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(These are excerpts from my book "A History of Popular Music") Country Music Southern States: Hillbilly Music

In 1910 ethnomusicologist John Lomax published "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (that followed by two years the first known collection of cowboy songs), and in 1916 Cecil Sharp began publishing hundreds of folk songs from the Appalachian mountains (or, better, the Cumberland Mountains, at the border between Kentucky and Tennessee), two events that sparked interest for the white musical heritage, although the world had to wait until 1922 before someone, Texan fiddler Eck Robertson, cut the first record of "old-time music". These collections created the myth of the Appalachians as remote sanctuaries of simple, noble life, whose inhabitants, the "mountaneers", isolated from the evils of the world embodied the true American spirit. Many of those regions were not settled until 1835, and then they were settled by very poor immigrants, thus creating a landscape of rather backwards communities, still attached to their traditions but also preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival.

In 1922, a radio station based in Georgia (WSM) was the first to broadcast folk songs to its audience. A little later, a radio station from Fort Worth, in Texas (WBAP), launched the first "barn dance" show. In june 1923, 55-year old Georgia's fiddler John Carson recorded (in Atlanta) two "hillbilly" (i.e., southern rural) songs, an event that is often considered the official founding of "country" music (although Texas fiddler Eck Roberton had already recorded the year before). The recording industry started dividing popular music into two categories: race music (that was only black) and hillbilly music (that was only white). The term "hillbilly" was actually introduced by "Uncle" Dave Macon's Hill Billie Blues (1924). In 1924, Chicago's radio station WLS (originally "World's Largest Store") began broadcasting a barn dance that could be heard throughout the Midwest.

With When The Work's All Done This Fall (1925), Texas-bred Carl Sprague became the first major musician to record cowboy songs (the first "singing cowboy" of country music). And, finally, in 1925, Nashville's first radio station (WSM) began broadcasting a barn dance that would eventually change name to "Grand Ole Opry". Country music was steaming ahead. Labels flocked to the South to record singing cowboys, and singing cowboys were exhibited in the big cities of the North.

Among the most literate songwriters were Texas-born Goebel Reeves, who penned The Drifter (1929), Blue Undertaker's Blues (1930), Hobo's Lullaby (1934) and The Cowboy's Prayer (1934), i.e. a mixture of hobo and cowboy songs, and Tennessee-born Harry McClintock, the author of the hobo ballads Big Rock Candy Mountain (1928) and Hallelujah Bum Again (1926).

Country music was a federation of styles, rather than a monolithic style. Its origins were lost in the early decades of colonization, when the folk dances (Scottish reels, Irish jigs, and square dances, the poor man's version of the French "cotillion" and "quadrille") and the British ballad got transplanted into the new world and got contaminated by the religious hymns of church and camp meetings. The musical styles were reminiscent of their British ancestors. The lyrics, on the other hand, were completely different. The Americans disliked the subject of love, to which they preferred pratical issues such as real-world experiences (ranching, logging, mining, railroads) and real-world tragedies (bank robberies, natural disasters, murders, train accidents).

The instrumentation included the banjo, introduced by the African slaves via the minstrel shows, the Scottish "fiddle" (the poor man's violin, simplified so that the fiddler could also sing) and the Spanish guitar (an instrument that became popular in the South only around 1910). Ironically, as more and more blacks abandoned the banjo and adopted the guitar, the banjo ended up being identified with white music, while the guitar ended up being identified as black music. For example, Hobart Smith learned to play from black bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, but went on to play the banjo while Jefferson played the guitar.

The role of these instruments was more rhythmic than melodic, because most performances were solo, without percussion. Some regions added their own specialties (such as the accordion in Louisiana), but mostly white music was based on stringed instruments. When not performed solo, it was performed by string bands, particularly after the 1920s, when the first recordings allowed musicians to actually make a living out of their "old-time music". The string bands of the 1920s included Charlie Poole's North Carolina Ramblers, that augmented the repertory of old-time music with songs from minstrel and vaudeville shows, Ernest Stoneman's Dixie Mountaineers, and finally (but the real trend-setters for string bands) the hillbilly supergroup Skillet Lickers, formed in 1926 and featuring Riley Puckett on guitar, Gideon Tanner and Clayton McMichen on fiddles (and all of them on vocals), the first ones to record Red River Valley (1927).

The "hillbilly" format (led by the guitar and a bit more "cosmopolitan") was more popular in the plains, while the "mountain" format of the Appalachians (dominated by fiddle and banjo) remained relatively sheltered from urban and African-American influences.

Solo artists, or "ramblers", became popular after World War I, but often had to move to New York to make recordings. Some of them specialized in "event" songs, songs that chronicled contemporary events, such as Henry Whitter's The Wreck Of The Old 97 (1923), that may have been the first "railroad song" (but actually used the melody of the traditional The Ship That Never Returned), later recorded by New York's singer Vernon Dalhart (1924) for the national audience (perhaps the first hit of country music), Andrew Jenkins' Death Of Floyd Collins, also first recorded by Dalhart (1926), about a mining accident, and Bob Miller's Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat (1928), Dry Votin' (1929), and especially Twentyone Years (1930), perhaps the first "prison song". Miller was, by far, the most prolific, writing thousands of hillbilly songs.

Hillbilly musicians also dealt with the opposite genre, the novelty song: Wendell Hall's ukulele novelty It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo (1923), Carson Robison's whistling novelty Nola (1926), Frank Luther's comic sketch Barnacle Bill The Sailor (1928).

Very few of these singers were of country origins: Vernon Dalhart, Carson Robison and Bob Miller were New York singers who became famous singing hillbilly songs (and sometimes composing them, as in the case of Robison and Miller).

The real country musicians had been known mainly for their instrumental bravura. A national fiddle contest had been organized in Georgia already in 1917 (by the Old Time Fiddlers Organization). Two musicians important in the transition from the quiet and linear "mountain" style and the fast and syncopated "bluegrass" style were banjoists Charlie Poole of the North Carolina Ramblers (Don't Let Your Deal Go Down, 1925; White House Blues, 1926, better known as Cannonball Blues), and "Uncle" Dave Macon, the main "collector" of old-time music and one of the best-sold artists during the Roaring Twenties (Keep My Skillet Good And Greasy, 1924; Chewing Gum, 1924; Sail Away Ladies, 1927). If these two already used the banjo as much more than a mere rhythmic device, Dock Boggs was perhaps the first white banjoist to play the instrument like a blues guitar (in 1927 he recorded six plantation blues numbers and Sugar Baby, that was rockabilly ante-litteram). Sam McGee was one of the first to play the guitar like a bluesman, starting with Railroad Blues (1928). Georgia's blind guitarist Riley Puckett, the author of My Carolina Home (1927), played a key role in transforming the guitar from percussion instrument to accompanying instrument.

Un until the late 1920s, hillbilly artists were considered comedians as much as musicians. Many of them had a repertory of both songs and skits. The Skillet Lickers were probably instrumental in creating the charisma of the country musician, as opposed to the image of the hillbilly clown.

The Hawaian steel guitar, invented by Joseph Kekuku around 1885 in Honolulu, was a late addition to the line-up of string bands. The incidental music to Richard Walton Tully's play Bird of Paradise (1912) popularized the ukulele and the steel guitar in the USA, as did the Hawaiian pavillion at the "Panama Pacific Exhibition" of San Francisco in 1915. On The Beach At Waikiki (1915), composed by Henry Kailimai and Sonny Cunha, started a nation-wide craze. In 1916 all the record labels started selling records of Hawaiian music, including Sonny Cunha's Everybody Hula (1916), Richard Whiting's Along the Way to Waikiki (1917), Hawaiian Butterfly (1917), composed by Billy Baskette and Joseph Santly, and Walter Blaufuss' My Isle of Golden Dreams (1919). Hawaiian steel-guitar virtuoso Frank Ferera toured internationally. He had debuted on record with Stephen Foster's My Old Kentucky Home (1915). The craze subsided in the 1920s, but the steel guitar (first recorded by a hillbilly musician in 1927) would become more and more popular in the repertory of country music.

