Category Archives: Moon Colonization

Predictably, online outreach was crucial for making sales in 2020, as digital storefronts replaced physical ones. Walk-ins to brick-and-mortar spaces and fair participation had been the second- and third-biggest contributors to sales for galleries, respectively, in 2019; last year, they were fourth and sixth. Galleries cited their own websites as the second-most important channels for making sales in 2020, followed by social media. Amid those shifts brought on by the pandemic, the most important sales channel remained consistent from 2019 to 2020: direct outreach to existing clients, which accounted for 28% of galleries total sales for the year.

Third-party online marketplaces like Artsy held steady from 2019 as the fifth-most important channel for sales in 2020, though the percentage of respondents who said they used an online marketplace dropped from 86% in 2019 to 75% last year. This may reflect a significantly larger survey pool (up from 1,008 respondents in 2019), but also the reality of many galleries launching their own bespoke online sales platforms amid the pandemic shutdown. More than one-third (34%) reported participating in an online viewing room, 31% took part in a virtual exhibition, and 30% hosted a virtual walkthrough or artist talk.

In addition to digital engagement, another key factor in galleries making sales in 2020 was price availability. Among galleries that reported not making a single sale in 2020, 65% said they never displayed prices for artworks. Many galleries did prioritize visible pricing in 2020, and the number of artworks with prices available overall ticked up year over year, from 63% to 69%. This may be partly due to the fact that many fairs strongly encouraged galleries participating in their online editions to publicly post prices or price ranges.

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Galleries Made More Connections with New and Young Collectors in 2020 - Artsy

Two old oil rigs have been spotted in South Texas sporting giant name tags of Mars moons. Who other than SpaceX and Elon Musk would be behind such an acquisition?

SpaceX is refurbishing two former oil drilling rigs near their Brownsville, TX site. Aptly named Deimos and Phobos after Mars two moons, these future spaceports may be our terminals to deep space. Musk first revealed his vision for offshore launch and landing facilities in 2017 in its Earth to Earth plan a captivating video showcasing passengers boarding a Starship from the NYC coastline and landing in Shanghai in 39 minutes. Starship has since evolved into the spacecraft synonymous with Mars colonization as the worlds most powerful launch vehicle able to carry over 100 metric tons to Earth orbit. However, these futuristic plans are logistically dependent on a whirlwind launch schedule to support Starship refueling and launch-landing operations. This will require a lot of sites certainly more than Cape Canaveral and Boca Chica. Consider how efficient and frequent the airline system would be if the United States only had HOU and MCO airports.

But rockets are loud. Super Heavy Starships with over forty Raptor engines are really loud. Unless Zillow plans to add proximity-to-spaceport and sonic boom noise pollution to real estate listings, the launch pads may need to be located elsewhere. Placing spaceports farther in an unpopulated landscape offshore helps to combat noise levels, establish a wider perimeter of safety, and leverage a vast aquatic surface area for more launch pad facilities.

SpaceX is building floating, super heavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth Elon Musk, June 2020

Photos spotting the rigs earlier this week show Deimos already emblazoned with its name on lifeboats and heliport. The two oil rigs will require extensive adjustments before the vision is realized and SpaceX has quite a bit still to prove with Starships viability to not only carry humans but launch and land in one piece. Last month, SpaceX completed a high-altitude flight of its SN8 prototype by sending it about 40,000 feet above the Texas coastline. Despite a crash landing, it provided valuable data for the team to iterate on and was deemed successful. SN9 is rolled out on the pad and has been undergoing static fire tests over the last few days, and space fans have been eagerly tracking Boca Chica airspace and local road closures. Though on Thursday evening, amidst very thick fog, another off-nominal static test fire occurred.

No country or private company has launched deep space missions from oceanic platforms but thats certainly never stopped SpaceX from anything. Over the weekend, they kicked off 2021 by launching another set of Starlink satellites and elegantly landed the Falcon 9's first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for a record 8th time. Theyve certainly got landing on water down so the only way left is up.

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Oil Rig Spaceports. What on Earth could SpaceX be doing | by Samantha Falcucci | ILLUMINATION | Jan, 2021 - Medium

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 7, 2020 / US Nuclear (OTCQB:UCLE) is the prime contractor to build MIFTI's fusion generators, which could be used in the relatively near future to power the propulsion systems for space travel and provide plentiful, low-cost, clean energy for the earth and other planetary bases once our astronauts get to their destination, be it the moon, Mars, Saturn or beyond. Chemical powered rockets opened the door to space travel, but are still far too slow and heavy even to travel to distant planets within our solar system, let alone travel to other stars. Accordingly, NASA is now looking to nuclear powered rockets that can propel a space vessel at speeds close to the speed of light and thermonuclear power plants on the moon and Mars, as these are the next steps towards space exploration and colonization.

The US Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, recently said, "If we want to engage in outer space, or deep space as we call it, we have to rely upon nuclear fuels to get us there that will allow us to get to Mars and back on one tank of gas'." This is made possible by the large energy density ratio which makes the fuel weight for chemical fuels ten million times higher than the fuel that powers the fusion drive. NASA is now relying on private companies to build spaceships: big companies like Boeing, but more and more on high-tech startups such as Elon Musk's Space-X, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, and Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic.

