Category Archives: Moon Colonization

At the University of Arizona, Jenn Frymark helped develop a greenhouse for extreme weather and then spent six months at the South Pole growing food for scientific researchers.

Now she grows 10 million heads of lettuce and other greens year-round, without soil, in considerably more benign conditions inside greenhouses in New York and Chicago.

She said her business, Gotham Greens, has been a success since she joined partners Eric Haley and Viraj Puri in growing greens hydroponically on a rooftop in Brooklyn in 2011.

Jenn Frymark, chief greenhouse officer and a co-founder of New York City-based Gotham Greens, points to lettuce crops at the companys Chicago rooftop greenhouse on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016. The 75,000-square-foot facility, which opened in October, is one of the largest rooftop greenhouses in the world.

Frymark is the poster child for the UAs Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, where she did her graduate studies.

Shes certainly one of the most successful graduates we have, particularly as it relates to business development, said center director Gene Giacomelli.

She took the science she learned and put it into a highly successful, very unique business, Giacomelli said.

The center, known as CEAC, is training the next generation of farmers for an urban agriculture revolution, researching ways to improve efficiency, taste and freshness in everything from lettuce to mushrooms. Giacomelli is planning to extend it to wine grapes.

Frymark said the skills she learned there are key to her business success and she still calls the center for technical advice.

Gotham Greens facility in Queens, New York.

The center is helping NASA develop a gardening system for the moon and Mars. It is developing sensors that will allow plants to signal their needs for light, carbon dioxide and nourishment. The center is branching out into mushroom farming and its director wants to learn if its possible to make fine wine from grapes whose roots never touch the soil.

It is also helping to lay the groundwork for the Monsanto Co.s 7-acre corn-research greenhouse on Tucsons northwest side.

The center is housed in sheds, greenhouses and offices scattered across the historic floodplain on the south side of the Rillito near North Campbell Avenue. It is jointly run by the UA Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, and the School of Plant Sciences. About 85 students from those programs and others are taking the centers courses, Giacomelli said.

The Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the UA is training farmers for an urban agriculture revolution.

This is an exciting time for food-production agriculture, Giacomelli said. For the first time in history, if youre not born into the agriculture business, you can start a food system in a garage, on a rooftop or in the corner of a building.

Controlled-environment agriculture will never replace field crops, said Jeff Silvertooth, UA associate dean of cooperative extension services, but its growth potential is great for high-value crops and niche opportunities.

Frymark said Gotham Greens had no trouble finding customers for lettuce it packages and ships every day.

Ship is a bit of an exaggeration. Her second site in Brooklyn was built atop a Whole Foods Market. They just walk it downstairs. Proximity, and her companys ability to control all aspects of distribution, make it possible to deliver greens the same day they are picked, she said.

Her greens are not organic a method of growing that is traditionally defined as feeding the soil rather than the crop.

But the companys greens remain attractive to the natural-foods crowd. People like local to the point where it is a stronger brand than organic, Frymark said.

Her hydroponic crops use no soil. They float on Styrofoam rafts atop a pool of water enriched with the chemical nutrients that the plants need.

The Mars Lunar Greenhouse at the UA is helping NASA develop gardening systems for the moon and Mars.

Methods of growing hydroponically were pioneered at the UA, and are being continually refined at the CEAC.

The center was started by pioneer hydroponic researcher Merle Jensen, who had previously worked on demonstrations of the technique for Disneys Epcot Center.

Jensen helped secure original funding for CEAC in 1998 from the Legislature, as Eurofresh Farms was developing huge tomato greenhouses in Willcox and Snowflake, Giacomelli said.

Many of the improvements made in growing crops in ordinary circumstances come from taking on the challenge of growing them in extreme environments, according to Giacomelli.

He contracted with Raytheons Polar Services division to work with the National Science Foundation to develop the South Pole greenhouse, and his students helped run it until 2012.

Giacomelli is in the last year of a third NASA grant to develop a system for space colonization called the Mars-Lunar Greenhouse. It was called the lunar greenhouse before NASA switched its long-range planning to include colonization of Mars.

The prototype is a lightweight, compact facility inside a windowless room in the corner of the Agriculture Colleges research complex just west of Campbell Avenue.

Light for photosynthesis is supplied by banks of 20-percent blue and 80-percent red LED lights. It is not just a food supply, said Giacomelli. It was designed to produce enough oxygen for a single astronaut.

Currently, it is growing lettuce and sweet potatoes, along with some basil and strawberries.

In a different building, in another lightless room, engineer Murat Kacira is experimenting with sensors that could allow the plants to control their own environment.

We call it speaking plant, Giacomelli said. The plants are speaking to us. What he does is he creates the systems to listen to those plants and create environments to help them grow more optimally.

Kacira, a UA professor of agricultural-biosystems engineering, and his students feed the plants nutrients, control the carbon-dioxide levels in the air and adjust the frequency of the lightwaves, as well as the duration of the lighting.

He is working with hydroponic basil and lettuce, but says his high-tech, indoor growing systems arent designed for such low-value crops. It could be used for pharmaceutical-grade plants that require precise control of plant quality, Kacira said.

In the education and teaching greenhouse, seven varieties of tomato are tended by volunteers and students who are learning all aspects of the process.

Tomatoes grow on the vine in a greenhouse at the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, 1951 E. Roger Road, on Feb. 9, 2017, in Tucson, Ariz. CEAC is helping NASA develop a sustainable gardening system for the moon and Mars.

Its Thursday, which means lean and lower day for the tomato vines, which are reaching for the light at the glass ceiling.

Jacob Cataldo, who is working toward a degree in agricultural technology management, lowers the cord supporting a tomato vine and coils a weeks worth of vine growth around the base. He said his curriculum at the center covers everything it takes to run a greenhouse.

Jobs for graduates are increasing in number, said Giacomelli, as is corporate involvement. The center tests varieties of crops, grafting techniques, sensors, lights and other greenhouse infrastructure for a number of companies, he said.

Barry Pryor, UA professor of plant sciences, is not officially affiliated with CEAC, but he and his students have been so successful growing mushrooms in a large shed on the property that theyre about to make the leap.

Pryor is something of a reluctant mushroom farmer. He is a mycologist, an expert on mushrooms, but had never grown any until prodded by students in his lab.

While studying the usefulness of mushrooms for bioremediation cleansing polluted soil with some mushroom magic the students developed a plan to grow their own and pitched a proposal to the UAs Green Fund to grow them with discarded waste.

They have since refined the medium to equal amounts of straw and mesquite pods collected on campus. The medium is placed in plastic bags and inoculated with mushroom spores.

On a recent visit, the bags sprouted pearl and blue oyster mushrooms, along with a few lions manes. With limited control of temperature, the fungi grow best in spring and fall, he said.

Mushroom growing is mushrooming said Pryor, with backyard growers and farmers who find it to be a good, reliable extra-money crop.

Giacomelli said mushrooms represent a way to provide protein in controlled environments and he has plans to build facilities with better temperature control for Pryors studies.

Tomatoes have been the biggest greenhouse crop for the last couple decades, but greens are making a move.

Gotham Greens expansion to Chicago was instantly profitable, said Frymark, and the team is now looking at six other cities.

Frymark said shes been steadily employed since deciding to learn hydroponic agriculture after graduating from Arizona State University with a bachelors degree in plant science.

After getting her masters degree at the UA, she completed a six-month stint at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica; then helped develop a greenhouse on a science barge in the Hudson River before hooking up with Haley and Puri to start a 13,000-square-foot rooftop greenhouse in Manhattan.

The demand for fresh salad greens was immediate and overwhelming, she said.

The rooftop location, while it created some permitting problems with city officials, provided the sunlight she needed.

A second greenhouse in Brooklyn was bigger. The company partnered with Whole Foods, which was building an ecologically friendly market and wanted a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse atop it.

We sold out immediately. We couldnt answer the phones, Frymark said.

A third greenhouse in Manhattan took up 60,000 square feet and their Chicago expansion is a 75,000-square-foot greenhouse.

Frymarks greens have a raft of advantages, she said. Pests are few in number and easily controlled. The produce is pesticide-free.

And while she cant call her lettuce organic, she can call it responsibly grown a label Whole Foods uses in the categories of good, better and best. Gotham Greens gets the best label, she said.

The technology also makes it possible to grow crops with a fraction of resources, including water and energy.

Giacomelli said controlled-environment lettuce generally uses a tenth of the water of field-grown crops, even when cooling water is factored in.

My number is so much better than that, Frymark said, though she doesnt want to say how much better until she has published, peer-reviewed research to back up the claim.

Because Gotham Greens is vertically integrated, it controls the timing of packaging and shipping, getting the product to customers with a lot of shelf life left. People are always asking, What do you put in the lettuce? It just doesnt go bad.