The first stars of the hillbilly genre were the members of the Virginia-based Carter Family, basically a vocal trio (Sara on lead vocals and autohapr, Alvin on bass vocals, and Maybelle on alto vocals and on guitar) that started out in 1926 and first recorded in 1927. Unlike their peers, who emphasized the instrumental sound, the Carter Family focused on songs. Collectively, they wrote over 300 songs, including classics such as Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone (1928), Keep On The Sunny Side (1928), a cover of Theodore Morse's 1906 song, Foggy Mountain Top (1929), My Clinch Mountain Home (1929), Worried Man Blues (1930), Can The Circle Be Unbroken (1935), No Depression (1936), and especially Wildwood Flower (1928), a traditional first published in 1860 that Maybelle turned into a guitar masterwork. Their vocal style was the quintessence of the "close-harmony" style of country music. Later, Maybelle (who plucked the melody on the bass strings) formed her own quartet with her three daughters (among whom June wrote Ring Of Fire and Helen wrote Poor Old Heartsick Me).

In 1924 with his first recording, Rock All Our Babies To Sleep, blind Georgia's guitarist Riley Puckett (already a radio star) introduced the "yodeling" style of singing (originally from the Swiss and Austrian Alps) into country music, the style adopted in 1927 by the first star of country music, Mississippi's Jimmie Rodgers, who wed it to the Hawaian slide guitar and, de facto, invented the white equivalent of the blues with T For Texas (1927), Waiting For A Train (1928), In The Jailhouse Now (1928), Mule Skinner Blues (1930). Ironically (but also tellingly), Jimmie Rodgers became the first star of this very white phenomenon by being the most influenced by the very black music of the blues. The year he died (1933) was a watershed year for country music.

Rodgers was influential in creating the myth of the Far West, which had already been fueled by the cowboy songs of Carl Sprague and Goebel Reeves. Thus "country" music became "country & western" music. Originally, country music was mainly from the Southeastern states (Virginia, Tennesse, Kentucky and neighboring states). But now the audience was becoming fascinated with the Southwestern states (Texas and neihboring states). The romantic allure of the mountain dweller was slowly being replaced by the romantic allure of the roaming cowboy.

Another country musician who, like Rodgers, harked back to the blues, was Louisiana's singer-songwriter Jimmie Davis whose songbook was no less impressive: Pistol Packin' Papa (1929), Organ Grinder's Blues (1929), Pussy Blues (1929), Nobody's Darling But Mine (1935), It Makes No Difference Now (1938), You Are My Sunshine (1939).

In the meantime, two new styles were emerging: honky-tonk and western-swing. And two instruments debuted in those years that would become the staple of rock bands: Adolph Rickenbacker invented (1931) the electric guitar and Laurens Hammond invented (1933) the Hammond organ. The steel guitar was electrified shortly afterwards, and enthusiastically embraced by country musicians (another sign that the trend was away from the mountain purists).

It was Texas singer-songwriter Gene Autry's Silver Hairde Daddy Of Mine (1931) a big hit that launched the "honky-tonk" style of country music. Debuting in the film Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935), Autry (who in real life was not a cowboy at all) was also the first of the "singing cowboys" of Hollywood (before Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Johnny Bond, Jimmy Wakely) that contributed to move country music (originally an eastern phenomenon) to the "far west", at least in the popular imagination. He also recorded Mother Jones (1931), a labor song, besides a long list of western-flavored songs, such as Mexicali Rose (1936). Roy Rogers and songwriters Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer formed the genre's supergroup, the Sons Of Pioneers, who composed some of the genre's classics, starting with Bob Nolan's Tumblin' Tumbleweeds (1927).

Clyde "Red" Foley was the star of Chicago, popularizing country music in the big city with Old Shep (1935) and Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy (1950).

By now "hillbilly" was no longer a positive attribute, but rather a derogatory one, and thus "country & western" came to connote all white southern music. The performers wore country attires and mimicked the slang of cowboys. The fascination with the West spread to the big cities of the North thanks to fake hillbilly songs written by professional Tin Pan Alley songwriters, such as Bill Hill's The Last Roundup (1933), actually a catchy tune in the Broadway style, but nonetheless influential in creating the vogue of the Far West. This enabled Tex Ritter, who had never been cowboy but simply a rodeo attraction, to become a star in New York, thanks to his Texan accent, and then (1936) in Hollywood (Rock'n'Rye Rag, 1948).

Both honky-tonk and western-swing were, de facto, by-products of the shift of country music towards the western states (i.e. Texas).

In 1932 vocalist Milton Brown and fiddler Bob Wills cut the first records of a kind of country music influenced by jazz that was later dubbed "western swing" (by Foreman Phillips in 1944). Basically, the country & western music of rural towns merged with the swing of the big bands of urban jazz. The two pioneers then split. Brown's combo, the Musical Brownies, featuring fiddler Cecil Brower (who introduced Joe Venuti's style to country music), jazz pianist Fred Calhoun, Bob Dunn on one of the first amplified steel guitars and a rhythm section influenced by ragtime, ruled in Texas, while Wills' Texas Playboys, based in Oklahoma and featuring a country string section and a jazz horn section, and now fronted by Tommy Duncan, debuted on record in 1935 (with Osage Stomp, reminiscent of Will Shade's Memphis Jug Band) and went on to produce Steel Guitar Rag (1936), New San Antonio Rose (1940), their greatest hit, recorded with an 18-piece band, perhaps the first nation-wide hits of country music. Time Changes Everything (1940), Smoke on the Water (1944), New Spanish Two Step (1946).

From 1936 Chicago's fiddler and accordionist Frank "Pee Wee" King, who wrote Bonaparte's Retreat, Tennessee Waltz and Slow Poke (1950), led the most popular of the western swing bands, the Golden West Cowboys.

After the war, Spade Cooley (in Los Angeles) introduced a variant of western swing that de-emphasized the brass and reeds while returning to the more traditional sound of pop orchestras.

Western Swing marked the transition from the archaic string-bands to the dancehall orchestras. These bands were responsible for the introduction into country music of instruments such as drums, horns and electric guitar.

Texas singer Al Dexter had hits in both the honky-tonk style, such as Honky Tonk Blues (1934), and the western-swing style, such as Pistol Packin' Mama (1942), boasting a revolutionary arrangement of accordion, trumpet and steel guitar. San Diego's pianist Merrill Moore did the same after World War II, achieving a synthesis in songs such as House Of Blue Lights (1953) that heralded rock'n'roll.

The other major genre to surface during the 1930s was bluegrass music, but this one originated in the traditional southeastern areas ("bluegrass country" being the nickname of Kentucky). Several vocalist-instrumentalist couples had appeared (particularly brothers) that played a more spirited music devoted to domestic themes.

Alabama's guitar-based Delmore Brothers (Alton was the main composer and lead vocalist) were instrumental in popularizing the "brothers style" thanks to their tenure with the "Grand Ole Opry" between 1932 and 1938. They were also important for bridging the world of white music and the world of black music. Their songs were bluesy, and they often interpreted gospel songs. Their greatest hits were in fact blues numbers, from Brown's Ferry Blues (1933) to Blues Stay Away from Me (1949). In 1944 they added the bluesy harmonica of Wayne Raney, and in 1946 they added electric guitar and drums. That is when they recorded their series of breathless boogies, one step away from rock'n'roll: Hillbilly Boogie (1945), Freight Train Boogie (1946), Mobile Boogie (1948), Pan American Boogie (1950). Other famous numbers were Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar, Midnight Special, Beautiful Brown Eyes (1951).

Another "brother act" was that of the Blue Sky Boys, formed by Bill and Earl Bolick (respectively, mandolin and guitar), perhaps the most faithful to the "mountain" tradition in their versions of Sunny Side Of Life (1935), Down On The Banks of the Ohio (1936), Story of the Knoxville Girl (1937), Are You From Dixie (1939), Turn Your Radio On (1940).

The bluegrass style, that originated in the 1920s from both Kentucky and Bristol, on the Virginia-Tennessee border, was a by-product of the "brother style", except that it was fast, virtuoso and sometimes instrumental-only "mountain music" (the country equivalent of the dixieland in jazz). It derived from the string bands of the 1920s, with a banjo, fiddle, and mandolin leading the melody, backed by guitar and string bass. The notable addition to the arsenal of the string bands was the Italian mandolin, that became popular in the South with bluegrass music. The vocals were not as important as in the "brothers style", although often featured a high-pitched tenor voice. Bluegrass music relied a mixture of techniques: mountain music's three-finger banjo picking, country & western's fiddle, the rhythmic guitar of the ramblers, the tenor-driven choir of religious hymns with bass-register counterpoint.