While nuclear fission has been considered as a basis for the next generation of rocket engines, the fuel used for fission is enriched uranium, which is scarce, costly, unstable, and hazardous. On the other hand, thermonuclear fusion uses a clean, low-cost isotope of hydrogen from ordinary seawater, and one gallon of this seawater extraction yields about the same amount of energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.

NASA is also currently seeking out industry partners to help establish nuclear fission power plants on the moon and Mars to produce large amounts of electrical energy, which will allow the creation of manned outposts in space. These fission power plants will be built and tested on Earth so that minimal assembly is required on the moon. Fusion power generators, once available, will be much more ideal for this application as they have a significantly smaller footprint and use a light, low-cost, and safe fuel that produces several times more energy with no highly radioactive fission byproducts.

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Popular Mechanics recently published an article about a fusion powered spaceship that is being developed that could travel to Saturn in just two years: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34437026/direct-fusion-drive-interstellar-travel-saturn-titan/.

Dr. Hafiz Rahman, MIFTI-MIFTEC President and Chief Scientist, commented that "There is no longer any question about fusion energy having far greater energy density than fission nuclear power. Fusion uses a very light, abundant, low-cost, and safe fuel while fission uses a very heavy fuel that is scarce, expensive, and hazardous." MIFTI has already achieved "proof of concept" with their successful test regimen at the University of Nevada, Reno National Terawatt Facility where they generated a historic neutron flux of 1010 neutrons per pulse using their breakthrough fusion generator. All that remains now is to complete a relatively small finance round to finalize the design and produce the next iteration of their fusion generator. Within an estimated 2 years from the close of financing, the first working fusion generator will be produced and available to power our ships to light-speed and power the global electric power grid and beyond. Clean, low-cost fusion energy is clearly within sight for the first time in history.

US Nuclear is the strategic partner, prime contractor and investor in MIFTI-MIFTEC, owning 10% of MIFTEC and exclusive manufacturing and sales rights for the medical isotope generators in North America and Asia, and a smaller percentage ownership in MIFTI.

Safe Harbor Act

This press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from expectations, estimates and projections and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results.

Investors may find additional information regarding US Nuclear Corp. at the SEC website at http://www.sec.gov, or the company's website at http://www.usnuclearcorp.com.

CONTACT:

US Nuclear Corp. (OTC: UCLE)Robert I. Goldstein, President, CEO, and ChairmanRachel Boulds, Chief Financial Officer(818) 883 7043Email: info@usnuclearcorp.com

SOURCE: US Nuclear Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/619679/US-Space-Force-and-NASA-Looking-to-Privatize-Nuclear-Spacecraft-Production

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US Space Force and NASA Looking to Privatize Nuclear Spacecraft Production - Yahoo Finance

When were stuck inside, we crave the outdoors. Youve probably noticed it this year, too. Its been easy to compartmentalize nature as a singular entitywere either in it or were notand it feels quite distant during pandemic times. But perhaps our relationship to nature could become more fluid, more interconnected, more spiritual. Such is the central topic of Adams and Ollmans group show, Eartha, featuring the works of seven artists grappling with their place in the natural world. The exhibition successfully creates openings and liminal spaces, encouraging deeper thought on human-flora-fauna relationships.

Eartha includes fifteen artworks, primarily paintings with a few pastel works on paper in the mix. The works are split between Adams and Ollmans back gallery room and their office space. The small gallery room, occupied by a few people comfortably, grants an intimate feel to the viewing experience. One feels enveloped by artworks in a small space. Likewise, the paintings installed in Adams and Ollmans office area integrate with books, a desk and chair, pottery; these functional objects deepen a sense of relationship between the art on display and daily life.

In the gallery room, Amy Bays trio of textural floral paintings feel like homages to all things decorative, patterned, and lush. Each has a zoomed-in quality. Flowers explode from all sides, occupying each paintings entire frame.

Across from Bays paintings, Ann Cravens Moon (Pink Crescent, Cushing, 8-25-19, 1:30AM) is a simple rendering of a luminous pink moon, part of Cravens extensive lunar painting catalog dating back to 1995. The painting has an immediacy and purity, settling well alongside the other pieces in the room.

Maureen St. Vincents Three Stacks and a Rock, a soft pastel drawing on paper with a custom frame, brings in more ambiguity and space for interpretation. The drawing isolates three rocky bluff vignettes as viewed through oval openings, reframing the landscapes both literally and conceptually. The openings feel fleshy, perhaps hinting at the bodys relationship to the natural world, or the body as navigable terrain. Three holes in St. Vincents custom frame create a balanced absence against the three openings in the pastel drawing.

While each work in the gallery room hones in on natures openness to interpretation, the standout pieces are Hayley Barkers Beverlywood and Riverwood. Barkers mark-making finds equilibrium in a space between gesture and intention, abstraction and representation. The works feel like recognizable landscapes, but not quite, as though Barkers compositions were pulled from a dream. Unexpected, bright color-pops mingle among neutral tones. Beverlywood is more impressionistic, while Riverwood has a more traditional landscape composition. In Riverwood, Barker plays with reflection and renders an astronomical body, but her color choices still make the scene feel surreal. Side-by-side, the two paintings conjure a sense of peering into an alternate world.