Read the rest here:
UA grad grows 10 million heads of lettuce without soil, could offer solution for future of agriculture - Arizona Daily Star

A crescent earth rises above the lunar horizon. (NASA/Reuters)

Our new issue yes! subscribe! contains a two-page Q&A I conducted with Eric C. Anderson. He has had a variety of tech and entrepreneurial identities, but I was speaking to him in his role as chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures, which has made a business of sending customers into space.

The subject of our discussion was the future of space travel. Below is an extended-play version of the interview, with extra questions and themes.

James Fallows: Space exploration seems to have lost its hold on the public imagination, compared with a generation ago.

Eric Anderson: I think absolutely they are right to feel a little bit disappointed. On April 12, 1961, the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, goes to space. Then, July 29, 1969: We're on the moon. If you and I were doing this interview on July 30, 1969 and you had asked me what space exploration would be like in the year 2013, I would've told you it would be far more advanced than it is now.

So I think the reality is that space was unnaturally accelerated by this Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Then, in the early part of the '70s, that sort of slowed down. The latter half of the '70s brought terrible economic trouble in the U.S., which really set the space program way back. In the '80s, it was the reverse. The Soviets basically ran out of money and then the Soviet Union collapsed. Then in the '90s we were sort of figuring out how to re-set ourselves in a post-Soviet world. It was in the mid-'90s that commercial revenues in space started to eclipse government revenuesthat was mainly for communication satellites and things like that.

So that part of the industry has gone pretty well. Every day we use GPS and DirecTV and get the weather , and that sort of stuff. But human flight has just been totally crimped. The number of people going to space, and the missions they were doing, went down. The Space Shuttle was so much over budget that it just was impossible for us to really do any real exploration. That's a long-winded answer, but yes: There's every reason for people to be disappointed with where we are now, particularly with regard to human space flight.

JF: Why should people be excited about what lies ahead?

EA: In the next generation or twosay the next 30 to 60 yearsthere will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony. Some people will tell you that this new colony will be on the moon, or an asteroidin my opinion asteroids are a great place to go, but mostly for mining. I think the location is likely to be Mars. This Mars colony will start off with a few thousand people, and then it may grow over 100 years to a few million people, but it will be there permanently. That should be really exciting, to be alive during that stage of humanity's history.

JF: I have to askreally? This will really happen?

EA: I really do believe it will. First of all, the key to making it happen is to reduce the cost of transportation into space. My colleague Elon Musk is aiming to get the cost of a flight to Mars down to half a million dollars a person. I think that even if it costs maybe a few million dollars a person to launch to Mars, a colony could be feasible. To me the question is, does it happen in the next 30 years, or does it happen in the next 60 to 70 years? There's no question it's going to happen in this century, and that's a pretty exciting thing.

JF: Apart from the cost of transport, what are the challenges in making that a reality? Are they cost and engineering challenges, or are they basic science problems?

EA: I think it's all about the economics. There is no technological or engineering challenge.

One key to making all this happen is that we need to use the resources of space to help us colonize space. It would have been pretty tough for the settlers who went to California if they'd had to bring every supply they would ever need along with them from the East Coast.

That's why Planetary Resources exists. The near-Earth asteroids, which are very, very close to the Earth, are filled with resources that would be useful for people wanting to go to Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system. They contain precious resources like water, rocket fuel, strategic metals. So first there needs to be a reduction in the cost of getting off the Earth's surface, and then there needs to be the ability to "live off the land" by using the resources in space.

JF: Againreally? To the general public, asteroid mining just has a fantastic-slash-wacky connotation. How practical is this?

EA: When [co-founder] Peter Diamandis and I conceived of the company, we knew it would be a multi-decade effort. From history, we knew that frontiers are opened by access to resources. We would like to see a future where humans are expanding the sphere of influence of humanity into space.

To make asteroid mining viable, we need spacecraft that can launch and operate in space considerably less expensively than has traditionally been the case. If we are able to do that, then asteroid mining can be profitablevery much so. When you ask "Is it viable?," I'll be the first one to tell you how risky this proposition is, and how there is a significant possibility that we could fail in a particular mission or technology, or fall short of our goals.

But we have found ways to reduce the cost of space exploration already. For example, our prospecting mission to a set of targeted asteroids will use the Arkyd line of spacecraft. The first of that series, the Arkyd-100, would have cost $100 million, minimum, in the traditional aerospace way of business and operation. But with the engineering talent we have, and by using commercially available parts and allowing ourselves to take appropriate risks, we've been able to bring that cost down to $4 or $5 million dollars.

In 10 years or so, what we'd really like to do is get robotic exploration of space in line with Moore's Law [the tech-world maxim that the price for computing power falls by half every 18 months]. Remember, asteroid mining doesn't involve people. We want to transition space exploration from a linear technology into an exponential one, and create an industry that can flourish off of exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Our first missions, for asteroid reconnaissance, will be launching in the next two to three years. For these missions, we're going to launch small swarms of spacecraft. When I say small, I mean we'll send three or four spacecraft, and each one of those spacecraft may weigh only 30 pounds. But they will have optical sensors that are better than any camera available today. They will send back imagery, they'll map the gravity field, they'll use telescopic remote sensing and spectroscopy to tell us exactly what materials are in the asteroid. It will be possible to know more about an ore body that's 10 million miles away from us in space than it would be to know about an ore body 10 miles below the Earth's surface.

We're really not talking about if; we're talking about when.

JF: Apart from the practicalities of asteroid mining, what is it going to mean in spiritual and philosophical ways for people to leave the Earth? I guess this is taking us back to the science fiction of the '50s and '60s, but what do you think?

EA: I've thought a lot about that. The interesting thing will be to see why the people who go to Mars, or to a colony on the moon, or to an asteroid, decide to go there. Will they go there because they're escaping something? Will they go there because they're curious? Will they go to make money?

Throughout history, most of the frontiers that we have had on the Earth have been opened up because people were seeking landnew hunting grounds, or fertile locations for cattleor mining for gold or precious metals. But occasionally they would go somewhere new because they were seeking religious freedom or some other kind of freedom.

So I don't actually know why people will go. Will the Earth be so ravaged by war, or catastrophic climate change, or whatever else, that people will want to leave?

JF: In addition to the forces you mentioned, over the last half millennium or more, the search for new territory has been powerfully driven by national rivalries. The French, the English, the Spanish and others were seeking new territory in which to spread their influence. Do you imagine the national rivalries on Earth being soothed by space exploration? Or rather being aggravated by space exploration, the way the exploration of the New World was?

EA: I think it's an excellent question, and I think it's inevitable. The Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967, basically says that no nation can claim a celestial body for its own sovereignty. And it also says that anything that is launched from a particular nation, that nation is responsible for, if it crashes into another nation or something like that. But I don't see the Outer Space Treaty living another 100 years.

I think that history repeats itself, and all the same things that happened in our history over the last thousand years will happen in one form or another in the next thousand years. Nowadays things are accelerated, it won't take as long for those cycles of history to happenbecause we have faster means of communication, faster democracies, faster governments. The consequences of action, of economic and political and social drivers, can be felt and reacted to faster than they have been in the past.

But those same things will happen. If the first colonists going to Mars are all American, what kind of system do you think they're going to want to set up on Mars? And how are other countries going to feel about that? And at what point will the Americans just pull out of the Outer Space Treaty? Or maybe it'll be the Chinesethe Chinese could get to Mars long before us. Who knows? But being there is 99 percent of it and I think that when the dam breaks and it's possible to travel at a reasonable cost in space outside the Earth's very-near vicinity, all sorts of things are going to change.

And one of the other tenets of the Outer Space Treaty is that space will not be weaponized. I hope that lasts for a long, long, long time, but I mean, who knows, it seems like a pipe dream to think that would last forever.

JF: About the environment: Are you thinking space could be not just an escape from a ravaged Earth but a way to save the Earth?

EA: There's a huge environmental cost to mining on Earth. But there are lots of strategic materials and metals that we can get in space and that will be necessary for us if we want to create abundance and prosperity generations from now on Earth. We sort of had a freebie over the past couple hundred yearswe figured out that you can burn coal and fossil fuels and give all the economies of the world a big boost. But that's about to end. Not only do we have to transition to a new form of energy, we also have to transition to a new form of resources. And the resources of the nearest asteroids make the resources on Earth pale by comparison. There are enough resources in the nearest asteroids to support human society and civilization for thousands of years.

I'm not suggesting that we're going to start using resources from space next year. But over the next 20 years, resources in space will most likely be used to explore our solar system. And eventually we'll start bringing them back to Earth. Wouldn't it be great if one day, all of the heavy industries of the Earthmining and energy production and manufacturingwere done somewhere else, and the Earth could be used for living, keeping it as it should be, which is a bright-blue planet with lots of green?

