Orbital Space Settlements

and a Solar System Wide

Web

Humanity could be life's ticket to the stars

(The dinosaurs weren’t space-faring)
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/shuttle-mir/photos/sts71/mir-imax/hmg0018.jpg
 People Live Everywhere
• Every continent, including Antarctica
• Hottest, driest deserts
• Coldest, iciest regions
• Wettest rain forests
• On water
• For short periods, in orbit
• 6,000,000,000 people on Earth
 Life is Everywhere
• On nearly all land areas
• In nearly all waters
• In the rocks under the Earth
• In near-boiling water
• In ice
• On desert rocks
• On a spacecraft on the Moon
 Next Target: Orbit
• Your lifetime: thousands of people living in
orbit
• A few centuries: most of humanity in orbit.

• Next millenium:
generation ships
to the stars
 Orbital Space Settlement
• Who? Ordinary people.
• What? Artificial ecosystems inside
gigantic rotating, pressurized
spacecraft.
• Where? In orbit; near Earth at first.
• How? With great difficulty.
• Why? To grow.
• When? Decades.
• How much will it cost? If you have to
ask, you can't afford it.
 Who
• Today: highly trained astronauts.
– $20-40 million tourist trip to Mir
– Survivor in Space
• Tomorrow: everyone who wants to go.
– 100 - 10,000,000 people per colony
– Ultimately, thousands or even millions of
colonies
• Sounds unrealistic?
– A hundred years ago nobody had ever flown in
an airplane.
– Today ~ 500 million person/flights per year.
 What
• A space settlement is a home in orbit,
not just a place to work.
• Live on the inside of air-tight,
kilometer scale, rotating spacecraft.
 Where
• In orbit, not on a planet or moon.
• Moon (1/6g) and Mars (3/8g) gravity
too low.
– Children will not have the bones and
muscles needed to visit Earth.
– Orbital colonies rotate for 1g.
• Continuous solar energy.
• Large-scale construction easier.
• Much closer: hours not days or months.
 How
• Materials
– Moon
• Oxygen, silicon, metals, some hydrogen for
water.
– Near-Earth Asteroids
• Wide variety of materials including water,
carbon, metals, and silicon.
– Radiation protection
• Life support: Biosphere II scientific
failure, engineering success!
• Transportation critical and difficult.
 Why
• Growth = survival.
• Largest asteroid converted to space
settlements can produce living area
~500 times the surface area of the
Earth.
– 3D object to 2D shells
– Uncrowded homes for trillions of people.
– New land.
• Nice place to live.
 Real Estate Features
• Great views
• Low/0-g recreation
– Human powered flight
– Cylindrical swimming pools
– Dance, gymnastics
– Sports: soccer
• Environmental independence
• Custom living
– Weather art
 When
• A few decades should be sufficient to
build the first one.
• No serious effort now.
• Technology requirements:
– Safer, cheaper launch
– Extraterrestrial materials
– Large scale orbital construction
– Closed ecological life support systems
– And much more
 How much will it cost?
• If you have to ask, you can’t afford
it.
– How much did Silicon Valley cost?
• Orbital space settlements will be far
more expensive:
– all materials imported
– transportation difficult
– build all life support
– hostile environment
– new techniques must be developed
 Key Problem: Launch
$/kg $/me Failure rate
(73 kg)
Shuttle 22,000 1,606,000 0.5-1%

Commercial 2,600-30,000 189,800- 6 - 33%

launcher 2,190,000
airline 5 365 1/2,000,000

2010 NASA goal 2,200 160,600 1/10,000

2020 NASA goal 220 16,060 1/10,000

 Launch Data Systems
• Major opportunities for information
technology.
– SIAT: wiring trend data were very
difficult to develop.
• Some launch failures caused by
software
– Sea Launch second flight
– Ariane V
– The comma “,”
 Information Power Grid
• IPG: integrated nationwide network of computers,
databases, and instruments.
• The Network is the Computer
• IPG value
– help reduce launch costs and failure rates
– support for automation necessary to exploit solar system
exploration by thousands of spacecraft
• Problems:
– low bandwidths
– long latencies
– intermittent communications
 Integration Timeline
NAS
•Single building
•A few supercomputers
•Many workstations
•Mass storage
•Visualization IPG
•Remote access •Nation wide
•Many supercomputers
•Condor pools
•Mass storage This talk
•Instruments •Solar system wide
•Terrestrial Grid
•Satellites
•Landers and Rovers
•Deep space comm.
 Relevant IPG Research
• Reservations
– insure CPUs available for close encounter
• Co-scheduling
– insure DSN and CPU resources available
• Network scheduling
• Proxies for firewalls
– Extend to represent remote spacecraft to
hide:
• low bandwidth
• long latency
• intermittent communication
 IPG Launch Data System
Vision
• Complete database: human and machine
readable
• Software agent architecture for
continuous examination of the database
• Large computational capabilities
• Model based reasoning
• Wearable computers/augmented reality
• Multi-user virtual reality optimized for
launch decision support
• Automated computationally-intensive
software testing
 2020 Tourism
• Hotel
• Doctors
• Maids
• Cooks
• Recreational directors
• Reservation clerks
• etc.
• These may be the first colonists.
 Low/0-g
Handicapped/Elderly Colony
• No wheelchairs needed.
• No bed sores.
• Easy to move body even when weak.
• Never fall and break hip.
• Grandchildren will love to visit.
• Need good medical facilities.
– Telemedicine
• Probably can’t return to Earth.
 AsterAnts: A Concept for
Large-Scale Meteoroid Return