Moving into Adams and Ollmans office, the first paintings I spot are Kaila Farrell-Smiths Get Out NDN and Under Fire. Farrell-Smith employs traditional Indigenous aesthetics and abstraction to explore landscapes between Indigenous and Westernized worlds. Farrell-Smith is also the sole artist in the show to utilize text in her work; I spot the word HUMAN in both paintings, and MAKLAK in Get Out NDN. The paintings have an intensity that causes one to stop and stare at the abstract lines and jagged scribbles. A black and white palette alongside neon orange and green demonstrates the artists fearlessness. Although its difficult to come to a precise conclusion from viewing the paintings, urgency is embedded in the works.

Further back in the office, another Amy Bay painting, My Condolences, and a second Maureen St. Vincent piece, Untitled, are installed across from each other. Both pieces expand further on themes the artists raised in their other works on display; St. Vincents Untitled is even more bodily than Three Stacks and a Rock, with undulant shapes and suggestions of pubic hair and flesh. Bays My Condolences is framed by ultra-thick paint dabs begging to be touched. I wonder if these works could have been displayed more prominently. Installed far back in the office, they dont feel as though theyve been given adequate attention.

Mariel Capannas paintings embed a wealth of information onto small canvases. Two of Capannas paintings, Hose, Bow, Flowers, Trumpet, Duck and Flowers, Fountain, Six oclock contain thick, blocky shapes coalescing to become detailed outdoor scenes. Cars, palm trees, ladders, umbrellasall slowly emerge the longer one gazes at these dense scenes. Its no surprise that Capanna sources imagery from films, documentaries, found photos, and home videos. A playful, game-like quality to the works turns the viewing experience into a search-and-find.

Conversely, Capanna shows her depth by switching it up in Candles, Flowers, Flowers, Chair. This painting is far quieter, with delicate flowers and candles floating cloud-like against a backdrop of sky. Capanna plays with notions of time in nature, creating visual representations of speed and slowness.

While Hayley Barkers paintings stood out in the gallery room, Emma Cooks monochromatic painting The Pig and the Cat is most striking in the office space. Against a background of dark crisscrossed lines, Cook paints a diverse range of characters pulled straight from a folkloric fantasy. Anthropomorphized pigs, figures with devilish grins, and abstracted creatures surround the paintings edges and meet in the middle, furthering a storytelling effect. The result is subtly unsettling, hinting at exploitative histories.

Eartha provokes more questions than answers, and perhaps thats one of the exhibitions goals. What potential for transformation exists in our relationship with the natural world? How does the body navigate natural spaces when considered through lenses of gender, politics, colonization, and spirituality? Each artist in Eartha answers the question in their own way. This openness to a wealth of answers helps prompt an ongoing conversation to begin.

Eartha is on view at Adams and Ollman (418 NW 8th Ave) through December 19th. The gallery is open by appointment only.

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The allure of interconnection - Oregon ArtsWatch

There are hundreds of Westerns, but virtually none which center Native American stories or perspectives. Some movies, like John Fords The Searchers (1956) or the Kevin Costner vehicle Dances With Wolves (1990), acknowledge the history of violence against Indigenous people, and include native characters or storylines. But these films still feature white stars, and view native people primarily through white eyes. This is so consistent, and so ubiquitous, that the Western as a genre could even be defined as narratives about the American West presented from the point of view of colonizers.

Space westerns have a more abstract relationship to the actual American West, but the tropes are much the same. The Mandalorian and Star Trek ask viewers to identify with explorers and pioneers, not with the explored and pioneered. Movies like Outland are as white as their Western predecessors, set in a landscape pre-emptied of Indigenous people. There are only white people in spacejust as, in Westerns, there are often, counter-historically, only white people in America.

The 2016-2017 Australian independent television series Clevermanisnt an exception to the colonial perspective of space Westerns, primarily because it isnt a Western. Instead, it can be seen as a kind of anti-Western. By focusing on the stories of Indigenous people, it turns Western genre pleasures inside-outand shows why those pleasures are only possible when you strap on the colonizers gunbelt.

Cleverman is a quasi-superhero narrative set in a future dystopia in which an Aboriginal race, the fur-covered, superstrong Hairypeople, live in uneasy coexistence with humans. Most Hairypeople are confined to a ghettoized neighborhood called the Zone, which is heavily policed by patrols and high-tech surveillance equipment. The hero of the series is a half-Gumbaynggirr man named Koen West (Hunter Page-Lockhard) who discovers that he has the invulnerability and powers of the Cleverman. He tries to use his abilities to protect the Hairypeople from their human oppressors and to thwart his ambitious, envious brother Waruu (Rob Collins.)

Its not surprising that Cleverman never became a hit series. Creator Ryan Griffin used Aboriginal legends and stories as inspiration, and while the mythology is fascinating, it strikes less of a chord with international audiences than more instantly familiar, corporate superheroes or the ubiquitous iconography of Westerns. Its determination to be true to Indigenous experience made it virtually impossible for the series to reach a truly mass audience.

Cleverman is also just a bleak, downbeat show. The Hairypeople lived on the land before humans came, but now they are hemmed in, pinned down, imprisoned and hounded to death. Like actual Indigenous people, the Hairypeople are penned into squalid reservations, thrown into prisons, and trafficked into brothels. The humans demand they abandon their culture and their powers; one of the only ways out of the Zone for the Hairypeople is for them to agree to be injected with a formula that robs them of their fur and their strength. The Zone is crowded and miserable, but if the Hairypeople try to move into property outside the Zone, they are arrested.