JF: Here's my last question. When I was a kid in the Baby Boom era, there was a genuine national excitement about space. Do you think that mood in the United States needs to be recreated for the populace as a whole? With an overall national excitement or sense of mission about space exploration, like in the 1960s? Or, on the contrary, is this something that should and can be left to people who see a business or scientific opportunity?

EA: If you look at polls, about half the population says that if it were at a price they could afford, and it were safe, they would go to space themselves. They would love to see the Earth from space. I don't know what that means in terms of gauging support. But clearly the more people are interested in and supportive of space exploration, the faster the industry will grow.

I think spending a half a percent of GDP on space, on space exploration, would be a very wise investment, whether that investment comes from the government itself or from just private industry. There are few things that inspire human engineering, human ingenuity, and the human spirit more than space exploration. Kids love space, and they love dinosaurs, and they love all those fantastical things that can happen when you push the boundaries. It's the same reason that, when my little one crawls out of her crib at night, she peeks around the corner to see what's there. This is curiosity.

We have enough perspective on ourselves and the universe to know that we just inhabit this tiny little corner of the universe. Humans are curious; so to say that we're not interested in space would put us [at odds with] the very core of our being as humans, in a world where we've defined a limit that we can never go beyond.

We obviously have huge problems on Earth, and nobody's saying that we should try to go develop space in lieu of solving our problems on Earth. But the fact of the matter is that we should always be doing things that inspire our youth and ourselves, and try to bring out the best parts of human nature.

Read the original here:
The Coming Age of Space Colonization - The Atlantic

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In the letter,President Trump stated that he looks forward to working with President Xi to develop a constructive relationship that benefits both the United States and China, according to an official White House statement. The letter also congratulated the Chinese people generally on two major holidays: the Lunar New Year and the upcoming Lantern Festival. The Chinese Foreign Ministry later confirmed the letter thanked President Xi Jinping for having congratulated Trump on his inauguration in January.

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NBC News notes that this is the first time President Trump has communicated personally with Xi as president.

We highly commend President Trump for his festive greetings to President Xi Jinping and the Chinese people, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lu Kang told reporters during the ministrys daily press conference on Wednesday. Lus response to a question regarding the letter was largely favorable to President Trump and the United States in general. China will work with the US, in the principle of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation, to expand cooperation, manage differences, and strive for greater achievements in our bilateral relationship by ensuring its healthy and sound growth, he said.

Reporters attempted to goad Lu into condemning Trumps letter, either for addressing the Lunar New Year after it had occurred or referring tothe presidents upcoming meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a longtime Beijing rival. Lu responded to the former by telling the report they had read too much into it and suggesting you learn more about the significance of the Lantern Festival in traditional Chinese culture to understand why President Trump would choose that occasion for a greeting.

The state publication Xinhua, in their write-up of the press briefing, noted, Lantern Festival, which falls on Feb. 11 this year, is held to mark the first full moon of the new lunar year. It falls on the 15th day of the first lunar month. Chinese people consider it to be one of the countrys most important holidays.

In support of Lus unusually warm regards to President Trump, Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters he was optimistic about economic ties between the two countries on Wednesday.The China-U.S. ties have never ceased development, overcoming various difficulties, he said, according to Xinhua. Almost every state in the U.S. has been doing business with China, every (U.S.) university has cooperated with China and the number of personnel exchanges between the two countries has risen to more than four million last year.

The Foreign Ministrys public attitude to Trump diverges significantly from the belligerence that has defined Beijing-controlled publications coverage of Trump. The Communist Party-runGlobal Times, for example, has accused Trump of causing total chaos in the United States and exposing the fragility of Western democracy. The Peoples Liberation Army has used its media channel to warn that Trump has made the possibility of a U.S.-China war more real and a practical reality.

Trump won election to the nations highest office on a campaign that emphasized reassessing Americas economic relationship with China, as well as promising to confront Chinas growing colonization of international waters in the South China Sea. Since assuming the presidency, Trump has ensured his administration remain consistent with his campaign promises.

If those islands are, in fact, in international waters and not part of China proper, yeah, well make sure we defend international interests from being taken over by one country, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in January in response to reports that China has expanded its military capabilities in Vietnamese and Philippine territory in the South China Sea. During his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson promised to send China a clear signal that, first the island building stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.

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China 'Highly Commends' Trump for Holiday Letter to President Xi Jinping - Breitbart News

By Josh Orcutt | Cronkite News Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017

Colonizing a moon of Mars is not an easy task.

However, more than 1,300 students from 20 schools around Arizona flocked to Arizona State University Polytechnic Campus to compete in the 18th annual Honeywell Fiesta Bowl Aerospace Challenge to do just that.

Nearly 300 separate teams of three to five students each created scale models and wrote reports about how they wanted to colonize and sustain a base of operations on Phobos. The reports included written descriptions of the original landing site, sequences of launches and the construction plans of the Phobos base. The teams presented their ideas to judges of the competitions who are Honeywell engineers.

The Aerospace Challenge is one of the largest STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) competitions in the state of Arizona.

There are three days of preliminary rounds. The top two teams with the highest scores from each day will move on to the finals.

Those six teams will have to create a 10-minute oral presentation and answer questions on the spot from Honeywell engineers later this month. The team with the highest score wins an all-expenses paid trip to the Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, an on-field appearance at the upcoming Fiesta Bowl, as well as plaques commemorating the victory.

A welcome sign greets students to the Honeywell Fiesta Bowl Aerospace Challenge. More than 1,300 students from 20 different Arizona schools competed. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

A view from above of the Honeywell Fiesta Bowl Aerospace Challenge held on Arizona State Universitys Polytechnic Campus in Mesa on Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

Seventh grade students Nicholas Kahhan, Sebastian Sanchez and Daniel Wade from Kyrene Altadena Middle School show off their project, codenamed Soup. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

Each groups presentation must include a written report about the logistics of the colonization of Phobos, a moon of Mars, as well as a scale model of their plan. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

Teams are required to build models detailing potential living quarters for the crews on Phobos as well as ways to stay sustainable. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

A judge from Honeywell discusses the plans proposed by Conall Mayo-Shanahan, Trevor Hunter and Eric Elizondo. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

One teams plan for colonizing Phobos, a moon of Mars, stands on display. Over the three days, 1,300 students from 20 schools will get feedback from Honeywell engineers about their plans. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

Students can win medals and awards while competing in the Honeywell Fiesta Bowl Aerospace Challenge. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

The Honeywell Fiesta Bowl Aerospace Challenge is one of the largest STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program for grade school and middle school students in Arizona. (Photo by Josh Orcutt/Cronkite News)

Read the rest here:
Students colonize Mars moon in Honeywell Aerospace Challenge - Cronkite News

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) is one of the space missions discussed in Rod Pyle's new book, "Amazing Stories of the Space Age," now on sale.

A new book brings together tales of the most bizarre and incredible space missions ever conceived. The book's author (and regular Space.com contributor), Rod Pyle, talked with Space.com via email about these amazing space missions and what they can tell us about the future of spaceflight.

The book, "Amazing Stories of the Space Age: True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts from the Annals of Spaceflight," is now available in paperbackand as an e-book. You can read an excerpt of the book here.

"Amazing Stories of the Space Age: True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts from the Annals of Spaceflight," by Rod Pyle.

Space.com: This book is a collection of stories about strange and amazing spaceflight missions and ideas for missions. To give our readers an idea of the kinds of things covered in the book, can you briefly describe one of your favorite "amazing storie," or one of the missions you find really fascinating?

Rod Pyle: I love them all, of course, but one that touches my heart is about the final days of the Viking 1 Mars lander. Two Viking spacecraft, each comprised of an orbiter and a lander, headed off to the Red Planet in 1975, arriving in 1976. After studying the surface from orbit, the flight controllers committed Viking 1 to a landing on July 20, 1976. They could only infer what the surface might be like from relatively low-resolution imaging, but they met with luck twice: first with this landing, and then with Viking 2 about six weeks. The folks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) still marvel at the accomplishment. After a long and successful campaign of great science, one by one, the Vikings went dark, and by late 1982, only Viking 1 was still transmitting, sending daily weather reports to Earth. At six years into the mission, however, the lander was experiencing some battery issues similar to what had ended the Viking 2 landers mission. The programmer assigned to the mission wrote some new software to optimize the battery charging cycles and uplinked it to the lander, where it was dutifully recorded onto the computers tape-drive memory. Unfortunately, it overwrote an instruction set responsible for keeping the radio dish oriented toward the Earth, and the lander fell silent. JPL tried to regain contact for months, to no avail. The team was devastated. And because the lander had a nuclear power supply, we have no idea how long it waited for a final message that would never arrive

Space.com: Some of these missions seem as though they would have left a very short paper trail, and some of them have just barely become declassified. How did you go about finding all of these?