Kentucky-based mandolinist Bill Monroe, who had started a duo in 1934 with his guitarist brother Charlie, popularized the "bluegrass" style with Kentucky Waltz (1945), Blue Moon Of Kentucky (1945) and Footprints in the Snow (1945), performed by his new band, the Blue Grass Boys, that eventually came to include virtuoso musicians such as Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle, Howard Watts on bass, and Lester Flatt on guitar, which were in turn replaced in the Sixties by a new generation of virtuosi (fiddler Richard Greene, guitarist Peter Rowan, banjoist Bill Keith). Monroe's spectacular mandolin style was documented on instrumental pieces such as Rawhide (1951) and Roanoke (1954). At the peak, Monroe's band was so focused on improvisation and technical skills that it sounded like a jazz group performing country music.

Flatt and Scruggs formed their own act in 1948, that, thanks to pieces such as Foggy Mountain Breakdown (1949), Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms (1950), Pike County Breakdown (1952), Flint Hill Special (1952), and eventually the hit The Ballad of Jed Clampett (1962), competed with both Bill Monroe. Flatt and Scruggs were also instrumental in introducing the dobro guitar (since 1955, played by Buck Graves), a variant of the Hawaian steel guitar, into country music.

Bluegrass acts of the 1950s included the Osborne Brothers (Sonny on banjo and Bobbie on mandolin), perhaps the most innovative of the new generation, as displayed in Ruby (1956); and the Stanley Brothers (Carter being the lead vocalist), much more focused on the vocal harmonies than on the instrumental counterpoint and solos, from the "high lonesome" style of A Vision of Mother to love songs such as How Mountain Girls Can Love (1959) to religious themes such as Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet and Albert Brumley's Rank Strangers (1960).

Bluegrass would remain the branch of country music most obsessed with dazzling technical proficiency, whether vocal or instrumental.

Tennesse native Roy Acuff became the first star of Nashville thanks to two tunes already recorded by the Carter Family: The Great Speckled Bird (1936), based on the melody of I'm Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes, and Wabash Cannonball (1936), one of the most celebrated "railroad songs". The Precious Jewel (1940), based on The Hills of Roane County, Wreck On The Highway (1942), one of the earliest car songs, Frank "Pee Wee" King's Tennessee Waltz (1947), were sung in an old-fashioned, mournful mountain style, and accompanied mainly with the dobro (James Clell Summey until 1938 and Beecher "Pete" Kirby after 1938). Country broadcasting had been dominated by string bands: Acuff's emotional solo performances changed the very perception of what country music ought to be. He was instrumental in turning country music into a business, and a huge nationwide business. The music publishing company he founded in 1942 with songwriter Fred Rose (credited with many songs that he actually only revised and published, including Hank Williams' Kaw-liga and Take These Chains From My Heart) became a gold mine.

Johnny Bond wrote Cimarron (1938), I Wonder Where You Are Tonight, Hot Rod Lincoln, Your Old Love Letters and Tomorrow Never Comes.

In 1939 the "Grand Ole Pry" moved to Nashville's "Ryman Auditorium" and was broadcasted by the national networks.

Nonetheless, the nation was still largely unaware of country music. It wasn't until 1942 that "Billboard" introduced a column on country music, and only in 1944 it introduced the charts for hillbilly songs.

If country music represented the quintessential American values, and a positive attitude towards the American way of life, others (harking back to the epics of the itinerant "hobos") were seeing through the American Dream and confronting the issues of poverty, fascism and racism.

In a somber guitar-based folk style, Oklahoma's Woody Guthrie wrote the Dust Bowl Ballads (1935, first recorded in 1940), the soundtrack of the Great Depression, to become the first major singer-songwriter of the USA. After moving to New York in 1940, he also graduated to be the voice of the political "opposition" with Pretty Boy Floyd (1939), the anthemic This Land Is Your Land (1940, first recorded in 1944), Ludlow Massacre (1944), 1913 Massacre (1944), Deportee (1948), and the Ballads Of Sacco & Vanzetti (1947); but also composed popular songs such as Oklahoma Hills (1937), Pastures Of Plenty (1941), Reuben James (1941), So Long It's Been Good To Know You (1942), Philadelphia Lawyer (1946). His songs were mostly based on ancient hillbilly melodies.

The Left gained strength throughout the 1930s, finding shelter in the artists' lofts of New York's Greenwich Village. The "Village Vanguard", opened by Max Gordon in 1939 in that area (7th Avenue and 11th Street), was a jazz club but soon began to serve a white audience of political dissidents.

The viability of popular music as sociopolitical protest had been proven by Brother Can You Spare A Dime (1932), a song written by Yip Harburg (music by Jay Gorner), a veteran of the Broadway musical and the Hollywood soundtrack, and sung by Bing Crosby. In fact, the whole soundtrack of Victor Fleming's Wizard of Oz (1939), also written by Harburg (music by Harold Arlen), was meant as a commentary to the Great Depression.

Besides Guthrie, other folk musicians composed protest songs. For example, Earl Robinson wrote Joe Hill (1936) to commemorate a murdered union leader.

Another important strain of popular music had to do with folk music, which Guthrie and Robinson had already associated with social awareness. In 1940 Pete Seeger went further: he formed the Almanac Singers to sing protest songs (We Shall Overcome, Guantanamera), sometimes with communist overtones. In 1948 Seeger formed the vocal quartet Weavers loosely modeled after the Country Family. Their arranger Gordon Jenkins added a string orchestra to their cover of Leadbelly's Good Night Irene (1949), thus creating the first folk-pop crossover. The collaboration with Gordon Jenkins continued with The Roving Kind (1950) and Wimoweh (1952). Their If I Had A Hammer (1949), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (1956), Bells Of Rhymney (1959) and Turn Turn Turn (1962) established the vogue of folk music, while Wimoweh (1961) even resurrected African folk music. His Goofing Off Suite (1955) was, de facto, the first record of "American primitivism".

Another pioneer of the folk revival, Burl Ives, popularized Foggy Foggy Dew (1945), a traditional English tune, Blue-tailed Fly (1948), a Civil War tune, Harry McClintock's Big Rock Candy Mountain (1948) and Stan Jones' Ghost Riders In The Sky (1949), based on the traditional When Johnny Comes Marching Home.

"Ramblin' Jack" Elliott Adnopoz became Guthrie's ambassador in Europe. Several black musicians (notably, Leadbelly and Josh White) benefited from the folk revival.

In fact, the folk revival was instrumental in rediscovering forgotten genres and musicians that could not possibly aim for the charts. For example, the tradition of "one-man bands" was kept alive in San Francisco by a black musician, Jesse Fuller, an old man (he debuted at 58) who played at the same time guitar, pedal bass, harmonica, hi-hats and castanets, immortalized by his San Francisco Bay Blues (1954). In 1948 Moe Asch founded Folkways, a record label devoted to folk music, but also to Latin-American music, to Native American music and to blues music.

New York became the stage for a movement of "folk revival" that spawned hits such as the Tarriers' Banana Boat Song (1956), that also launched the calypso craze, the Kingston Trio's traditional Tom Dooley (1958), Jimmy Driftwood's Battle Of New Orleans (1958), and Jimmy Driftwood's Battle of New Orleans (1958) and Soldier's Joy (1958), all of them reconstructed from traditional melodies. Ethno-musicologists such as the New Lost City Ramblers assembled "lost" songs on albums such as The New Lost City Ramblers (1958), Vol II (1959) and Songs from the Depression (1960). The Limeliters assembled a multinational repertory on soothing collections such as The Slightly Fabulous (1961). The "Newport Folk Festival" (1959) created a vast audience for this music, an audience that increasingly came to be identified with the political Left and the young beatniks of the Greenwich Village.

These folksingers had little in common (stylistically or ideologically) with the hillbillies of country music, but they ended up creating the urban audience for country music. Country music, even in states that were rapidly urbanizing such as Texas, had been catering mainly to the countryside. The post-war generation of folksingers catered almost exclusively to the audience of the big cities. It wasn't long before country music learned that lesson.