Watching Cleverman can be an intense, difficult, and claustrophobic experience. The Hairypeople are penned in both by walls and by history. The show is science fiction, but reality clutches at the narrative like fingers around a throat. The humiliations and the violence that the Hairypeople suffer all have real-life precedents. Colonizers kill children; they put people in prison and beat them; they rape. The experience of colonization is an experience of restriction: The Hairypeoples lives are a shrinking circle. They are being crushed out of existence.

Colonization means constriction for the Hairypeople. But for their tormentors, it means freedom, and more room to expand. This is most obvious in the storyline of Jarrod Slade (Iain Glen), a wealthy white Australian who is studying the Hairypeople in order to appropriate their powers for himself. He manages to create a serum which gives him Hairypeople strength, endurance, and speed, allowing him to leap across the Sydney cityscape with exuberant glee.

Again, this isnt a Western. But Slade stepping on Indigenous people to boost his way into his own freedom and self-actualization is nonetheless an instructive dynamic. The allure of the Western, and the space western, is a sense of freedom and powerof breaking out of the dreary, normal, everyday grind of mundane business and lighting out for the territories. The Starship Enterprise or Millennium Falcon zipping across the screen has the same allure as Clint Eastwood riding off into the sunset. The joy is in the feeling that youre headed somewhere new and big and empty, where rules do not apply. Like the tourists in Michael Crichtons Westworld, fans of the Western get to take pleasure in a fantasy of shooting and screwing and swaggering with no consequences and no restrictions.

Cleverman is a valuable reminder, though, that opening up the frontier for one person often means closing it down for someone else. You can ride where you will in that vast and empty landscape only because someone forcibly emptied it out, and tossed its original inhabitants into the Zone. John Wayne and Han Solo and Captain Kirk are indomitable and larger than life for the same reason that Slade is: Theyve stolen someone elses spirit, and injected it into their own veins.

This isnt to say that Westerns arent fun. Its to say the opposite. Westerns, and space westerns, are really fun! Freedom, empowerment, discovery, shooting the bad guys down: those are enjoyable fantasies. People like them, and for good reason. But its sometimes worth considering whats left out of a genre as well as whats in it, and to think about what truths we clear away when we make room to enjoy ourselves. A space western that really centered and gave weight to Indigenous experiences wouldnt be a space western anymore. Instead, like Cleverman, it might be a dystopia.

Noah Berlatsky is the author ofWonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics(Rutgers University Press).

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The Costs of Colonization: Cleverman as an Anti-Western - tor.com

The settling of distant planets and solar systems has started to be more than just a dream of the scientific community. When considering projects that span across millennia, incentives for space exploration that forego short term benefits in the interest of long term results may be the most successful approach.

In the field of exploration, space remains by far the costliest in both time and money. Given the recent expansion in space exploration to include private companies and the increased interest in manned missions to mars and the moon, humanity may well become a multiplanetary species in the future. When realizing these distant goals such as space settlements and space colonization, it is important to consider that the settling of space might only be possible across generations. In Jacob Haqq-Misras paper, Can Deep Altruism Sustain Space Settlement, Haqq-Misra delves into this topic and explores strategies that can be pursued in order to make possible a multigenerational approach to space settlement.

Potential strategies considered are deep altruism and deep egoism. Haqq-Misra considers deep altruism to be the more effective approach. Deep altruism can be considered the pursuit of long-term goals deep in the future (spanning millennia) without consideration for any short term benefits. Deep egoism, on the other hand, can be considered the antithesis to deep altruism, it is the pursuit of long-term goals for the financial benefit of the founding parties, or their descendants.

In order to determine the efficacy of deep altruism in long term space settlement, Haqq-Misra begins with the example of the time capsule. Time capsules are long term efforts to communicate with future societies. Because of their minimal benefit to the groups producing the time capsules, they can be considered altruistic in intent. Time capsules can be left from a short duration of several years to longer periods of hundreds of years. When time capsules are planned to last for periods stretching into thousands of years, it is important to design them so future generations understand the contents of the time capsule.

Haqq-Misra goes on to break down long term human projects into a hierarchical relationship between information, structure and culture. Cultural projects typically involve the preservation of tradition and culture of a society, structural projects are done to preserve buildings and engineering accomplishments, and information projects archive knowledge such as solutions to problems.

He then describes and compares generational versus intergenerational time scales, introducing the concept of deep time.Generational time typically involves a project that is started and completed within one generation. The founder of the project sees it come to fruition and reaps the benefits, such as the Human Genome Project. Intergenerational time involves projects that run between 100 and 1000 years. With intergenerational time, the founder of the projectmay not live to see the benefits, but their descendants usually will see the benefits. These projects usually have an impact on the same culture that was around when the project started. Deep time involves projects that take over 1000 years to complete. Examples would be Stonehenge or the Great Wall of China. These projects are far less common and are rarely pursued, as the undertaking of such projects can require massive investment at start. Also, with deep time, founders and their descendants will not see any benefits from the end results of the project. For this reason, projects that extend into deep time tend to be altruistic in nature we do it for some greater good.