Pyle: This is true in many cases. While it's simple to buy a copy of something like [rocket pioneer] Wernher von Brauns "The Mars Project," getting more in-depth data on many of these programs was far more complicated. To add to the adventure, some have only been fully declassified in the past few years. For example, much of the material on the U.S. Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory was posted in the National Reconnaissance Office's online archives in 2015. Other programs have been extensively studied in academic papers that are available. Still others exist only as documents from the era, or even as hearsay that must be vetted by sources familiar with the program and the time frame the Soviet-era stories were the toughest. But this is in part what made it such a compelling book project."

Space.com: You've been a spaceflight historian for quite a while, so I imagine you've been collecting these stories for some time. When and why did you decide to put them all in a book?

Pyle: I've been writing books about spaceflight since 2003. Prior to that, I was working in documentary television, and would steer projects towards space-related subjects whenever possible. This book originated as a pitch to a cable network for a show called "Secrets of Space" in the early 2000s. We got close a few times but were never able to begin production. The pitch languished for some time, and I decided about five years ago to recast it as a book, which would allow for a much deeper dive into the subject matter a huge plus. My agent made a deal with the good folks at Prometheus Books, and off we went.

Space.com: Of all the stories in your book that stood out to me, I think perhaps the most incredible was the idea in the late 1950s that the U.S. would have a military base on the moon and would actually be fighting moon wars against Russian moon armies within a decade. You even mention in the book that this may sound incredible, but that's just a testament to how intense the Cold War was. Were most people really convinced that spaceflight would advance at such a rapid clip? When do you think people started to realize that wouldn't be the case?

Pyle: Project Horizon was a 1959 U.S. Army study for a militarized moon base. It was pretty much [dead on arrival] when it was submitted, since things were moving in another direction by then NASA was a new civil space agency, and von Braun, who had worked on the Project Horizon study, had transferred there from the Army. When reading the Project Horizon proposal, I had to chuckle at some of the assumptions made the Redstone Arsenal [what is now ;NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama] was just developing the Saturn I rocket and the flight rates and amount of cargo needed to build the Horizon base would have been staggering on the order of 150+ boosters, including spares.

All this would need to be transported to Christmas Island [also known as Kiritimati, part of the Republic of Kiribati] in the central Pacific, where the equatorially based launch site would be, and everything would have to go perfectly to be anywhere near their scheduled time of completion, about 1965 to 1966. The budgeted cost was about $6 billion in 1959 dollars. Later, as NASA began to look hard at their manned lunar mission options, especially direct ascent versus Earth orbit rendezvous, it began to sink in just how difficult this could all be. Of course, Project Horizon was a filing-cabinet item by then; it was, to my knowledge, not taken seriously after being submitted in 1959, and von Braun, as mentioned, had moved on.

Today, when you look at all 363 feet [111 meters] of a Saturn V moon rocket, and realize that only the last 13 feet [4 m] of it returned home from the moon, plans like Horizon feel like studies in technological hubris. But it would have been magnificent, had it worked, and one must admire the determination of the planners.

Space.com: On that same point, your book is a great illustration that some of the biggest leaps of spaceflight tech have come along because they had military motivations. Would you say it's true that the greatest spaceflight accomplishments of the 20th century were motivated by war and world dominance? Do you think that can change or is changing in the 21st century?

Pyle: Most of the unflown mission designs in the book were of military or quasi-military origins, with the one major exception being Project Orion, the atomic rocket. The late 1940s and early 1950s were a time of great paranoia and increasing fear. The United States had exited World War II as the sole power possessing nuclear weapons a comfortable position to be in at the time. Within a handful of years, thanks to clever physicists and good espionage, the Soviet Union had developed and tested both atomic and hydrogen bombs. At the time say, through the mid-1950s the only way to deliver such weapons was with lumbering, slow bomber aircraft. But what if some clever folks built rockets big enough to fling them across the globe at ballistic speeds, or placed them in an orbiting station that could drop them on U.S. targets at will? This was a huge concern.

So the plans for the Horizon lunar base, the Air Force's Lunex base, von Braun's inflatable "wheel" space station, the Dyna-Soar rocket plane and many others were based, at least in part, on this paranoia and the desire to seize the "high ground," however each branch of the military perceived that. And, of course, although Apollo was a civilian program, we know that it was born of geopolitics and the Kennedy administration's desire to find a pursuit in space in which we could assure a win over the Soviet Union something that would demonstrate the superiority of our technology, our political system and our people. A crewed lunar landing was the answer. This program, called Project Apollo, was almost curtailed many times, and it continues to astound me that it all worked, and within the decade.

I see great promise for a different outcome in the 21st century, a blending of international collaboration, commercial/government partnerships and private competition (mostly in the U.S. for the next decade) in space exploration and development.

Space.com: There are also some stories in your book about projections in the 1960s that humans would visit other planets by the 1980s. The fact that those estimates were wildly off target makes me feel nervous about NASA's current plans to get humans to Mars by the 2030s. Does learning about the history of humanity trying to get past the moon make you feel hopeful for future solar system exploration, or does it mostly inspire caution?

Pyle: What an interesting question! It was all so much simpler when von Braun penned "The Mars Project" in 1953 We thought that Mars might have a sufficiently dense atmosphere to support a gliding landing of his huge space-shuttle-like landing craft, that we could cross the gulf between Earth and Mars with a 10-ship armada of taxpayer-funded behemoths, and it would all proceed much like a submarine journey under the North Pole (which occurred in 1958).

But we soon learned that Mars was much more hostile than we had suspected, that Venus was a hell planet and that the moon, while far closer than either, was still a tremendous challenge. And as we continue to study the deep-space environment and microgravity, we find that we, the frail beings who evolved to live perfectly on the surface of our planet and nowhere else, are at great peril when journeying in space for extended periods. So, during the space race we learned much about spaceflight and the associated engineering and scientific issues involved, but this was the low-hanging fruit.

From here on out, the exploration of the solar system gets much harder. And a few hardy U.S.-based billionaires aside, our greatest enemy seems to be a lack of cohesive direction and the dogged determination to forge ahead, in my opinion. As [retired NASA Flight Director] Gene Kranz said to me at the end of an interview a few years back, as he fixed me with that steely eyed missile-man stare, "What America will dare, America can do." I think he's right, and for more than just America. Today, I might rephrase it as, "We know what we can do. What will we dare?"

Space.com: In Chapter 4, you talk about General Atomics, which was a commercial company that wanted to build a brand-new kind of rocket to get humans into space. Would you call this company a predecessor to companies like SpaceX? (While private companies have been involved in spaceflight since its inception, I'm asking if there's a similarity, because most of those companies contribute to existing human spaceflight missions rather than trying to initiate their own.)

Pyle: The idea of nuclear-pulse propulsion originated from Los Alamos [National Laboratory] in 1947 as a paper outlining an unmanned spacecraft. It was then restarted at General Atomics in 1958 on a slim budget, funded internally. It soon became clear that this was going to require more resources, and federal dollars became involved. It did begin in a fashion not entirely dissimilar from efforts such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, but without sexy billionaires at the helm it was a corporate decision.

Later that same year, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, (DARPA's predecessor) committed to spending a million dollars per year on the project, and soon, the Air Force took over funding, seeing military potential in the program. The studies continued with more engineers and physicists involved, and the plan was to launch a giant crewed spacecraft ranging from 10,000 to a million tons, from Nevada, using nuclear explosions. [Theoretical physicist and mathematician] Freeman Dyson calculated that only a few lives would be lost per launch from fallout, far less than a week of automotive accident deaths in the U.S. The idea was tested with small-scale models called "putt-putts" and appeared to work, but ultimately, the scale of the project and the politics of raw nuclear pollution resulting from the launches doomed it.

NASA did later look hard at launching a far smaller version of Orion on a Saturn V, which would initiate atomic explosions only after it had left the atmosphere. But by then, the Apollo program was front and center, and Project Orion was discontinued. I'll add that Dyson's motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970" a spectacular notion. It could have changed the course of human space exploration!

Space.com: Your book takes a look back at 20th century spaceflight and highlights some of the really grand, inspiring visions that people had for missions and technologies. Those people weren't cranks, either; even if Project Orion or some of von Braun's grander visions never got off the ground, the community still did amazing things. So do you think people are still dreaming at the same scale that they were in the first few decades of spaceflight? Is there room to dream up things like Project Orion and military bases on the moon?