Also part of the Leftist movement of ideas were the iconoclast satirists who attacked the American way of life, contemporary politics and assorted taboos in the night clubs of New York: Richard "Lord" Buckley, Lenny Bruce and Tom Lehrer (chronologically). Their caustic humour actually anticipated the existential spleen and the political skepticism of the Greenwich Movement.

The 1940s were mainly the years of "honky-tonk" music, a much more driving style than traditional Appalachian music, and the first urban form of country music. Originally named after the saloons where alcohol was being served illegally (which, in turn, took their name from the factories that made gin), honky tonk became even more popular at the end of Prohibition era. Its stars were from Texas: Ernest Tubb (Walking The Floor Over You, 1942), who was also the first country artist to employ an electric guitar, and William "Lefty" Frizzell, Rodgers' natural heir, one of the most innovative vocalists and a poignant songwriter (If You've Got The Money I've Got The Time, 1950; Always Late, 1951; I Want to Be With You Always, 1951; Danny Dill's folk ballad The Long Black Veil, 1959; Saginaw Michigan, 1964; That's the Way Love Goes, 1973). Floyd Tillman wrote It Makes No Difference Now (1938) and the "cheating song" Slipping Around (1949). Houston-based pianist Aubrey "Moon" Mullican predated Jerry Lee Lewis in fusing honky-tonk and boogie-woogie, two styles that had much in common, with Harry Choates' New Jole Blon' (1947) and I'll Sail My Ship Alone (1950). South Carolina's guitarist Arthur Smith did something similar with the instrumental Guitar Boogie (1945). Ted Daffan composed the classics Worried Mind (1940), Born To Lose (1943), Headin' Down The Highway (1945). Honky-tonk songs dealt with more prosaic themes such as alcohol (of course) and cheating.

Purists looked down on honky-tonk, that preserved little of the original spirit of country music, but Hank Williams shut them down with Lovesick Blues (1949) and You're Gonna Change (1949), followed by a repertory of both ballads and pseudo-blues. Among the former: Cold Cold Heart (1950), Why Don't You Love Me (1950), Your Cheating Heart (1952), I Saw The Light (1953). Among the latter: Moaning The Blues (1950), Long Gone Lonesome Blues (1950), So Lonesome I Could Cry (1949), I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive (1952). Plus rhythmic songs that predated rock'n'roll, such as Move It On Over (1947), Honkytonking (1948), Howlin' At The Moon (1951). He died young (at 29), and his last songs, such as Jambalaya (1952) and Fred Rose's Kaw-liga (1952), already predated the age of exotic music.

The star of honky-tonk who succeeded Williams, Webb Pierce, from Louisiana, adopted the electric guitar and steel guitar and moved towards pop and rock'n'roll in Merle Kilgore's More And More (1954) and Teenage Boogie (1956). Ray Price, from Texas, bordered both honky-tonk and western swing in songs such as Don't Let The Stars Get Into Your Eyes (1952), Crazy Arms (1956), City Lights (1958). Hank Thompson's band, also from Texas, did the opposite (from western swing to honky-tonk), starting with Wild Side of Life (1952), basically a cover of Roy Acuff's The Great Speckled Bird (1936). Another Texas, Johnny Horton, adapted the style to the dancehalls and to rock'n'roll with songs such as Honky Tonk Man (1956).

Jimmie Rodgers' style was instead revived by Canadian-born Hank Snow, particularly in his own I'm Moving On (1950), one of the greatest hits of the post-war era, The Golden Rocket (1950) and The Rhumba Boogie (1951).

Among instrumental virtuosi, Merle Travis' finger-picking style (that was basically an adapation of a banjo technique to the guitar) turned the guitar into both a melodic and rhythmic instrument. To his contemporaries, he sounded like two guitarists, not one. He also recorded Folk Songs of the Hills (1947), including his own celebrated protest song Sixteen Tons, in a vein similar to Woody Guthrie's. Smoke Smoke Smoke (1947) was his biggest hit.

His disciple Chet Atkins simplified Travis' style by using three fingers instead of only two. More importantly, Atkins pioneered the classic "Nashville sound" through compositions such as Bluesy Guitar (1946), a duet between electric guitar and clarinet, Canned Heat (1947), Galloping on the Guitar (1949), Chinatown My Chinatown (1952), Country Gentleman (1953), Downhill Drag (1953), that progressively downplayed the rustic role of the fiddle and the steel guitar while emphasizing a sweeter, poppier sound based on guitar and piano.

Jean Ritchie pioneered the revival of the dulcimer with records such as Singing Traditional Songs of Her Mountain Family (1952).

Les Paul, a white guitarist who played more often with jazz musicians than country ones, invented the solid-body guitar (1941), pioneered new recording techniques ("close miking", "echo delay", "multi-tracking") and engaged in archetypical experiments of tape manipulation and overdubbing in his 1948 songs Brazil and Lover (on which he played all instruments by himself), besides sprinkling his recordings with all sorts of sound effects.

Los Angeles-based pyrotechnic guitarist Joe Maphis was one of the first to use the instrument not only for the rhythmic accompaniment but also for the lead lines. He also composed Dim Lights Thick Smoke (1952) and Fire On The Strings (1954).

Other virtuosi included fiddler Vassar Clements and blind flat-picking guitarist Arthel "Doc" Watson, who recorded his first album, Doc Watson Family (1963), at the age of forty.

"Tennessee" Ernie Ford was the sex symbol of country music in the 1950s, and launched standards such as Smokey Mountain Boogie (1948), Johnny Lange's and Fred Glickman's Mule Train (1949) and Shotgun Boogie (1950), a progenitor of rock'n'roll.

Leon Payne, a member of Bob Wills' Texas Playboys, wrote Lost Highway (1949) and I Love You Because (1950)

Felice and Boudleaux Bryant were among the most successful Nashville songwriters, from Hey Joe (1953) to Love Hurts (1961) to Rocky Top (1967), and particularly for the Everly Brothers.

At the end of World War II, several studios had opened in Nashville, reflecting the growing popularity of the "Grand Ole Opry". Then musicians started relocating to Nashville. By 1954, when the "Country Music Disc Jockeys' Association" (CMA) was created, Nashville had as many songwriters as New York. Chet Atkins was one of the producers who, in the 1950s, crafted the "Nashville sound", basically country music played with a pop sensibility (the guitar and sometimes the piano replacing the fiddle, background vocals, string orchestra). Atkins was the man who buried the "high lonesome" Appalachian sound. In 1961 there were 81 radio stations devoted to country music, in 1966 there were 328. By 1963 one out of every two American records was produced in a Nashville studio.

Malone, Bill: "Country Music USA" (1968)

Visit link:
A History of Country Music - Scaruffi

Space colonization (also called space settlement, or extraterrestrial colonization) is permanent human habitation off the planet Earth.

Many arguments have been made for and against space colonization.[1] The two most common in favor of colonization are survival of human civilization and the biosphere in case of a planetary-scale disaster (natural or man-made), and the vast resources in space for expansion of human society. The most common objections to colonization include concerns that the commodification of the cosmos may be likely to enhance the interests of the already powerful, including major economic and military institutions, and to exacerbate pre-existing detrimental processes such as wars, economic inequality, and environmental degradation.[2][3]

No space colonies have been built so far. Currently, the building of a space colony would present a set of huge technological and economic challenges. Space settlements would have to provide for nearly all (or all) the material needs of hundreds or thousands of humans, in an environment out in space that is very hostile to human life. They would involve technologies, such as controlled ecological life support systems, that have yet to be developed in any meaningful way. They would also have to deal with the as yet unknown issue of how humans would behave and thrive in such places long-term. Because of the present cost of sending anything from the surface of the Earth into orbit (around $2,500 per-pound to orbit, expected to further decrease)[4] a space colony would currently be a massively expensive project.

There are yet no plans for building space colonies by any large-scale organization, either government or private. However, many proposals, speculations, and designs for space settlements have been made through the years, and a considerable number of space colonization advocates and groups are active. Several famous scientists, such as Freeman Dyson, have come out in favor of space settlement.[5]

On the technological front, there is ongoing progress in making access to space cheaper (reusable launch systems could reach $10 per-pound to orbit)[6] and in creating automated manufacturing and construction techniques.[7]

The primary argument calling for space colonization is the long-term survival of human civilization. By developing alternative locations off Earth, the planet's species, including humans, could live on in the event of natural or man-made disasters on our own planet.