In evaluating whether or not humanity is ready to set out on the long journey of settling space, Haqq-Misra first analyzed the incentive structure of the world. With its current predominantly capitalistic societies, Haqq-Misra acknowledged that one potential option to finance humans settling space would be deep egoism. Deep egoism is a system where space ventures could turn massive profits and thus finance future expeditions and settling. However, deep egoism poses a risk of failure if financial ventures fail to continually provide a return on investment. So, deep altruism is the most viable option to guarantee the success of long-term missions. Deep altruism, however, can only be achieved through government and private enterprise intervention, and although deep egoism can certainly assist in the process, it will be deep altruism that will allow for long term settlements in space.

Excerpt from:
Is humanity ready to live in space? - Sciworthy

History, of course, would suggest that treaties crumble when serious money comes into play. Western settlers signed treaties with indigenous people in the Americas, then ignored them, as Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium and another cofounder of the JustSpace Alliance, noted.

In many cases, she told me, treaties are good until somebody discovers something that they want. Shes a fan of the Outer Space Treaty, finding it a very, like, hopeful, peaceful, almost Star Trek-esque view of what space is. She hopes it proves stronger than it looks.

Historically, however, law tends to follow the facts on the ground rather than shape them. When a new geography for commerce opens, whoever shows up first to exploit the resources sets the normand then law is written to validate the first movers. First come, first serve is essentially whats going to happen when people start to do things on the moon, Peter Ward, author of The Consequential Frontier, said.

Yet before the great water rush on the moon starts in earnest, one key point is worth pausing over: The supply of ice on the moon is limited. The estimated water reserves up there may be eye-popping at first glance, but theyre not that big. They likely add up to three to five cubic kilometers of water, based on the studies that have come up, said James Schwartz, a philosopher who also studies the ethics of space exploration. Not a lot of water compared to even moderate- or small-size lakes on Earth. It wouldnt be that hard for a concerted explosion of commercial activity to chew through it all.

That may sound far-fetched, but, as all these space ethicists note, to the eyes of nineteenth-century explorers and industrialists, our planet seemed limitless, tooand it only took another century-plus of rapid commercial activity to tear through a diminishing store of finite resources. The environmental implications of exhausting the moon seem ludicrously sci-fi and far-off right now, and theyll remain so for a long timeuntil, abruptly, theyre not. As with low-Earth orbit, outer space becomes much smaller and more cramped when you start thinking at commercial scale.

In any event, the moon is chiefly envisioned as a way-station project among the most ambitious cohort of space privatizers. A settled moon colony would serve as the push-off point for the main event, commercially speaking, for New Space entrepreneurs: mining the asteroid belt.

Asteroids are almost comically rich in precious materials. The asteroid Ryugu, for example, has about $82 billion in nickel and iron, according to the Asterank asteroid-valueranking project. Another, Bennu, boasts a cool $669 million worth of iron and hydrogen. You could totally collapse the gold and platinum market on Earth by mining asteroids, joked Jacob Haqq Misra, a senior research investigator with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, a nonprofit that encourages space exploration.

But theres a hitch: Nobody has much of an idea how youd actually mine an asteroid. Despite what youve seen in lumbering sci-fi epics like Armageddon, merely grabbing hold of a comparatively small, city-blocksize object in microgravity is a forbidding physics puzzleto say nothing of actually refining whatever you find.

One things clear, however: In order to reach an asteroid, youd need a lot of fuel for robotic probes. (Oxygen, too, if youre bringing along a human crew.) This would likely be too expensive to do from Earth, given its gravity. The moon, on the other hand, is a sweet spot to base ones commercial mining endeavors: enough gravity so humans can live in a base and assemble a rotating corps of mining robots, but sufficiently little gravity that launching mining probes at asteroids is easy.

It takes so much energy to escape Earths orbit, by the time you do that, youre basically halfway to anywhere in the universe, Anderson said. The moon as a launchpadtheres a lot of commercial value there.

Some New Space firms harbor still greater plans, in line with the classic civilizing mission that animated so many colonial land rushes in recent terrestrial history. Jeff Bezos wants to build space stations that rotate fast enough to simulate Earth gravityand large enough to host entire cities full of residents. Its a vision he built from a youth steeped in sci-fi. At Princeton, he took a class with Gerard ONeill, a physicist whod been arguing since the 1960s that humanity had to slip the surly bonds of Earth in order to survive over the long haul. ONeill argued that living in space and mining asteroids represented the only path forward for the human race to continue growing and prospering without laying waste to planet Earth. He laid it out as a simple proposition of geology: If you were to mine the entire Earth down half a mile, leaving it a honeycombed crater, youd still only get 1 percent of the metals and substances from the three biggest asteroids.

Bezos has eagerly endorsed the space-colony vision. In the short term, Bezoss plans are the standard-issue vision for the New Space entrepreneur: building rockets and spacecraft that NASA will hire in order to resume landing astronauts on the moon. But in the long rundecades hencebuilding space colonies is, as he has argued, the only mission he can find big enough to devote his life and riches toward. The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource, Bezos told Business Insider, is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.

The unexpected costs of Bezos-style space exploitation are, as yet, a little distantdecades, at least. But if theres one thing weve learned from observing the human and environmental wreckage of the industrial era, its that history is like space travel: The path you set at the beginning is critical. Changing course later on is much harder. So it behooves us to plan now. Are there ways to avoid the worst possible outcomes in space? How is commercial life in space going to unfold?

