8 Things We Can Do Now to Build a Space Colony This Century

Before humans start living in space on a regular basis, there's a lot of basic science and political agendas that need to advance. We talked to scientists and experts about the fundamental things they think we should do right now, if we want to have a space colony in the next 100 years.

Interstellar Mayflower, art by Stephan Martiniere

NASA astronomer Amy Mainzer, who studies Near Earth Objects at JPL, says our number one priority has to be here on our home planet.

She told io9 that it's a pretty inhospitable universe out there, so our space colonies will probably never replace home:

From my perspective, the most important thing we can do to be prepared for any activity far in the future is try not to wipe out life here. Indiscriminate environmental destruction and the practice of rendering entire species extinct cannot continue if we want to have a long-term future either in space or on Earth. As an astronomer, I spend a lot of time thinking about other places than Earth, and they are not particularly hospitable. It's pretty clear that the vast majority of humanity will stay here. Therefore, I'd say that the defining challenge of the next hundred years is to come to grips with creating a sustainable future here, as a minimum precursor to building a sustainable future anywhere else.

Ariel Waldman is a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Human Spaceflight, and she told us about that group's latest thinking on how we'd develop a human colony on Mars in the next century. The group recently presented a hefty plan for human space missions to the U.S. government, and Waldman told us that the upshot is that we absolutely need to change NASA's direction now if we want a space colony in the twenty-first century.

In an email, Waldman outlined what the Committee on Human Spaceflight found out, and what they suggest we do about it her answer covers everything from mission planning, to funding and the technologies we need to focus on most:

If the nation decides to begin a space colony outside of low Earth orbit, you need to talk about changing the way NASA does business. Currently, NASA engages in a capabilities-based and/or "flexible path" approach in which technologies are developed with no specific set of missions in mind. Future missions are then selected/favored based on what you can do with the technologies. I am a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Human Spaceflight, and we recently produced a report recommending that NASA switch to a "pathways" approach. A pathways approach would outline a horizon goal along with a very specific set of stepping stones along the way. This would allow for continuity of technology development, the minimization of dead-end technologies that don't contribute to the next step along the pathway, and more efficiency. You can see in the ARM-to-Mars pathway versus the Moon-to-Mars pathway (see figures below) how different pathways can utilize more/less feed-forward technologies.

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8 Things We Can Do Now to Build a Space Colony This Century