On two occasions, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has argued for space colonization as a means of saving humanity. In 2001, Hawking predicted that the human race would become extinct within the next thousand years, unless colonies could be established in space.[8] In 2006, he stated that humanity faces two options: either we colonize space within the next two hundred years and build residential units on other planets, or we will face the prospect of long-term extinction.[9]

In 2005, then NASA Administrator Michael Griffin identified space colonization as the ultimate goal of current spaceflight programs, saying:

...the goal isn't just scientific exploration... it's also about extending the range of human habitat out from Earth into the solar system as we go forward in time... In the long run a single-planet species will not survive... If we humans want to survive for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we must ultimately populate other planets. Now, today the technology is such that this is barely conceivable. We're in the infancy of it.... I'm talking about that one day, I don't know when that day is, but there will be more human beings who live off the Earth than on it. We may well have people living on the Moon. We may have people living on the moons of Jupiter and other planets. We may have people making habitats on asteroids... I know that humans will colonize the solar system and one day go beyond.[10]

Louis J. Halle, formerly of the United States Department of State, wrote in Foreign Affairs (Summer 1980) that the colonization of space will protect humanity in the event of global nuclear warfare.[11] The physicist Paul Davies also supports the view that if a planetary catastrophe threatens the survival of the human species on Earth, a self-sufficient colony could "reverse-colonize" Earth and restore human civilization. The author and journalist William E. Burrows and the biochemist Robert Shapiro proposed a private project, the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, with the goal of establishing an off-Earth "backup" of human civilization.[12]

Based on his Copernican principle, J. Richard Gott has estimated that the human race could survive for another 7.8 million years, but it is not likely to ever colonize other planets. However, he expressed a hope to be proven wrong, because "colonizing other worlds is our best chance to hedge our bets and improve the survival prospects of our species".[13]

Resources in space, both in materials and energy, are enormous. The Solar System alone has, according to different estimates, enough material and energy to support anywhere from several thousand to over a billion times that of the current Earth-based human population.[14][15][16] Outside the Solar System, several hundred billion other stars in the observable universe provide opportunities for both colonization and resource collection, though travel to any of them is impossible on any practical time-scale without the use of generation ships or revolutionary new methods of travel, such as faster-than-light (FTL) engines.

All these planets and other bodies offer a virtually endless supply of resources providing limitless growth potential. Harnessing these resources can lead to much economic development.[17]

Expansion of humans and technological progress has usually resulted in some form of environmental devastation, and destruction of ecosystems and their accompanying wildlife. In the past, expansion has often come at the expense of displacing many indigenous peoples, the resulting treatment of these peoples ranging anywhere from encroachment to full-blown genocide. Because space has no known life, this need not be a consequence, as some space settlement advocates have pointed out.[18][19]

Another argument for space colonization is to mitigate the negative effects of overpopulation.[clarification needed] If the resources of space were opened to use and viable life-supporting habitats were built, Earth would no longer define the limitations of growth. Although many of Earth's resources are non-renewable, off-planet colonies could satisfy the majority of the planet's resource requirements. With the availability of extraterrestrial resources, demand on terrestrial ones would decline.[20]

Additional goals cite the innate human drive to explore and discover, a quality recognized at the core of progress and thriving civilizations.[21][22]

Nick Bostrom has argued that from a utilitarian perspective, space colonization should be a chief goal as it would enable a very large population to live for a very long period of time (possibly billions of years), which would produce an enormous amount of utility (or happiness).[23] He claims that it is more important to reduce existential risks to increase the probability of eventual colonization than to accelerate technological development so that space colonization could happen sooner. In his paper, he assumes that the created lives will have positive ethical value despite the problem of suffering.

In a 2001 interview with Freeman Dyson, J.Richard Gott and Sid Goldstein, they were asked for reasons why some humans should live in space.[5] Their answers were:

There would be a very high initial investment cost for space colonies and any other permanent space infrastructure due to the high cost of getting into space. However, proponents argue that the long-term vision of developing space infrastructure will provide long-term benefits far in excess of the initial start-up costs.[citation needed]

Because current space launch costs are so high ($4,000 to $40,000 per kilogram), any serious plans for space colonization must include developing low-cost access to space followed by developing in-situ resource utilization. Therefore, the initial investments must be made in the development of low-cost access to space followed by an initial capacity to provide these necessities: materials, energy, propellant, communication, life support, radiation protection, self-replication, and population.[citation needed]

Although some items of the infrastructure requirements above can already be easily produced on Earth and would therefore not be very valuable as trade items (oxygen, water, base metal ores, silicates, etc.), other high value items are more abundant, more easily produced, of higher quality, or can only be produced in space. These would provide (over the long-term) a very high return on the initial investment in space infrastructure.[24]

Some of these high-value trade goods include precious metals,[25][26] gemstones,[27] power,[28] solar cells,[29] ball bearings,[29] semi-conductors,[29] and pharmaceuticals.[29]

...the smallest Earth-crossing asteroid 3554 Amun... is a mile-wide (2km) lump of iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum, and other metals; it contains 30 times as much metal as Humans have mined throughout history, although it is only the smallest of dozens of known metallic asteroids and worth perhaps US$ 20 trillion if mined slowly to meet demand at 2001 market prices.[25]

Space colonization is seen as a long-term goal of some national space programs. Since the advent of the 21st-century commercialization of space, which saw greater cooperation between NASA and the private sector, several private companies have announced plans toward the colonization of Mars. Among entrepreneurs leading the call for space colonization are Elon Musk, Dennis Tito and Bas Lansdorp.[30][31][32]

Potential sites for space colonies include the Moon, Mars, asteroids and free-floating space habitats. Ample quantities of all the necessary materials, such as solar energy and water, are available from or on the Moon, Mars, near-Earth asteroids or other planetary bodies.

The main impediments to commercial exploitation of these resources are the very high cost of initial investment,[33] the very long period required for the expected return on those investments (The Eros Project plans a 50-year development),[34] and the fact that the venture has never been carried out before the high-risk nature of the investment.

Major governments and well-funded corporations have announced plans for new categories of activities: space tourism and hotels, prototype space-based solar-power satellites, heavy-lift boosters and asteroid miningthat create needs and capabilities for humans to be present in space.[35][36][37]

There are two main types of space colonies:

There is considerable debate among space settlement advocates as to which type (and associated locations) represents the better option for expanding humanity into space.[citation needed]

Locations in space would necessitate a space habitat, also called space colony and orbital colony, or a space station which would be intended as a permanent settlement rather than as a simple waystation or other specialized facility. They would be literal "cities" in space, where people would live and work and raise families. Many designs have been proposed with varying degrees of realism by both science fiction authors and scientists. Such a space habitat could be isolated from the rest of humanity but near enough to Earth for help. This would test if thousands of humans can survive on their own before sending them beyond the reach of help.

Building colonies in space would require access to water, food, space, people, construction materials, energy, transportation, communications, life support, simulated gravity, radiation protection and capital investment. It is likely the colonies would be located near the necessary physical resources. The practice of space architecture seeks to transform spaceflight from a heroic test of human endurance to a normality within the bounds of comfortable experience. As is true of other frontier opening endeavors, the capital investment necessary for space colonization would probably come from the state,[38] an argument made by John Hickman[39] and Neil deGrasse Tyson.[40]

Colonies on the Moon, Mars, or asteroids could extract local materials. The Moon is deficient in volatiles such as argon, helium and compounds of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. The LCROSS impacter was targeted at the Cabeus crater which was chosen as having a high concentration of water for the Moon. A plume of material erupted in which some water was detected. Mission chief scientist Anthony Colaprete estimated that the Cabeus crater contains material with 1% water or possibly more.[41] Water ice should also be in other permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. Although helium is present only in low concentrations on the Moon, where it is deposited into regolith by the solar wind, an estimated million tons of He-3 exists over all.[42] It also has industrially significant oxygen, silicon, and metals such as iron, aluminum, and titanium.