The worlds small community of space ethicists has, in recent years, been increasingly pondering this, and theyve come to some unsettling conclusions. First off, they note, the big winners in space will likely be ... the big winners on Earth. I think its going to benefit the wealthy people that are running these mining firms, Schwartz said bluntly. There are, as New Space investors today will tell you, winner-take-all dynamics. Bezos built a supply chain that is helping Amazon gradually dominate the world. Space will probably have room for only a few winners. So in order to envision the future contours of space conquest, its probably a safe bet to take all the harms of monopoly we see on this planet and project them on to a literally cosmic scale.

And that leads, in turn, to a corollary prophecy: Human rights in space are likely to be execrable, if theyre left up to the private sector.

Consider that anyone working in space will be reliant upon their employer for the most basic stuff of life. Thats not just food and water, but breathable oxygen, on a minute-by-minute basis. Plenty of science fiction has, over the years, war-gamed the bleak implications of these precarious situations. In Ridley Scotts Alien (1979), the employees of The Company are sent unwittingly to encounter a vicious alien life-form, with The Company hoping it would get a profitable specimen out of this. More recently, the TV show The Expanse depicts the lives of asteroid miners as an outright form of slavery. One could, again, regard this as the typical pessimism of left-wing creative typesuntil one ponders workers rights on Earth as they exist now. Employees in Amazons warehouses are already peeing into bottles and collapsing from heat exhaustion in their attempt to satisfy their employers relentless work quotas; imagine if the company also controlled their breathable air.

Charles Cockell is a professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh whos written at length about the question of freedom in space settlements. Hes generally a libertarian, so hes concerned about concentrations of power in both governments and private-sector firms in space.

The controls on freedom of movement on the moon or Mars are worse than in North Korea, he told me. You cant just walk out of a settlement. Control of oxygen, he predicted, will empower the worst instincts of authoritarians of any stripe. It will attract the coercively inclined and petty officialdom like all these things do. It will attract people who crave power. You have to assume that that will lead to tyranny.

These thought experiments dont all conclude in grim dead-ends, however. Theres a whole arm of space ethics and philosophy devoted to asking the questions: Could the prospect of settling space positively serve society and justice? Could it offer up new ways of thinking about how we organize civic relations?

Coping with scarcity in space might impel settlers to reconsider some of the basic tentpoles of Western society. One is prison: On Mars, jailing someone would cost billions. A settlement would, as the astrophysicist and ethicist Nesvold noted, wonder, Is it even worth it? Theyd be far more liable to consider styles of justice that dont involve locking people up. The same goes for environmental thinking. Water and air will be so precious to space settlers that the people who are living in space are going to be much more concerned about resource conservation, Schwartz said. It could be the attitudes that we get there are ones that are helpful to send back [to Earth].

The idea of space as a fresh slate for political thinking is enticing. But its hemmed in by the very nature of the market forces currently reaching for the skies. Would any private-sector firms heading to space agree to limit their power when theyre beyond Earths grasp? Nesvold and Lucianne Walkowicz think its possible. There is, they believe, a window of opportunity right now, while commercial space activity is still ramping up, to convince everyone in New Spacefrom the firms to their early (and crucial) governmental clientsto take space ethics seriously. Theyve been pursuing two tracks of inquiry along these lines: first, talking directly to New Space companies about the political, social, and environmental aspects of space exploitation. (The smaller firms, Nesvold noted, are often eager to talk; the big onesthe SpaceXs and Blue Originsnot so much.) Walkowicz has also been holding public events to get everyday citizens to discuss, as she put it, becoming interplanetary.

I think making the infrastructure of getting to spaceflight cheaper and more sustainable, reusable, all of that stuff is greatI love watching rocket launches as much as the next person, Walkowicz told me. But she wants a much broader cross-section of the public to have a voice on how space is used. As she frames things, its a simple matter of public accountability: For all the self-mythologizing among New Space titans about the new, scrappy, and libertarian cast of modern space exploration, its still NASAand by extension, the peoples treasurythats projected to supply the biggest revenue stream for much New Space activity today, and in the near future. In other words, we the people are paying for many of these rocket launches, and the huge outlays that will help bankroll the hard stuff, like future human colonies on the moon.

So the public ought to have more input on how the projected settlement and exploitation of outer space actually happens. Walkowicz and Nesvold want to create a bigger sample of people informed about the stakes in the new space race, people whod lobby Congress to help lay down the new American road rules for spacefrom keeping orbits clean to the question of who gets to ride on those taxpayer-funded rockets in the first place.

Space, in other words, needs to be decolonized. Thats a coinage gaining currency among some space thinkers, including Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Shes a planetary scientist with one foot in the world of New Space, and another in the world of space ethics. Shes the head of the NASA Psyche project, which is launching a probe next year to explore the metallic asteroid Psyche. On the one hand, she is herself benefiting directly from the lower costs that New Space has created, so shes generally a fan of commercial interests making space more viable. Her probe will launch on a SpaceX rocket, and its so much cheaper than NASAs older launches that it makes her science far more affordable. (Im sure Im not supposed to tell you, but Ill tell you: Its a lot of money, she said.)