Pyle: Is there ever! And we are, thankfully, somewhat less focused on the military aspect, though defense projects are still quietly well-funded. When I heard Elon Musk's talk at Guadalajara last September, when he announced SpaceX's plans to go to Mars, I was thrilled. I had expected something along those general lines, but the sheer scale of it, and the raw will and determination behind it, gives me great hope. He may never pull it off at the scale he outlined (though I, for one, would never bet against him), but the mere fact that he is willing to put this grand, almost utopian vision out there, and use his own money to seed it, is wonderful.

Ditto Jeff Bezos and his colonization plans for space, along with smaller companies like Bigelow, Sierra Nevada and all the rest. And, of course, other countries' programs the European Space Agency's Moon Village, Chinas ambitious plans for human flights to the moon and Mars, and other national space efforts are inspiring. It will be a wonderful time in space exploration and development the forward-looking visions of the 20th century may come true, in some form, at last.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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'Amazing Stories of the Space Age': Q&A with Author Rod Pyle - Space.com

Skywatchers are in for a treat this Friday evening as a rare Snow Moon eclipse will take place.

A so-called deep penumbral lunar eclipse will occur on February 10th, as the Earth moves almost directly between the sun and moon, blocking the suns rays and casting a shadow on the moon. Unlike a total or partial lunar eclipse where the moon passes through the central part of the Earths shadow, called the umbra, and goes completely dark, the penumbral eclipse will involve the moon travelling through the outer edges of the Earths shadow (the penumbra), an event which on Earth will be seen as a dimming of the moons brightness.

What makes this penumbral eclipse special is that this is a rare occasion when almost the whole of the moons face will pass within the Earths penumbra, says Jeremy Shears from the British Astronomical Association, to the Telegraph, and so the reduction of the moons brightness will be more perceptible than usual.

The eclipse is expected to last just over four hours and can be seen almost everywhere on Earth. In Canada, viewers will see the full moon shining in the Eastern sky during the eclipse and theyll get the best view as the moon goes into mid-eclipse at 7:44 pm EST. Close watchers in eastern Canada, however, will get the best look as theyll be able to see the shading begin on the moons left side at least an hour and a half earlier at 6:15 pm EST.

Februarys full moon is known as the Snow Moon, a name said to be handed down from Indigenous North American cultures. Februarys moon has also been called the Hunger Moon and the Storm Moon.

For lunar enthusiasts, 2017 expects to be a banner year, space travel-wise, as all five remaining teams competing for Googles Lunar X Prize gear up for their respective missions to the moon. The $30 million prize ($20 million for the first place finisher and $5 million each for second and third place) will be rewarded to the team that first lands a rover on the moon, sends it rolling 500 metres across the moons surface and sends back images and video of the event to Earth.

All in the name of advancing private innovation and entrepreneurship, the Lunar X Prize recently announced the names of the five teams remaining in the competition, all of which have secured launch contracts. The one solely North American entry, Moon Express, has so far reportedly raised $20 million in financing. The Florida-based group is planning a launch later in 2017 and has said its larger ambitions include mining the moon for minerals and moon colonization.

We now have all the resources in place to shoot for the Moon, said Bob Richards, Moon Expresss CEO, in a statement. Our goal is to expand Earths social and economic sphere to the Moon, our largely unexplored eighth continent, and enable a new era of low cost lunar exploration and development for students, scientists, space agencies and commercial interests.

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Snow Moon and lunar eclipse both coming this week - Cantech Letter

Most people would probably say yes, its quite possible there will be humans residing on the moon within the next ten years, and it will be relatively inexpensive too. Much of this is down to 3D printing, robots, and SpaceX. Whatever the reason, its a cool concept and one that deserves exploring. Out of a workshop help in 2014, came nine papers that have been prepared specifically for the task of setting up an alternative environment on the moon. Although all nine papers differ in detail, essentially they are all working towards that same goal.

But, its not the first time people have talked about setting up a base on the moon, and so far nothing, so whats changed? Chris McKay, NASA astrobiologist, says, The reason all the previous plans for going back to the moon have failed is that theyre just way too expensive. The space program is living in a delusion of unlimited budgets, which traces back to Apollo. This was a project that cost $150 billion by todays standards.Today, however, estimates from the papers suggest that we could have a base in place on the moon by 2022 and for less than $10 billion.

As it stands, NASA has no intentions of returning to the moon and instead is looking at Mars as the next place of colonization. But people such as McKay and others feel that we need to conquer the moon first before trying to take on the likes of Mars. This would allow astronauts the chance to test new equipment and habitats just a few days away on the moon rather than nine months away on Mars. My interest is not the moon. To me, the moon is as dull as a ball of concrete. But were not going to have a research base on Mars until we can learn how to do it on the moon first. The moon provides a blueprint to Mars.

Others besides NASA that are also looking to get a base set up on the moon include China, Russia, and the European Space Agency. So even if NASA didnt want to fund the mission alone, it would soon be able to partner with another source. Private investors also want to go back to the moon, even if just as a stepping stone to Mars. But, how do we even go about building a lunar base there? Well, that will vary depending on who you ask, but many proposals will include some form of robotic exploration to find the perfect site for the living. Next, lunar excavation machines would set to work leveling the area while more robots would start to set up a solar power network.

It would take a while for the majority of people to start living on the moon, and at first, only a small crew would stay for a few days at a time. The missions would be increased each time until eventually there was a permanent base established, suitable for humans to reside on. It really shouldnt be that difficult either, as we already know how to survive on the moon. Now its a case of using the technology around us to drive down the cost of a moon base. Using VR technology could help with the planning of the mission and 3D printing could be used to replace any small components that happen to break on the spacecraft.

Some of the proposals were relying on technologies that arent even in existence yet, but not completely out of this world. One idea involved SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket transporting small payloads or the Falcon Heavy taking large payloads to the moon, while another was to allow rockets to refuel in orbit. The moon lodgings are likely to be designed and manufactured by Bigelow Aerospace who have come up with a dwelling that is flexible and can be folded up to fit inside the cargo bay of a rocket, then simply expand on the lunar surface, similar to that of a pop-up tent. Test versions of the moon lodgings will be trialed at the International Space Station later this year.

The whole project doesnt come cheap, and its estimated that the cost of building a lunar base on the moon will be around $10 billion, with annual upkeep costs of around $2 billion per year. But, NASA can afford it especially if they team up with some private investors. One study last year showed that the project could even pay for itself after one year if large water deposits are found on the moon. And, whats more, is all of this could be up and running in less than ten years. How exciting!

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Will We Really Be Living on the Moon Within the Next Decade? - TrendinTech

"The Space Between Us" is apparently a large divide when it comes to describing this silly, romantic, mixed-up movie.

It's an interplanetary adventure as a science-fiction flick with a race against time.

It's a teen romance (involving a girl named Tulsa!) formed around a fish-out-of-water story.

It's a morality play, and it's a redemption story.

It's a mess, more than anything, that goes from a convoluted, boring first hour to a second half that is such a heart-on-its-sleeve love story, aimed so squarely at tween girls, that your 12-year-old daughter may walk out of the theater swooning.

That may be the one group of people whose space between their ears will really appreciate "The Space Between Us."

Initially set in the very near future, NASA sends a shuttle of astronauts to prep Mars for colonization, but there's a problem: One of them is pregnant. The baby is born on Mars, and the mother dies in childbirth.

That makes Gardner Elliott the first human not born on Earth, and that makes him different.

No. 1: A full gestation in zero-gravity atmosphere means his organs are different than our own, endangering his ever coming home.

No. 2: Sentencing him to live on Mars is a bit of a public-relations nightmare, so his existence is kept a secret from the public.

I know what some may be thinking, but no: The moon landing was not faked.

This whole snafu leaves Gary Oldman, as the architect of this Mars mission, fretting and yelling at people about this massive cover-up, and it leaves a motherless boy stuck with astronauts inside a small space station for the first 16 years of his life.

Asa Butterfield ("Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children") already proved his sci-fi teen mettle in "Ender's Game," and now as Gardner he gets an upgrade to romantic lead.

But it takes forever to get him there in the hands of director Peter Chelsom ("Serendipity," "Hannah Montana: The Movie").

Between Oldman's rants down on Earth, Mars mother-figure Carla Gugino's sentimental concerns for the boy and Gardner's repeated questions What's Earth like? What's your favorite thing about Earth? Will I know how to act on Earth? that the only thing that kept me from snoring was thinking out loud: When are you going to get this boy on Earth?

The movie never really takes off until we get Gardner in front of Tulsa, the teen girl in Colorado he's been secretly future-texting from Mars, where the wi-fi is red planet-hot.

Tulsa is played by Britt Robertson, who was the one good thing about "Tomorrowland" and who, at 26, is so pretty that she can make us believe she's still in high school.