Launching materials from Earth is expensive, so bulk materials for colonies could come from the Moon, a near-Earth object (NEO), Phobos, or Deimos. The benefits of using such sources include: a lower gravitational force, there is no atmospheric drag on cargo vessels, and there is no biosphere to damage. Many NEOs contain substantial amounts of metals. Underneath a drier outer crust (much like oil shale), some other NEOs are inactive comets which include billions of tons of water ice and kerogen hydrocarbons, as well as some nitrogen compounds.[43]

Farther out, Jupiter's Trojan asteroids are thought to be rich in water ice and other volatiles.[44]

Recycling of some raw materials would almost certainly be necessary.

Solar energy in orbit is abundant, reliable, and is commonly used to power satellites today. There is no night in free space, and no clouds or atmosphere to block sunlight. Light intensity obeys an inverse-square law. So the solar energy available at distance d from the Sun is E = 1367/d2 W/m2, where d is measured in astronomical units (AU) and 1367 watts/m2 is the energy available at the distance of Earth's orbit from the Sun, 1 AU.[45]

In the weightlessness and vacuum of space, high temperatures for industrial processes can easily be achieved in solar ovens with huge parabolic reflectors made of metallic foil with very lightweight support structures. Flat mirrors to reflect sunlight around radiation shields into living areas (to avoid line-of-sight access for cosmic rays, or to make the Sun's image appear to move across their "sky") or onto crops are even lighter and easier to build.

Large solar power photovoltaic cell arrays or thermal power plants would be needed to meet the electrical power needs of the settlers' use. In developed nations on Earth, electrical consumption can average 1 kilowatt/person (or roughly 10 megawatt-hours per person per year.)[46] These power plants could be at a short distance from the main structures if wires are used to transmit the power, or much farther away with wireless power transmission.

A major export of the initial space settlement designs was anticipated to be large solar power satellites that would use wireless power transmission (phase-locked microwave beams or lasers emitting wavelengths that special solar cells convert with high efficiency) to send power to locations on Earth, or to colonies on the Moon or other locations in space. For locations on Earth, this method of getting power is extremely benign, with zero emissions and far less ground area required per watt than for conventional solar panels. Once these satellites are primarily built from lunar or asteroid-derived materials, the price of SPS electricity could be lower than energy from fossil fuel or nuclear energy; replacing these would have significant benefits such as elimination of greenhouse gases and nuclear waste from electricity generation.

However, the value of SPS power delivered wirelessly to other locations in space will typically be far higher than to locations on Earth. Otherwise, the means of generating the power would need to be included with these projects and pay the heavy penalty of Earth launch costs. Therefore, other than proposed demonstration projects for power delivered to Earth,[36] the first priority for SPS electricity is likely to be locations in space, such as communications satellites, fuel depots or "orbital tugboat" boosters transferring cargo and passengers between Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and other orbits such as Geosynchronous orbit (GEO), lunar orbit or Highly-Eccentric Earth Orbit (HEEO).[47]:132

Nuclear power is sometimes proposed for colonies located on the Moon or on Mars, as the supply of solar energy is too discontinuous in these locations: The Moon has nights of two Earth weeks in duration. Mars has nights, relatively high gravity, and an atmosphere featuring large dust storms to cover and degrade solar panels. Also, Mars' greater distance from the Sun (1.5 astronomical units, AU) translates into E/(1.52 = 2.25) only - the solar energy of Earth orbit.[48] Another method would be transmitting energy wirelessly to the lunar or Martian colonies from solar power satellites (SPSs) as described abovenote again that the difficulties of generating power in these locations make the relative advantages of SPSs much greater there than for power beamed to locations on Earth.

For both solar thermal and nuclear power generation in airless environments, such as the Moon and space, and to a lesser extent the very thin Martian atmosphere, one of the main difficulties is dispersing the inevitable heat generated. This requires fairly large radiator areas.

Transportation to orbit is often the limiting factor in space endeavours. To settle space, much cheaper launch vehicles are required, as well as a way to avoid serious damage to the atmosphere from the thousands, perhaps millions, of launches required.[citation needed] One possibility is the air-breathing hypersonic spaceplane under development by NASA and other organizations, both public and private. Other proposed projects include skyhooks, space elevators, mass drivers, launch loops, and StarTrams.

Transportation of large quantities of materials from the Moon, Phobos, Deimos, and near-Earth asteroids to orbital settlement construction sites is likely to be necessary.

Transportation using off-Earth resources for propellant in conventional rockets would be expected to massively reduce in-space transportation costs compared to the present day. Propellant launched from the Earth is likely to be prohibitively expensive for space colonization, even with improved space access costs.

Other technologies such as tether propulsion, VASIMR, ion drives, solar thermal rockets, solar sails, magnetic sails, electric sails, and nuclear thermal propulsion can all potentially help solve the problems of high transport cost once in space.

For lunar materials, one well-studied possibility is to build mass drivers to launch bulk materials to waiting settlements. Alternatively, lunar space elevators might be employed.

Lunar rovers and Mars rovers are common features of proposed colonies for those bodies. Space suits would likely be needed for excursions, maintenance, and safety.

Compared to the other requirements, communication is easy for orbit and the Moon. A great proportion of current terrestrial communications already passes through satellites. Yet, as colonies further from the Earth are considered, communication becomes more of a burden. Transmissions to and from Mars suffer from significant delays due to the finitude of the speed of light and the greatly varying distance between conjunction and oppositionthe lag will range between 7 and 44 minutesmaking real-time communication impractical. Other means of communication that do not require live interaction such as e-mail and voice mail systems should pose no problem.

In space settlements, a life support system must recycle or import all the nutrients without "crashing." The closest terrestrial analogue to space life support is possibly that of a nuclear submarine. Nuclear submarines use mechanical life support systems to support humans for months without surfacing, and this same basic technology could presumably be employed for space use. However, nuclear submarines run "open loop"extracting oxygen from seawater, and typically dumping carbon dioxide overboard, although they recycle existing oxygen.[citation needed] Recycling of the carbon dioxide has been approached in the literature using the Sabatier process or the Bosch reaction.

Although a fully mechanistic life support system is conceivable, a closed ecological system is generally proposed for life support. The Biosphere 2 project in Arizona has shown that a complex, small, enclosed, man-made biosphere can support eight people for at least a year, although there were many problems. A year or so into the two-year mission oxygen had to be replenished, which strongly suggests that they achieved atmospheric closure.

The relationship between organisms, their habitat and the non-Earth environment can be:

A combination of the above technologies is also possible.

Cosmic rays and solar flares create a lethal radiation environment in space. In Earth orbit, the Van Allen belts make living above the Earth's atmosphere difficult. To protect life, settlements must be surrounded by sufficient mass to absorb most incoming radiation, unless magnetic or plasma radiation shields were developed.[51]

Passive mass shielding of four metric tons per square meter of surface area will reduce radiation dosage to several mSv or less annually, well below the rate of some populated high natural background areas on Earth.[52] This can be leftover material (slag) from processing lunar soil and asteroids into oxygen, metals, and other useful materials. However, it represents a significant obstacle to maneuvering vessels with such massive bulk (mobile spacecraft being particularly likely to use less massive active shielding).[51] Inertia would necessitate powerful thrusters to start or stop rotation, or electric motors to spin two massive portions of a vessel in opposite senses. Shielding material can be stationary around a rotating interior.

Space manufacturing could enable self-replication. Some think it the ultimate goal because it allows an exponential increase in colonies, while eliminating costs to and dependence on Earth.[53] It could be argued that the establishment of such a colony would be Earth's first act of self-replication.[54] Intermediate goals include colonies that expect only information from Earth (science, engineering, entertainment) and colonies that just require periodic supply of light weight objects, such as integrated circuits, medicines, genetic material and tools.

The monotony and loneliness that comes from a prolonged space mission can leave astronauts susceptible to cabin fever or having a psychotic break. Moreover, lack of sleep, fatigue, and work overload can affect an astronaut's ability to perform well in an environment such as space where every action is critical.[55]

In 2002, the anthropologist John H. Moore estimated that a population of 150180 would permit a stable society to exist for 60 to 80 generations equivalent to 2000 years.

A much smaller initial population of as little as two women should be viable as long as human embryos are available from Earth. Use of a sperm bank from Earth also allows a smaller starting base with negligible inbreeding.

