big difference. I think it ends up being a moot point because you want to bring the spaceship back. These spaceships are expensive, okay, they’re hard to build. You can’t just leave them there. So whether or not people want to come back or not, is kind of – like, they can just jump on if they want, but we need the spaceship back. I mean, it’d be kind of weird if there’s this huge collection of spaceships on Mars over time. It’d be like, maybe we should send them back – no, of course we should send them back. Particularly if we want to have a colony of some kind that’s of significant size.

The Mars One graphics typically show Dragon spacecraft converted into habitats on the ground. However, Elon thinks that going to Mars in Dragons makes little sense:

Well, the illustrations that I’ve seen basically has them using a bunch of SpaceX rockets and Dragon spacecraft. I’m like, okay, if they want to buy a bunch of Dragons and Falcon 9 rockets, that’s cool. We’ll certainly sell them. I mean, I don’t think they’ve got anywhere near the funding to buy even one, so I think therefore it’s unrealistic, and I think trying to go to Mars in Dragon is less than ideal. It’s at least – well, if you go real fast it’s maybe a three month journey and normally it would be more like a 6 to 8 month journey. That’s a long time to spend in something with the interior volume of an SUV. I’d recommend waiting for the next generation of technology.

Elon has said that later this year he will describe in more detail the “next generation of technology” that he believes will enable his plan for Mars settlement.  If SpaceX makes steady progress over the next few years in implementing that technology, especially reusable rockets, then proposals for Mars settlement will gain increasing credibility and many organizations will emerge to pursue that goal. Mars One may be a leader in that movement or it may have become a footnote; an early group that failed to get off the ground financially but proved that there are plenty of people eager and willing to move to Mars.

Update: Some comments from Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX about Mars travel: SpaceX: No One Laughs Anymore When We Talk About Colonizing Mars – Motherboard

“We’re not shy about talking about Mars, which would be an extraordinary step for humans, to actually have a settlement there,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Tuesday at the Satellite conference in Washington, DC. “The whole company is geared up on that, everybody’s eye is on the Red Planet.”

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“We’re not interested in one way trips,” she said. “In order to take people there and come back, you can’t toss the rocket when you get there and then wait 30 years until you can build another one on Mars.”

“There is a surprising number of people that want to leave Earth, we believe there is a commercial application for any Mars mission,” she added.

My emphasis.

Living in Space, Solar Sci-Fi, Space Settlement

Futures: Space architecture + “Twelve Tomorrows” SF anthology + “Exploring and settling the outer solar system”

An article about space architects and their ideas about inflatable habitats and building with lunar dust concrete: Let’s all move to Mars! The space architects shaping our future – The Guardian

“The lunar surface is an open mine of potential building materials,” says Madhu Thangavelu, space architect at the University of Southern California (USC) and co-author of The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement. “It is full of readily accessible minerals and compounds that could be used to produce metals, bricks, glass and paints. The moon is also riddled with ‘lava tubes’, great cavernous volumes under the surface that could be made habitable, offering protection from radiation and solar storms.”

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Location, location … Mars base 10. Illustration: Ondřej Doule

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Check out MIT Technology Review’s third SF anthology issue: Twelve Tomorrows – MIT Technology Review

Inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered in the pages of MIT Technology Review, renowned writers Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, and Christopher Brown join the hottest emerging authors from around the world to envision the future of the Internet, biotechnology, computing, and more.

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Leonard David reviews the book Living Among Giants: Exploring and Settling the Outer Solar System by Michael Carroll, a noted space artist: Book Review: Living Among Giants – Exploring and Settling the Outer Solar System –

Here is a fascinating and unique look at the outer Solar System, masterfully detailed in words and artwork regarding planned and imagined future human exploration and possible colonization.

Carroll is a prominent prize-winning space artist with a flair for writing and swinging a paintbrush. This book includes numerous illustrations, among them original paintings by the author.

Right from the start, Carroll asks a picture-captioned question: “Mars is the next logical site for human habitation. But what other sites offer promise?”

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Mars, Space participation, Space Settlement

Mars One: Video ‘Life on Mars: Leila Zucker’ + Odds of success + Lander project stand-down

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The announcement by Mars One about the reduction of the list of candidates for missions to Mars down to 100 individuals has gotten quite a bit of publicity. Many in the space community, however, point out the huge, if not insurmountable, hurdles that face the organization in getting to the distant Red Planet.

I prefer to focus on the fact that it is significant that the project has shown the world that there are plenty of talented, highly-educated people who are eager to go to Mars even without any guarantee of ever returning to earth. For example, here is a video profile of Dr. Leila Sucker, an emergency room MD, who made the cut to the final 100 candidates:  Life On Mars: Leila Zucker on Vimeo (created by Melissa Balan and colleagues at Senior Post) –

It’s clear, though, that the only way Mars One can succeed is if SpaceX succeeds in achieving Elon Musk’s goal of lowering the cost of getting to Mars to a level that private individuals and groups can afford it. It’s no accident that the Mars One artwork shows SpaceX derived hardware. The odds are against SpaceX getting people to Mars by the 2020s but considering what the company has achieved and is in the process of achieving, the odds are steadily improving.

BTW: While the Mars One organizers talk about one-way missions, Elon emphasizes that going to Mars can only become affordable if the transports to get there come back to earth to be reused again and again. So there will in fact be opportunities for Mars One settlers to return if they want to come back.

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The Mars One project to put an unmanned lander on Mars in the 2018 time frame appears to have hit cash-flow problems: Mars One Suspends Work on Robotic Missions – SpaceNews.

The leader of Mars One says they remain committed to the lander project –  Jeff Foust on Twitter:

Mars One’s Bas Lansdorp did email me this morning to say that the 2018 robotic missions are still their “top priority.”