It turns out that she was abandoned at age 4 in Tulsa, and the orphan girl adopted the city as her nickname.

So we can see that bond start to form: Both Gardner and Tulsa grew up without parents, forced to live with strangers who didn't always tell them the truth.

Butterfield brings an awkward, goofy, somewhat cute manner to his discovery of Earth things both large and small, from crawly bugs to homeless people to Robertson's lips.

Robertson, playing the street-smart girl who can steal a car as easily as she takes off in a crop-dusting plane, brings a blushing sweetness to her tough chick, whose defenses weaken in the presence of a true innocent.

After a sloooow-developing period of great length, it's remarkable that the final act is as moving in a sappy kind of way as it is. Admittedly, my 12-year-old daughter may have coaxed that feeling along.

She and her friends are the audience for "The Space Between Us," and those accompanying them will just have to grin and bear it.

Michael Smith

918-581-8479

michael.smith@tulsaworld.com

Twitter: @michaelsmithTW

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Movie review: "The Space Between Us" is aimed squarely at teens - Tulsa World

In Syfys The Expanse, Mars and Earth are two superpowers racing to gain the technological upper hand, while those who live in the Asteroid Belt mine resources for the more privileged planets and become more and more prone to radicalization.

Sound familiar?

As we enter the miasmatic era of a Donald Trump presidency, it is impossible not to view televisionany pop culture, for that matterthrough the lens of politics. Dystopian science fiction in particular warrants comparisons to present-day society, or at least points to where it might be headed. But finding allegories in fiction isnt necessarily a bad thing, and former President Barack Obamahimself has said that fiction can be a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about everyday.

The Expanse does just that, only its the 23rd century, and humanity has successfully colonized the planets in the solar system. No, there is no demagogue with tiny hands running a planet in this story, but there are other obvious similarities you can draw: Marginalized communities are pitted against the wealthy and elite, limited natural resources cause war and strife, and nations are constantly poised on the brink of war.

But The Expanse doesnt merely copy and paste current global affairs into its story. Instead, the show uses a nuanced, character-driven narrative to combat a Trumpian view of the worldone that eschews complexity by boiling down politics to simply good versus evil. Authoritarianism perpetuates the idea that nuance does not exist, only the impetus to quell opposition, and as Ruth Ben-Ghiat in The Atlantic points out, this leaves society open to the possibility of violence without consequence. The Expanse, on the other hand, manages to paint a portrait of a divided universe without vilifying one group and raising the other to god-like status, a kind of storytelling that will be essential in the coming days.

The series achieves this feat by making us question who the real heroes in its story are. Is it Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), operative of the United Nations, which controls Earth and the moon colony? Avasarala wants to protect the citizens of her planet and uphold Earths ideals of welfare and social reform, but she does so in a way that blatantly ignores civil liberties. We see this when she tortures a Belter for information, and when she repeatedly betrays friends and allies in order to achieve her goals. She is ruthless and cold, determined and vicious. Yet we also have to wrestle with the fact that she lost her son to terrorists, and her determination to stifle insurrection comes from her loss and her fear.

What about Joe Miller (Thomas Jane), the hardboiled detective who lives in the Asteroid Belt? On the surface, it looks like hes fighting for justice by investigating the disappearance of Julie Mao (Florence Faivre), a key player in the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance, a Belter activist group). But his motives are dubiousmuch of his search is misguided by fantasy, ignoring the Belter plight and rejecting his own heritage. Is Julie Mao our hero, then? She has a humanitarian streak, seen helping miners made sick from poor living conditions. But she joined a militant organization without questioning its methods, ultimately leading to her demise. As for the Belters, its indisputable that they are an oppressed group facing severe injustice, but they are hardly monolithic. Some have chosen violent means to achieve their goals by joining the OPAs terrorist cells, while others want legitimacy through formal negotiation.

The closest we have to heroes might be the crew of the Rocinante ship. This group of disparate people came together through unforeseen circumstances, each with different motivations for investigating the brewing conflicts between Earth, Mars and the Belters. What makes us root for them is not that they are consistently morally righteous (some of them possibly have sketchy backgrounds), but that they are fiercely committed to exposing the truth, whatever the truth may be.

This is not to say that there are no clear rights and wrongs in The Expanse universe. When the Belter miners are cruelly murdered after protesting inhumane conditions, we are meant to be appalled. When we see acts of terrorism that lead to the deaths of innocent civilians, we are meant to be horrified. There is no call to empathize with bigotry, or to tolerate murder. There is, however, a call to understand the root causes that underlie the institutions and systems that run the solar systemwhat privilege looks like, why terrorism happens. We are meant to confront evil and condemn it, but also to ask ourselves, and our leaders, What is really at work here? Only then can we move forward to better humanity as a whole.

And what might that look like? The Expanse has some ideas on that, too. All you have to do is take a look at the number of women in the series, all in positions of power, all with complex personalities. Theres the graceful and cruel Chrisjen Avasarala. Theres Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), a capable engineer and natural leader aboard the Rocinante. Theres Theresa Yao (Jean Yoon), the stern captain of a Mars military vessel. On Ceres, theres Captain Shaddid (Lola Glaudini), head of Star Helix Security, as well as detective Octavia Muss (Athena Karkanis). And at the heart of the series mystery is the enigmatic Julia Mao. Daniel Abrahams, one of the authors of the books on which The Expanse is based, said in an interview with Tor.com that [i]t was always our intention to have a future world that included women who were strong as characters.

The shows not perfect, though. For instance, it still suffers from the Smurfette syndrome by often having just one strong female character within a group, resulting in a dearth of female relationships. But its a start, already miles ahead of a lot of current television. And if it seems like the mere existence of female leaders in a show is a low bar to set, youd be right. Unfortunately, such is the reality of a country that balked at the very idea of a woman with political ambitions assuming the mantle of the presidency.

Most of these characters are played by women of color, and the showrunners are enthusiastic in their embrace of a multicultural future both in the story and behind the scenes. In an interview with The Verge, Naren Shankar explained that he was committed to the vision of the books authors: The people who make it out into space, its not just going to be Neil Armstrong, clean-cut, classically white Americans. Its going to be Indian, Chinese, Russian, a mix of everybody, every ethnicity. And thats just going to melt and mingle. The very foundation of the shows futuristic premise is immigrationthe colonization of previously uninhabited planets means that everyone is essentially an immigrant.

But The Expanse isnt simply touting the idea of celebrating diversity. Its imagining a post-racial society. Indeed, inequality doesnt seem to exist between different races, or even different genders. Instead, we see a different kind of inequality, based on which planet one is from. Although the Belters, for example, are a racially diverse people, the group itself has a unique cultural identity. They are physically different (their bodies being taller and thinner due to low gravity conditions) and possess their own pidgin language (Belter Creole, a mixture of different languages that reflect the original settlers). Because of where they live and how they look, the Belters are essentially treated by the other planets as slave labor, inhuman even.

In the spirit of nuance, we should recognize that there is a danger in the aspiration for a post-racial world. Belters dont want to give up their identity so much as gain civil rights that are afforded to all humans on other planets. Its a multiracial society we need, not a homogenous one. Perhaps the lesson here is that inequality will always exist in some form or another when the privileged dont recognize marginalized groups. Perhaps this is the story that progressives want to be able to tella story that does not pit the white working class against the black working class, for instance, but instead unites both against the same system of economic oppression.

The Expanse shows us a possible future, a future in which women can be leaders without the bat of an eye, in which racially diverse groups can unite in common cause. But it is also a warning about keeping institutions in check, about recognizing inequality wherever it might exist, in order to avoid past mistakes. Whether it provides lessons on how to deal with autocracy, or simply provides hope and relief from our current situation, The Expanse is must-watch television for our time. And I didnt even mention the mysterious glowing blue stuff

Elena Zhang is a freelance writer based in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter at @EZhang77.

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In Syfy's The Expanse, Nuance Is the Antidote to Authoritarianism - Paste Magazine

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has made trips to Trump Tower. He met with Trump and the Washington Post has ben reliably told, discussed Mars and public-private partnerships.

Elon Musk and SpaceX have the bold dream of colonizing Mars, and think they can launch the first human mission to the surface of the Red Planet as soon as 2024 when Trump, if reelected, would still be in the White House. (We understand that Musk also talked with Trump about other issues, including the need for a smart grid the kind of infrastructure that would give a boost to the solar energy business, in which Musk is a leader via his investments in the company Solar City.)

Trump seems to be cozying up to Elon Musk and is entertaining the idea of financing Musks Mars colonization project

Elon's Vision of the Mars Colony

Initially, glass panes with carbon fiber frames to build geodesic domes on the surface, plus a lot of miner/tunneling droids. With the latter, you can build out a huge amount of pressurized space for industrial operations and leave the glass domes for green living space.