Researchers in conservation biology have tended to adopt the "50/500" rule of thumb initially advanced by Franklin and Soule. This rule says a short-term effective population size (Ne) of 50 is needed to prevent an unacceptable rate of inbreeding, whereas a longterm Ne of 500 is required to maintain overall genetic variability. The Ne=50 prescription corresponds to an inbreeding rate of 1% per generation, approximately half the maximum rate tolerated by domestic animal breeders. The Ne=500 value attempts to balance the rate of gain in genetic variation due to mutation with the rate of loss due to genetic drift.

Location is a frequent point of contention between space colonization advocates. The location of colonization can be on a physical body or free-flying:

Compared to other locations, Earth orbit has substantial advantages and one major, but solvable, problem. Orbits close to Earth can be reached in hours, whereas the Moon is days away and trips to Mars take months. There is ample continuous solar power in high Earth orbits. The level of (pseudo-) gravity can be controlled at any desired level by rotating an orbital colony.

The main disadvantage of orbital colonies is lack of materials. These may be expensively imported from the Earth, or more cheaply from extraterrestrial sources, such as the Moon (which has ample metals, silicon, and oxygen), near-Earth asteroids, comets, or elsewhere. As of 2016[update], the International Space Station provides a temporary, yet still non-autonomous, human presence in low Earth orbit.

Due to its proximity and familiarity, Earth's Moon is discussed as a target for colonization. It has the benefits of proximity to Earth and lower escape velocity, allowing for easier exchange of goods and services. A drawback of the Moon is its low abundance of volatiles necessary for life such as hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Water-ice deposits that exist in some polar craters could serve as a source for these elements. An alternative solution is to bring hydrogen from near-Earth asteroids and combine it with oxygen extracted from lunar rock.

The Moon's low surface gravity is also a concern, as it is unknown whether 1/6g is enough to maintain human health for long periods.

Another near-Earth possibility are the five EarthMoon Lagrange points. Although they would generally also take a few days to reach with current technology, many of these points would have near-continuous solar power because their distance from Earth would result in only brief and infrequent eclipses of light from the Sun. However, the fact that the EarthMoon Lagrange points L4 and L5 tend to collect dust and debris, whereas L1-L3 require active station-keeping measures to maintain a stable position, make them somewhat less suitable places for habitation than was originally believed. Additionally, the orbit of L2L5 takes them out of the protection of the Earth's magnetosphere for approximately two-thirds of the time, exposing them to the health threat from cosmic rays.

The five EarthSun Lagrange points would totally eliminate eclipses, but only L1 and L2 would be reachable in a few days' time. The other three EarthSun points would require months to reach.

Many small asteroids in orbit around the Sun have the advantage that they pass closer than Earth's moon several times per decade. In between these close approaches to home, the asteroid may travel out to a furthest distance of some 350,000,000 kilometers from the Sun (its aphelion) and 500,000,000 kilometers from Earth.

The surface of Mars is about the same size as the dry land surface of Earth. The ice in Mars' south polar cap, if spread over the planet, would be a layer 12 meters (39 feet) thick[56] and there is carbon (locked as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere).

Mars may have gone through similar geological and hydrological processes as Earth and therefore might contain valuable mineral ores. Equipment is available to extract in situ resources (e.g. water, air) from the Martian ground and atmosphere. There is interest in colonizing Mars in part because life could have existed on Mars at some point in its history, and may even still exist in some parts of the planet.[citation needed]

However, its atmosphere is very thin (averaging 800 Pa or about 0.8% of Earth sea-level atmospheric pressure); so the pressure vessels necessary to support life are very similar to deep-space structures. The climate of Mars is colder than Earth's. The dust storms block out most of the sun's light for a month or more at a time. Its gravity is only around a third that of Earth's; it is unknown whether this is sufficient to support human beings for extended periods (all long-term human experience to date has been at around Earth gravity, or one g).

The atmosphere is thin enough, when coupled with Mars' lack of magnetic field, that radiation is more intense on the surface, and protection from solar storms would require radiation shielding.

Terraforming Mars would make life outside pressure vessels on the surface possible. There is some discussion of it actually being done.[citation needed]

The moons of Mars may be a target for space colonization. Low delta-v is needed to reach Earth from Phobos and Deimos, allowing delivery of material to cislunar space, as well as transport around the Martian system. The moons themselves may be suitable for habitation, with methods similar to those for asteroids.

While the surface of Venus is far too hot and features atmospheric pressure at least 90 times that at sea level on Earth, its massive atmosphere offers a possible alternate location for colonization. At an altitude of approximately 50km, the pressure is reduced to a few atmospheres, and the temperature would be between 40100C, depending on the altitude. This part of the atmosphere is probably within dense clouds which contain some sulfuric acid. Even these may have a certain benefit to colonization, as they present a possible source for the extraction of water.

Because of Mercury's extremely small axial tilt, there is a suggestion that Mercury's polar regions could be colonized using the same technology, approach, and equipment that is used in colonizing the Moon. Polar colonies on Mercury would avoid the extreme daytime temperatures elsewhere on the planetthe temperatures on the poles are consistently below 93C (135F). Moreover, "Mercurys very low axial tilt (0.034) means that its polar regions are permanently shaded and cold enough to contain water ice."[57]

Observations of Mercury's polar regions by radar from Earth and the MESSENGER spacecraft have been consistent with water ice and/or other frozen volatiles being present in permanently shadowed areas of craters in Mercury's polar regions.[58] Measurements of Mercury's exosphere, which is practically a vacuum, revealed more ions derived from water than scientists had expected.[59] These volatiles would be available to hypothetical future colonists of Mercury.[57]

Compared on the Moon, solar panels on Mercury would be exposed to far more energythe intensity ranges from approximately four and a half times to more than ten times the intensity at one astronomical unit. In addition, the solar energy available to a colony on Mercury would never be blocked by an eclipse. On the other hand, it would need to deal with the far greater variance of solar intensity, which is a product of the planet's highly elliptical orbit.[57]

Colonization of asteroids would require space habitats. The asteroid belt has significant overall material available, the largest object being Ceres, although it is thinly distributed as it covers a vast region of space. Unmanned supply craft should be practical with little technological advance, even crossing 1/2 billion kilometers of cold vacuum. The colonists would have a strong interest in assuring that their asteroid did not hit Earth or any other body of significant mass, but would have extreme difficulty in moving an asteroid of any size. The orbits of the Earth and most asteroids are very distant from each other in terms of delta-v and the asteroidal bodies have enormous momentum. Rockets or mass drivers can perhaps be installed on asteroids to direct their path into a safe course.

Ceres is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, comprising about one third the mass of the whole belt and being the sixth largest body in the inner Solar System by mass and volume. Ceres has a surface area somewhat larger than Argentina. Being the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres could become the main base and transport hub for future asteroid mining infrastructure, allowing mineral resources to be transported further to Mars, the Moon and Earth. See further: Main-Belt Asteroids. It may be possible to paraterraform Ceres, making life easier for the colonists. Given its low gravity and fast rotation, a space elevator would also be practical.

The Artemis Project designed a plan to colonize Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Scientists were to inhabit igloos and drill down into the Europan ice crust, exploring any sub-surface ocean. This plan discusses possible use of "air pockets" for human habitation. Europa is considered one of the more habitable bodies in the Solar System and so merits investigation as a possible abode for life.

Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System. It may be attractive as Ganymede is the only moon with a magnetosphere and so is less irradiated at the surface. The presence of magnetosphere, likely indicates a convecting molten core within Ganymede, which may in turn indicate a rich geologic history for the moon.

NASA performed a study called HOPE (Revolutionary Concepts for Human Outer Planet Exploration) regarding the future exploration of the Solar System.[60] The target chosen was Callisto due to its distance from Jupiter, and thus the planet's harmful radiation. It could be possible to build a surface base that would produce fuel for further exploration of the Solar System.

The three out of four largest moons of Jupiter (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) have an abundance of volatiles making future colonization possible.

Titan is suggested as a target for colonization,[61] because it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere and is rich in carbon-bearing compounds.[62]Robert Zubrin identified Titan as possessing an abundance of all the elements necessary to support life, making Titan perhaps the most advantageous locale in the outer Solar System for colonization, and saying "In certain ways, Titan is the most hospitable extraterrestrial world within our solar system for human colonization".