Yet as Elkins-Tanton noted, the story of new frontiers being settled is the history of colonization, fueled by moneyed interests. Whether it was Europeans heading to North America or Africa or parts of Asia, it was generally huge state interests putting up the money for risk-taking explorerswith the explorers getting rich, the states amassing power, the new frontiers becoming gradually stripped of resources, and their indigenous populations either killed or impoverished.

Decolonization, as she and other New Space ethicists put it, would be a different route. Itd be the act of exploring space with that history in mind, and working deliberately in concert to avoid its brutalities. What would that mean? Elkins-Tanton argued, like Walkowicz and Nesvold, that any voyages to space need to have much greater democratic participation. For years, shes been organizing annual projects that bring together a disparate array of thinkersastrophysicists, artists, indigenous scholarsto plan for things such as how a Mars colony might exist without becoming a human rights nightmare.

We need artists and philosophers and sociologists, psychologists and every other kind of person thinking about how we do this thing, she said. This can sound, she admitted, touchy-feely. But in her own work as an astronomer, the big-tent approach has paid off. When Elkins-Tanton initially pitched the Psyche mission to NASA, she was competing with 28 other pitches, and asking NASA to commit $750 million. To build her proposal, she insisted her team members, down to the college interns, speak up about their concernshow things could go wrong, and what unexpected outcomes of the project might be. Our motto is, the best news is bad news brought early, she said. You need everybody to be able to speak up. In her pitch to NASA, she touted her insistent culture of inclusion. When NASA heads approved her mission over the other ones, they cited it as a crucial reason why.

To them, it was a success metric, she said. So now I can stand up and say: Culture is not for the weak. Culture is literally worth $750 million. It would be heartening if NASA seriously embraced this model. Decolonizing the way we explore space would actually honor the incredible unknowns and unexpected dangers the sustained commercial settlement of the heavens will bring. As John F. Kennedy said when he first argued for putting people on the moon: The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

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Monetizing the Final Frontier - The New Republic

Gen. DT Thompson: There are no plans today to send Space Force units into space.

WASHINGTON Since the U.S. Space Force was established in December 2019, officials have had to dispel misconceptions that the service will have a human spaceflight program and deploy troops to the moon.

At least for the foreseeable future, any member of the Space Force who wants to go to space has to compete for a slot in NASAs astronaut corps. Will there be a time when the Space Force will deploy large numbers of boots on the moon? No idea, Gen. David D. Thompson, vice chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, said Oct. 1. Certainly not in my career.

But the Space Force has to prepare for the possibility of more human activity on the moon and colonization of the lunar region which could require a military presence, Thompson said during an online event hosted by DefenseOne.

There shouldnt be any near-term expectations that were preparing to send Space Force units into space in any way other than through the NASA astronaut program, Thompson said.

Thompson echoed remarks made on Tuesday by Maj. Gen. John Shaw, commander of space operations at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. At the AFWERX EngageSpace conference, Shaw said the Space Force one day might send personnel to stand up bases on the moon, although when that might happen is anybodys guess and a long ways off.

Shaws comments caused some irritation in Washington because they fuel speculation that the Space Force is not being forthright about its plans and goals.

This rhetoric is not helping concerns about U.S. intentions in space, Victoria Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, tweeted Sept. 30

The head of the U.S. Space Force Gen. John Raymond has insisted that the service wants to help prevent, not start, wars.

U.S. Space Command spokesman Maj. Cody Chiles said Shaw was not suggesting that the Space Force is planning to stand up a human spaceflight program. He said Shaw sees the Space Forces role in support of NASAs peaceful human exploration of space.

The Space Force will be working with NASA as the space agency starts deploying assets to cislunar space. Today, military space activities do not extend farther than our highest-orbiting satellites. However, commercial investments and new technologies have the potential to expand the reach of vital national space interests to cislunar and beyond, Chiles said. It is the responsibility of U.S. Space Force to maintain U.S. advantages in space.If and when that extends beyond the GEO belt, we will go beyond as needed.

Lt. Gen. William Liquori, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs, requirements and analysis, said the Space Force will be part of the conversation on how the nations space assets are protected in future exploration efforts.

Our mission is focused where the United States operates in space and so that tends to be in the area below the moon, Liquori said Oct. 1 on a video chat hosted by WorldBoston World Affairs Council.

Obviously our partners in NASA have outer space probes that go well beyond that, and our responsibility as the United States Space Force is to protect U.S. and allied advantages and systems in space, said Liquori. If at some point in the future we need to move beyond where we typically operate today then well certainly be a part of that conversation.

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Space Force members can go to the moon, if they're picked by NASA - SpaceNews

The discovery of phosphine in Venus atmosphere has generated a lot of interest. It has the potential to be a biosignature, though since the discovery, some researchers have thrown cold water on that idea.

But it looks, at least, like the discovery is real, and that one of NASAs Pioneer spacecraft detected the elusive gas back in 1978. And though its not necessarily a biosignature, the authors of a new study think that we need to rethink the chemistry of Venus atmosphere.

The recent study found only tiny amounts of phosphine in Venus atmosphere: 20 parts per billion. But it was still there. And it looks like its been there for a while, according to the results in a new paper.

A team of researchers announced the Pioneer phosphine data in a paper titled Is Phosphine in the Mass Spectra from Venus Clouds? The lead author is Rakesh Mogul, a Professor of Biological Chemistry at California State Polytechnic University. Mogul is also associated with the SETI Institute, and NASAs Office of Planetary Protection. The paper is available on the pre-press site arxiv.org.