Real Mars and Spacex Plans

The current Mars plan is:

The Flight Tank for the Interstellar Transport was the most important part of the announcement

The flight tank will actually be slightly longer than the development tank shown, but the same diameter.

That was built with latest and greatest carbon fiber prepreg. In theory, it should hold cryogenic propellant without leaking and without a sealing linker. Early tests are promising.

Will take it up to 2/3 of burst pressure on an ocean barge in the coming weeks.

The spaceship would be limited to around 5 g's nominal, but able to take peak loads 2 to 3 times higher without breaking up.

Booster would be nominal of 20 and maybe 30 to 40 without breaking up.

Spacex and Elon Musk have the 61 page presentation of the Interplanetary Transport System and the plan from early exploration to a sustainable colony on Mars

Spacex has built a full sized carbon composite fuel tank.

The Interplanetary Transport system can launch 550 tons to low earth orbit which is nearly four times as much as the Saturn V. It would be over four times as powerful as the SLS in the final version of the SLS

Next version of Falcon 9 will have uprated thrust

Final Falcon 9 has a lot of minor refinements that collectively are important, but uprated thrust and improved legs are the most significant.

Elon thinks the F9 boosters could be used almost indefinitely, so long as there is scheduled maintenance and careful inspections. Falcon 9 Block 5 -- the final version in the series -- is the one that has the most performance and is designed for easy reuse, so it just makes sense to focus on that long term and retire the earlier versions. Block 5 starts production in about 3 months and initial flight is in 6 to 8 months, so there isn't much point in ground testing Block 3 or 4 much beyond a few reflights.

Robert Zubrin, Longtime Mars Colonization advocate, gives a Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System.

Zubrin was struck by many good and powerful ideas in the Musk plan. However, Musks plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical. Still, with some corrections, a system using the core concepts Musk laid out could be made attractive not just as an imaginative concept for the colonization of Mars, but as a means of meeting the nearer-at-hand challenge of enabling human expeditions to the planet.

Zubrin explains the conceptual flaws of the new SpaceX plan, showing how they can be corrected to benefit, first, the near-term goal of initiating human exploration of the Red Planet, and then, with a cost-effective base-building and settlement program, the more distant goal of future Mars colonization.

Robert Zubrin, a New Atlantis contributing editor, is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, Colorado, and president of the Mars Society.

Highlights * Have the second stage go only out to the distance of the moon and return to enable 5 payloads to be sent instead of one * Leave the 100 person capsule on Mars and only have a small cabin return to earth * use the refueling in orbit and other optimizations to enable a Falcon Heavy to deliver 40 tons to Mars instead of 12 for exploration missions in 2018, 2020 etc... * Reusable first stage makes rocketplanes going anywhere point to point on Earth feasible. Falcon Heavy would have the capacity of a Boeing 737 and could travel in about one hour of time anywhere

There are videos of the Elon Musk presentation and an interview with Zubrin about the Musk plan at the bottom of the article

Design of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System

As described by Musk, the SpaceX ITS would consist of a very large two-stage fully-reusable launch system, powered by methane/oxygen chemical bipropellant. The suborbital first stage would have four times the takeoff thrust of a Saturn V (the huge rocket that sent the Apollo missions to the Moon). The second stage, which reaches orbit, would have the thrust of a single Saturn V. Together, the two stages could deliver a maximum payload of 550 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), about four times the capacity of the Saturn V. (Note: All of the tons referenced in this article are metric tons.)

At the top of the rocket, the spaceship itself where some hundred passengers reside is inseparable from the second stage. (Contrast this with, for example, NASAs lunar missions, where each part of the system was discarded in turn until just the Command Module carried the Apollo astronauts back to Earth.) Since the second-stage-plus-spaceship will have used its fuel in getting to orbit, it would need to refuel in orbit, filling up with about 1,950 tons of propellant (which means that each launch carrying passengers would require four additional launches to deliver the necessary propellant). Once filled up, the spaceship can head to Mars.

The duration of the journey would of course depend on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits; the shortest one-way trip would be around 80 days, according to Musks presentation, and the longest would be around 150 days. (Musk stated that he thinks the architecture could be improved to reduce the trip to 60 or even 30 days.)

After landing on Mars and discharging its passengers, the ship would be refueled with methane/oxygen bipropellant made on the surface of Mars from Martian water and carbon dioxide, and then flown back to Earth orbit.

Zubrin's Problems with the Proposed Spacex System

The SpaceX plan as Musk described it contains nine notable features. If we examine each of these in turn, some of the strengths and weaknesses in the overall system will begin to present themselves.

1. Extremely large size. The proposed SpaceX launch system is four times bigger than a Saturn V rocket. This is a serious problem, because even with the companys impressively low development costs, SpaceX has no prospect of being able to afford the very large investment at least $10 billion required to develop a launch vehicle of this scale.

2. Use of methane/oxygen bipropellant for takeoff from Earth, trans-Mars injection, and direct return to Earth from the Martian surface. These ideas go together, and are very strong. Methane/oxygen is, after hydrogen/oxygen, the highest-performing practical propellant combination, and it is much more compact and storable than hydrogen/oxygen. It is very cheap, and is the easiest propellant to make on Mars. For over a quarter century, I have been a strong advocate of this design approach, making it a central feature of the Mars Direct mission architecture I first laid out in 1990 and described in my book The Case for Mars. However, it should be noted that while the manufacture of methane/oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide and water is certainly feasible, it is not without cost in effort, power, and capital facilities, and so the transportation system should be designed to keep this burden on the Mars base within manageable bounds.

3. The large scale manufacture of methane/oxygen bipropellant on the Martian surface from indigenous materials. Here I offer the same praise and the same note of caution as above. The use of in situ (that is, on-site) Martian resources makes the entire SpaceX plan possible, just as it is a central feature of my Mars Direct plan. But the scale of the entire mission architecture must be balanced with the production capacity that can realistically be established.

4. All flight systems are completely reusable. This is an important goal for minimizing costs, and SpaceX is already making substantial advances toward it by demonstrating the return and reuse of the first stage of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. However, for a mission component to be considered reusable it doesnt necessarily need to be returned to Earth and launched again. In general, it can make more sense to find other ways to reuse components off Earth that are already in orbit or beyond. This idea is reflected in some parts of the new SpaceX plan such as refilling the second stage in low Earth orbit but, as we shall see, it is ignored elsewhere, at considerable cost to program effectiveness. Furthermore the rate at which systems can be reused must also be considered.

5. Refilling methane/oxygen propellant in the booster second stage in Earth orbit. Here Musk and his colleagues face a technical challenge, since transferring cryogenic fluids in zero gravity has never been done. The problem is that in zero gravity two-phase mixtures float around with gas and liquid mixed and scattered among each other, making it difficult to operate pumps, while the ultra-cold nature of cryogenic fluids precludes the use of flexible bladders to effect the fluid transfer. However, I believe this is a solvable problem and one well worth solving, both for the benefits it offers this mission architecture and for different designs we may see in the future.

6. Use of the second stage to fly all the way to the Martian surface and back. This is a very bad idea. For one thing, it entails sending a 7-million-pound-force thrust engine, which would weigh about 60 tons, and its large and massive accompanying tankage all the way from low Earth orbit to the surface of Mars, and then sending them back, at great cost to mission payload and at great burden to Mars base-propellant production facilities. Furthermore, it means that this very large and expensive piece of capital equipment can be used only once every four years (since the feasible windows for trips to and from Mars occur about every two years).

7. The sending of a large habitat on a roundtrip from Earth to Mars and back. This, too, is a very bad idea, because the habitat will get to be used only one way, once every four years. If we are building a Mars base or colonizing Mars, any large habitat sent to the planets surface should stay there so the colonists can use it for living quarters. Going to great expense to send a habitat to Mars only to return it to Earth empty makes no sense. Mars needs houses.

8. Quick trips to Mars. If we accept the optimistic estimates that Musk offered during his presentation, the SpaceX system would be capable of 115-day (average) one-way trips from Earth to Mars, a somewhat faster journey than other proposed mission architectures. But the speedier trips impose a great cost on payload capability. And they raise the price tag, thereby undermining the architectures professed purpose colonizing Mars since the primary requirement for colonization is to reduce cost sufficiently to make emigration affordable. Lets do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Following the example of colonial America, lets pick as the affordability criterion the property liquidation of a middle-class household, or seven years pay for a working man (say about $300,000 in todays equivalent terms), a criterion with which Musk roughly concurs. Most middle-class householders would prefer to get to Mars in six months at the cost equivalent to one house instead of getting to Mars in four months at a cost equivalent to three houses. For immigrants, who will spend the rest of their lives on Mars, or even explorers who would spend 2.5 years on a round trip, the advantage of reaching Mars one-way in four months instead of six months is negligible and if shaving off two months would require a reduction in payload, meaning fewer provisions could be brought along, then the faster trip would be downright undesirable. Furthermore, the six-month transit is actually safer, because it is also the trajectory that loops back to Earth exactly two years after departure, so the Earth will be there to meet it. And trajectories involving faster flights to Mars will necessarily loop further out into space if the landing on Mars is aborted, and thus take longer than two years to get back to Earths orbit, making the free-return backup abort trajectory impossible. The claim that the SpaceX plan would be capable of 60-day (let alone 30-day) one-way transits to Mars is not credible.