Deliver Support solar

extraterrestrial system
materials to LEO colonization

Al Globus, MRJ, Inc.

Bryan Biegel, MRJ Inc.
Steve Traugott, Sterling Software, Inc.
NASA Ames Research Center
 Near Earth Object
Materials
• Mining of large NEOs very difficult
to automate
– Mining involves large forces
– Materials properties are unknown and
variable
• Capture of small NEO may not require
human life support
• 10 million - 1 billion 10m diameter
NEOs
• Far more 1m diameter NEOs
Solar Sail in Earth Orbit

World Space Foundation

 Znamia 1993

Guy Pignolet
• 20 meter diameter spinning mirror
• deployed from Progress resupply vehicle
 Solar Sailing 1

Net force

Photons

Sail
Sun
 Solar Sailing 2
Orbital velocity Outward spiral
Propulsive force

Sail

Orbital velocity
Sun
Inward spiral Sail

Propulsive force
NEO Characterization
Project
 Solar System Exploration
• High launch cost of launch = small number
exploration satellites
– one-of-a-kind personnel-intensive ground
stations.
• Model based autonomy = autonomous
spacecraft
• Requirement drivers
– Autonomous spacecraft use of IPG resources
– low bandwidths
– long latencies
– intermittent communications
 Each Spacecraft
• Represented by an on-board software
object.
• Communicates with terrestrial proxies to
hide communication problems
– know schedule for co-scheduling and reservations
• Data stored in Web-accessible archives
– virtual solar system
• Controlled access using IPG security for
computational editing
 Spacecraft Use of IPG
• Autonomous vehicles require occasional
large-scale processing
– trajectory analysis
– rendezvous plan generation
• Proxy negotiates for CPU resources, saves
results for next communication window
• Proxy reserves co-scheduled resources for
data analysis during encounters
 Conclusion

The colonization of the solar system

could be the next great adventure
for humanity. There is nothing but
rock and radiation in space, no living
things, no people. The solar system is
waiting to be brought to life by
humanity's touch. And computer
science can help.
 NEO Composition
• Widely varied, includes large amounts
of:
– Water
– Carbon
– Metals, particularly iron
– Silicon
• Spectral studies don’t agree very well
with meteorite analysis
 Detection of 1-meter
diameter meteoroids
• Current Earth-based optical asteroid
telescopes
– Smallest found < 10m diameter
– Maximum 1m detection distance ~ 106 km
– 2,000 to 200,000 within range at any given
time
– 5-7 hit the Earth each day
• Radar required for accurate trajectory
and rotation rate
 Solar sail experience
• Solar sailing used by Mariner 10
mission to Mercury for attitude
control
– Enabled multiple returns to Mercury by
reducing control gas consumption
• Ground deployment test by World
Space Foundation
• Zero-g deployment test by U3P in
aircraft
• Russian Znamia mirror February, 1993
 Solar sail meteoroid return
• Characteristic acceleration of 1 mm/s2
produces 1.3 km/s delta-v per month
• 170-182 meters square sail for 500 kg
NEO return at 0.25 mm/s2 characteristic
acceleration
• Once design is refined, mass production of
AsterAnts spacecraft
• ?NASA build first one open source, then
pay for meteoroid materials by the ton?
 Summary
• Capture ~1 m diameter NEOs (Near
Earth Objects)
• Return to LEO (Low Earth Orbit)
• Solar sails for propulsion
• Start with one small spacecraft, scale
up with copies
• Early returns have scientific value,
later materials for construction and
resupply
 Conclusion
• Benefits
– small down payment (one small spacecraft)
– scales by mass production
– missions can probably be automated
– no consumables
• Challenges
– 1m NEO detection difficult
– solar sails have little flight experience
– geosynchronous applications require space
manufactured sails