The Foundation Society

Alexandriat.S89E14.
Kolstad42Lane.
From: Office of New Settlement Planning NEWS
FoundationSociety.ONSP Date: 12 January 2059

Foundation Society Settlement to Move Asteroids

Foundation Society President Edwards Smith announced today that the organization will build a
space settlement to move asteroids. The asteroids will be moved to orbits where they can provide
raw materials for refineries and factories in space. The Society meets tomorrow with selected
aerospace companies to define requirements for the settlement and solicit design proposals for its
construction. “It’s time to take the next big step in space infrastructure development,” said Smith.

Engineer Haylah Renears said the Foundation Society did its own analyses to study methods for
moving an asteroid. “We considered an automated system to put rockets on an asteroid and push it
where we want it to go. We looked at solar sails. We looked at mass driver propulsion. The more
we looked at it, the more we realized so many things are unexpected or can go wrong. Experience
in space shows the best way to solve problems is to have people there to figure out what’s going on
and fix things, often in ways that programmers of automated systems wouldn’t have predicted.”
Smith added the Foundation Society’s goal is to move more of its members into space. “After a
while it became obvious that the asteroid-moving problem is really an opportunity to get more of
our members living and working in orbit. We felt silly for not recognizing that from the start.”

Planetary Scientist Ty Quayle explained that there are several types of asteroids, differentiated by
their composition. Examples of all types of asteroids are found in Earth-crossing orbits. “It takes
the least energy to move an Earth-crosser into an Earth orbit. An added benefit is that we’ll turn
possible future killer asteroids into resources for human development in space, and our contractor
will demonstrate a method for removing future asteroid threats that jeopardize life on Earth.”
Specific asteroid parameters will not be identified. According to Renears, “we prefer to empower
our contractors to make the big decisions that affect their designs. The size of the asteroid and the
location of its natural orbit will affect major aspects of settlement design. We want to see what our
contractors think is smartest.”
(andandand this is just to get the margins right)
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Asteroid - Moving Settlement

The Foundation Society’s orbital manufacturing centers currently mostly process lunar ores. A
few small batches of asteroid materials have been transported to the research center at the
Alexandriat space settlement, where they show promise for new products. “Our biggest success so
far is figuring out how to make buckystructure materials out of Germanium,” said Renears.
“Servers and computers consume a third of the power produced on Earth. Servers made with
Germanium buckystructures use only 1/10th as much power, and barely need cooling. We got this
stuff onto the market just last year, and the demand for it is huge, because as more of these servers
replace the old ones, it will be possible to shut down old and inefficient power plants.”

Foundation Society analyst Gale Agrawal added “in its decade of operations, our Bellevistat
settlement has taught us that the more time creative people live in space, the more cool things they
think up to do with space resources. We can do chemistry in space that doesn’t work on Earth.
Also, people in a production environment like Bellevistat tend to focus on improving production
rather than researching new things to produce. After we figured out how to make Germanium
buckystructures, our Bellevistat engineers want to figure out how to make more of that product
faster. This new settlement will have a research lab that just figures out how to make new products
from the asteroids it captures.”

“This is going to be fun,”, said Quayle. “It will be a big settlement, and we want it to move big
asteroids. It will be a lot of mass to move. It’s made possible by a new propulsion system that can
be scaled to any size, any thrust, any acceleration--and it derives its fuel from the dust on asteroids.
We have no constraints on how long it will take to move asteroids, so contractors have lots of
choices.”

The new asteroid-moving settlement will be named “Atlas”, after the Titan from Greek mythology
who is usually pictured carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

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