9. The use of supersonic retropropulsion to achieve landing on Mars. This is a breakthrough concept for landing large payloads, one that SpaceX has demonstrated successfully in landing the first stages of its Falcon 9 on Earth. Its feasibility for Mars has thus been demonstrated in principle. It should be noted, however, that SpaceX is now proposing to scale up the landing propulsion system by about a factor of 50 and employing such a landing techniques adds to the propulsive requirement of the mission, making the (unnecessary) goal of quick trips even harder to achieve.

Improving the SpaceX ITS Plan

Taking the above points into consideration, some corrections for the flaws in the current ITS plan immediately suggest themselves:

A. Instead of hauling the massive second stage of the launch vehicle all the way to Mars, the spacecraft should separate from it just before Earth escape. In this case, instead of flying all the way to Mars and back over 2.5 years, the second stage would fly out only about as far as the Moon, and return to aerobrake into Earth orbit a week after departure. If the refilling process could be done expeditiously, say in a week, it might thus be possible to use the second stage five times every mission opportunity (assuming a launch window of about two months), instead of once every other mission opportunity. This would increase the net use of the second stage propulsion system by a factor of 10, allowing five payloads to be delivered to Mars every opportunity using only one such system, instead of the ten required by the ITS baseline design. Without the giant second stage, the spaceship would then perform the remaining propulsive maneuver to fly to and land on Mars.

B. Instead of sending the very large hundred-person habitat back to Earth after landing it on Mars, it would stay on Mars, where it could be repurposed as a Mars surface habitat something that the settlers would surely find extremely useful. Its modest propulsive stage could be repurposed as a surface-to-surface long-range flight system, or scrapped to provide material to meet other needs of the people living on Mars. If the propulsive system must be sent back to Earth, it should return with only a small cabin for the pilots and such colonists as want to call it quits. Such a procedure would greatly increase the payload capability of the ITS system while reducing its propellant-production burden on the Mars base.

C. As a result of not sending the very large second stage propulsion system to the Martian surface and not sending the large habitat back from the Martian surface, the total payload available to send one-way to Mars is greatly increased while the propellant production requirements on Mars would be greatly reduced.

D. The notion of sacrificing payload to achieve one-way average transit times substantially below six months should be abandoned. However, if the goal of quick trips is retained, then the corrections specified above would make it much more feasible, greatly increasing payload and decreasing trip time compared to what is possible with the original approach.

Changing the plan in the ways described above would greatly improve the performance of the ITS. This is because the ITS in its original form is not designed to achieve the mission of inexpensively sending colonists and payloads to Mars. Rather, it is designed to achieve the science-fiction vision of the giant interplanetary spaceship. This is a fundamental mistake, although the temptation is understandable. (A similar visionary impulse influenced the design of NASAs space shuttle, with significant disadvantage to its performance as an Earth-to-orbit payload delivery system.) The central requirement of human Mars missions is not to create or operate giant spaceships. Rather, it is to send payloads from Earth to Mars capable of supporting groups of people, and then to send back such payloads as are necessary.

To put it another way: The visionary goal might be to create spaceships, but the rational goal is to send payloads.

Alternative Versions of the SpaceX ITS Plan

To get a sense of some of the benefits that would come from making the changes I [Zubrin] outlined above, lets make some estimates. In the table below, I [Zubrin] compare six versions of the ITS plan, half based on the visionary form that Elon Musk sketched out (called the Original or O design in the table) and half incorporating the alterations I [Zubrin] have suggested (the Revised or R designs).

Our starting assumptions: The ship begins the mission in a circular low Earth orbit with an altitude of 350 kilometers and an associated orbital velocity of 7.7 kilometers per second (km/s). Escape velocity for such a ship would be 10.9 km/s, so applying a velocity change (DV) of 3 km/s would still keep it in a highly elliptical orbit bound to the Earth. Adding another 1.2 km/s would give its payload a perigee velocity of 12.1 km/s, sufficient to send it on a six-month trajectory to Mars, with a two-year free-return option to Earth. (In calculating trip times to Mars, we assume average mission opportunities. In practice some would reach Mars sooner, some later, depending on the launch year, but all would maintain the two-year free return.) We assume a further 1.3 km/s to be required for midcourse corrections and landing using supersonic retropropulsion. For direct return to Earth from the Martian surface, we assume a total velocity change of 6.6 km/s to be required. In all cases, an exhaust velocity of 3.74 km/s (that is, a specific impulse of 382 s) for the methane/oxygen propulsion, and a mass of 2 tons of habitat mass per passenger are assumed. A maximum booster second-stage tank capacity of 1,950 tons is assumed, in accordance with the design data in Musks presentation.

Using the improved plan to send 40 tons (3.3 times more) to Mars with Falcon Heavy

Consider what this revised version of the ITS plan would look like in practice, if it were used not for settling Mars but for the nearer-at-hand task of exploring Mars. If a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle were used to send payloads directly from Earth, it could land only about 12 tons on Mars. (This is roughly what SpaceX is planning on doing in an unmanned Red Dragon mission as soon as 2018.) While it is possible to design a minimal manned Mars expedition around such a limited payload capability, such mission plans are suboptimal. But if instead, following the ITS concept, the upper stage of the Falcon Heavy booster were refueled in low Earth orbit, it could be used to land as much as 40 tons on Mars, which would suffice for an excellent human exploration mission. Thus, if booster second stages can be refilled in orbit, the size of the launch vehicle required for a small Mars exploration mission could be reduced by about a factor of three.

In all of the ITS variants discussed here, the entire flight hardware set would be fully reusable, enabling low-cost support of a permanent and growing Mars base. However, complete reusability is not a requirement for the initial exploration missions to Mars; it could be phased in as technological abilities improved. Furthermore, while the Falcon Heavy as currently designed uses kerosene/oxygen propulsion in all stages, not methane/oxygen, in the revised ITS plan laid out above only the propulsion system in the trans-Mars ship needs to be methane/oxygen, while both stages of the booster can use any sort of propellant. This makes the problem of refilling the second stage on orbit much simpler, because kerosene is not cryogenic, and thus can be transferred in zero gravity using flexible bladders, while liquid oxygen is paramagnetic, and so can be settled on the pumps side of the tank using magnets.

Dawn of the Spaceplanes

Toward the end of his presentation, Musk briefly suggested that one way to fund the development of the ITS might be to use it as a system for rapid, long-distance, point-to-point travel on Earth. This is actually a very exciting possibility, although I would add the qualifier that such a system would not be the ITS as described, but a scaled-down related system, one adapted to the terrestrial travel application.

For a rocketplane to travel halfway around the world would require a DV of about 7 km/s (6 km/s in physical velocity, and 1 km/s in liftoff gravity and drag losses). Assuming methane/oxygen propellant with an exhaust velocity of 3.4 km/s (it would be lower for a rocketplane than for a space vehicle, because exhaust velocity is reduced by surrounding air), such a vehicle, if designed as a single stage, would need to have a mass ratio of about 8, which means that only 12 percent of its takeoff mass could be solid material, accounting for all structures, while the rest would be propellant. On the other hand, if the rocketplane were boosted toward space by a reusable first stage that accomplished the first 3 km/s of the required DV, the flight vehicle would only need a mass ratio of about 3, allowing 34 percent of it to be structure. This reduction of the propellant-to-structure ratio from 7:1 down to 2:1 is the difference between a feasible system and an infeasible one.

In short, what Musk has done by making reusable first stages a reality is to make rocketplanes possible. But there is no need to wait for 500-ton-to-orbit transports. In fact, his Falcon 9 reusable first stage, which is already in operation, could enable globe-spanning rocketplanes with capacities comparable to the DC-3, while the planned Falcon Heavy (or New Glenn) launch vehicles could make possible rocketplanes with the capacity of a Boeing 737.

Nextbigfuture notes that reusable first stages are now technically functioning but safety and reliability would need to be improved by about 1000 to 10,000 times for point to point manned travel.

SOURCES- Spacex, Zubrin, the New Atlantis

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Trump may fund the Spacex Mars Colonization plan - Next Big Future