Considering the implications of the reported single spectral line detection of phosphine (PH3) by Greaves et al., we were inspired to re-examine data obtained from the Pioneer-Venus Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS) to search for evidence of phosphorus compounds, the researchers write in the beginning of their paper.

The Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, also called Pioneer Venus 2, or Pioneer 13, detected it with its Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS) instrument.

The nomenclature around NASAs Pioneer program deserves some clarification. There were actually two Pioneer programs.

The first involved a series of spacecraft launched between 1958 to 1960. It sent spacecraft to orbit the Moon, to fly-by the Moon, and to investigate the interplanetary space between Venus and Earth.

The second part launched spacecraft between 1965 and 1992. It sent out four spacecraft, two of which were sent to Venus. Those two comprised the Pioneer Venus project, consisting of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter, and the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe.

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Its the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe (PVM) and the data it gathered thats at the heart of this study. The PVM was made up of a main spacecraft that carried four separate probes. One was large, and three were smaller. On December 9th, 1978, all four probes were released into the Venusian atmosphere at different locations, gathering data as they descended through the thick clouds.

The largest of the four probes is simply referred to as the Large Probe. It carried more instruments than the smaller probes; seven, in fact. And it lowered itself via parachute, while the other three didnt. One of its instruments was the Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer

When Greaves et al discovered phosphine in Venus upper cloud layers, the team of researchers behind this work decided to look for evidence of the phosphine from earlier days. Since the LNMS studied neutral gases and their masses at different altitudes, they reasoned, perhaps it saw phosphine in the upper cloud layers, way back in 1978.

After going over the data, the team wrote, We find that LMNS data support the presence of phosphine; although, the origins of phosphine remain unknown.

It took some work to get to that conclusion. After all, the data is over 40 years old.

They starting by testing the accuracy of the data, and the instrument that gathered it, to make sure. To estimate the resolution and resolving power of the LNMS, we first compared measured and expected masses for CO2, SO2, N2, 40Ar, and 36Ar, which were identified by Hoffman et al, they write. In all cases, measured masses (from the spectra) and expected masses differed by <0.003 amu ). That difference is not significant in this work. In their paper, they explain the accuracy of their data in greater detail.

In this light, we leveraged the high-resolution data and dynamic range to uncover the presence of phosphine. We note that phosphorous compounds were not reported in the initial analyses of LNMS data. But that doesnt mean the signal wasnt there.

The authors say that the data confirms the presence of phosphine in Venus atmosphere. They also list a few other conclusions, which only the especially chemically-minded might find interesting. Interested readers can check out the paper, which is a fairly short read.

In short, theres some initial ambiguity in the readings, suggesting that what appears to be PH3 could potentially be H2S, or hydrogen sulfide. But in the end, its PH3 and its sibling PH2 that account for it, in the authors analysis.

They also found some other incongruential data for other chemicals in Venus atmosphere. Again, this is likely of interest to only the chemically-minded among us, but its worth mentioning. They say the presence of these chemicals is at odds with Venus oxidizing atmosphere. These include methanes, nitrous oxide, and hydrogen peroxide.

In their conclusion, the authors write that this re-evaluation of Venus mass spectra shows the detection of atomic phosphorous as a fragmentation product from a neutral gas. Moreover, the spectra show a tantalizing possibility for the presence of PH3, along with its associated fragments

They also point out that the LNMS signal for phosphine is weak, but it matches with the 20 ppb figure in the study from a couple weeks ago.

While intensities of the peaks are low, they are perhaps consistent withthe ~20 ppb abundances reported by Greaves et al. Together, the tentative assignments suggest that the reported abundances of H2S (from mass spectra) across Venus atmosphere may actually be PH3;

In total, the team thinks that we might need to rethink Venus atmosphere, and its potential to harbour life. Not only because of the Greaves et al study, but because of their own results. We believe this to be an indication of chemistries not yet discovered, and/or chemistries potentially favorable for life.

Looking ahead, they write, and to better understand the potential for disequilibria in the clouds, we require a sustained approach for the exploration of Venus.

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Did Pioneer See Phosphine in the Clouds of Venus Decades Ago? - Universe Today

Democratic 2020 US presidential candidate former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg attends a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., February 29, 2020. REUTERS/Eric Thayer

The first presidential debate between US President Donald J. Trump and former US Vice President Joe Biden dealt another body blow to American credibility on the world stage, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said on September 30.

Americas adversaries, certainly anybody who is eager to see America play less of a role in world leadership, would have been rubbing their hands in glee at the chaotic scene, Buttigieg argued. But despite the current political polarization in the United States, it remains the case that the world needs a certain kind of American leadershipnot just any kind of American leadership, but America at its best, he said.

Buttigieg, who spoke at a virtual Atlantic Council Front Page event moderated by CBS News Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan, explained that the focus of a future Democratic administration, should Biden win in November, would be on restoring US credibility in the world and regaining the trust of US allies. America cannot move forward in the way that we need to without cooperation with our partners and allies around the world, Buttigieg maintained, especially with the pressing challenges of a rising China, climate change, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Heres a quick look at what Buttigieg said about the future of Americas role in the world as the US presidential election approaches:

Watch the full event:

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How Pete Buttigieg sees the US restoring its credibility in the world - Atlantic Council