Enceladus is a small, icy moon orbiting close to Saturn, notable for its extremely bright surface and the geyser-like plumes of ice and water vapor that erupt from its southern polar region. If Enceladus has liquid water, it joins Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa as one of the prime places in the Solar System to look for extraterrestrial life and possible future settlements.

Other large satellites: Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, and Mimas, all have large quantities of volatiles, which can be used to support settlement.

Although they are very cold, the five large moons of Uranus (Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon) and TritonNeptune's largest moonhave large amounts of frozen water and other volatiles and could potentially be settled. However, habitats there would require a lot of nuclear power to sustain a habitable temperature. Triton's thin atmosphere also contains some nitrogen and even some frozen nitrogen on the surface (the surface temperature is 38 K or about -391Fahrenheit).

The Kuiper belt is estimated to have 70,000 bodies of 100km or larger.

Freeman Dyson has suggested that within a few centuries human civilization will have relocated to the Kuiper belt.[63]

The Oort cloud is estimated to have up to a trillion comets.

Statites or "static satellites" employ solar sails to position themselves in orbits that gravity alone could not accomplish. Such a solar sail colony would be free to ride solar radiation pressure and travel off the ecliptic plane. Navigational computers with an advanced understanding of flocking behavior could organize several statite colonies into the beginnings of the true "swarm" concept of a Dyson sphere.

It may be possible to colonize the three farthest giant planets that is, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with floating cities in their atmospheres. By heating hydrogen balloons, large masses can be suspended underneath at roughly Earth-like gravity. A human colony on Jupiter would be less practical due to its high gravity, escape velocity, and radiation. Such colonies could export helium-3 for use in fusion reactors if they ever become operational. Escape from the giant planets, especially Jupiter, seems well beyond current or near-term foreseeable chemical-rocket technology due to the combination of large velocity and high acceleration needed to even achieve low orbit.

Looking beyond the Solar System, there are up to several hundred billion potential stars with possible colonization targets. The main difficulty is the vast distances to other stars: roughly a hundred thousand times further away than the planets in the Solar System. This means that some combination of very high speed (some percentage of the speed of light), or travel times lasting centuries or millennia, would be required. These speeds are far beyond what current spacecraft propulsion systems can provide.

Many scientific papers have been published about interstellar travel. Given sufficient travel time and engineering work, both unmanned and generational voyages seem possible, though representing a very considerable technological and economic challenge unlikely to be met for some time, particularly for manned probes.[citation needed]

Space colonization technology could in principle allow human expansion at high, but sub-relativistic speeds, substantially less than the speed of light, c. An interstellar colony ship would be similar to a space habitat, with the addition of major propulsion capabilities and independent energy generation.

Hypothetical starship concepts proposed both by scientists and in hard science fiction include:

The above concepts all appear limited to high, but still sub-relativistic speeds, due to fundamental energy and reaction mass considerations, and all would entail trip times which might be enabled by space colonization technology, permitting self-contained habitats with lifetimes of decades to centuries. Yet human interstellar expansion at average speeds of even 0.1% of c would permit settlement of the entire Galaxy in less than one half of a galactic rotation period of ~250,000,000 years, which is comparable to the timescale of other galactic processes. Thus, even if interstellar travel at near relativistic speeds is never feasible (which cannot be clearly determined at this time), the development of space colonization could allow human expansion beyond the Solar System without requiring technological advances that cannot yet be reasonably foreseen. This could greatly improve the chances for the survival of intelligent life over cosmic timescales, given the many natural and human-related hazards that have been widely noted.

If humanity does gain access to a large amount of energy, on the order of the mass-energy of entire planets, it may eventually become feasible to construct Alcubierre drives. These are one of the few methods of superluminal travel which may be possible under current physics.

Looking beyond the Milky Way, there are about 100 billion other galaxies in the observable universe. The distances between galaxies are on the order of a million times further than those between the stars. Because of the speed of light limit on how fast any material objects can travel in space, intergalactic travel would either have to involve voyages lasting millions of years,[64] or a possible faster than light propulsion method based on speculative physics, such as the Alcubierre drive. There are, however, no scientific reasons for stating that intergalactic travel is impossible in principle.

Originally posted here:
Space colonization - Wikipedia

"Lunar outpost" redirects here. For NASA's former plan to construct an outpost between 2019 and 2024, see Lunar outpost (NASA).

The colonization of the Moon is the proposed establishment of permanent human communities or robotic industries[1][2] on the Moon.

Recent indication that water might be present in noteworthy quantities at the lunar poles has renewed interest in the Moon. Polar colonies could also avoid the problem of long lunar nights about 354 hours,[3] a little more than two weeks and take advantage of the Sun continuously, at least during the local summer (there is no data for the winter yet).[4]

Permanent human habitation on a planetary body other than the Earth is one of science fiction's most prevalent themes. As technology has advanced, and concerns about the future of humanity on Earth have increased, the argument that space colonization is an achievable and worthwhile goal has gained momentum.[5][6] Because of its proximity to Earth, the Moon has been seen as the most obvious natural expansion after Earth. There are also various projects in near future by space tourism startup companies for tourism on the Moon.

The notion of a lunar colony originated before the Space Age. In 1638 Bishop John Wilkins wrote ADiscourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet, in which he predicted a human colony on the Moon.[7]Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (18571935), among others, also suggested such a step.[8] From the 1950s onwards, a number of concepts and designs have been suggested by scientists, engineers and others.

In 1954, science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke proposed a lunar base of inflatable modules covered in lunar dust for insulation.[9] A spaceship, assembled in low Earth orbit, would launch to the Moon, and astronauts would set up the igloo-like modules and an inflatable radio mast. Subsequent steps would include the establishment of a larger, permanent dome; an algae-based air purifier; a nuclear reactor for the provision of power; and electromagnetic cannons to launch cargo and fuel to interplanetary vessels in space.

In 1959, John S. Rinehart suggested that the safest design would be a structure that could "[float] in a stationary ocean of dust", since there were, at the time this concept was outlined, theories that there could be mile-deep dust oceans on the Moon.[10] The proposed design consisted of a half-cylinder with half-domes at both ends, with a micrometeoroid shield placed above the base.

Project Horizon was a 1959 study regarding the United States Army's plan to establish a fort on the Moon by 1967.[11]Heinz-Hermann Koelle, a German rocket engineer of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) led the Project Horizon study. The first landing would be carried out by two "soldier-astronauts" in 1965 and more construction workers would soon follow. Through numerous launches (61Saturn I and 88Saturn II), 245tons of cargo would be transported to the outpost by 1966.

Lunex Project was a US Air Force plan for a manned lunar landing prior to the Apollo Program in 1961. It envisaged a 21-airman underground Air Force base on the Moon by 1968 at a total cost of $7.5 billion.

In 1962, John DeNike and Stanley Zahn published their idea of a sub-surface base located at the Sea of Tranquility.[9] This base would house a crew of21, in modules placed four meters below the surface, which was believed to provide radiation shielding on par with Earth's atmosphere. DeNike and Zahn favored nuclear reactors for energy production, because they were more efficient than solar panels, and would also overcome the problems with the long Lunar nights. For the life support system, an algae-based gas exchanger was proposed.

As of 2006, Japan planned to have a Moon base in 2030.[12] and as of 2007, Russia planned to have a Moon base in 202732.[13]

In 2007 Jim Burke of the International Space University in France said people should plan to preserve humanity's culture in the event of a civilization-stopping asteroid impact with Earth. A Lunar Noah's Ark was proposed.[14] Subsequent planning may be taken up by the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG).[15][16][17]

In a January 2012 speech Newt Gingrich, Republican candidate for President of the United States of America, proposed a plan to build a U.S. moon colony by the year 2020.[18][19]

In 2016 Johann-Dietrich Wrner, the new Chief of ESA, proposed the International Moon Village that incorporates 3D printing.[20]

Exploration of the Lunar surface by spacecraft began in 1959 with the Soviet Union's Luna program. Luna1 missed the Moon, but Luna2 made a hard landing (impact) into its surface, and became the first artificial object on an extraterrestrial body. The same year, the Luna3 mission radioed photographs to Earth of the Moon's hitherto unseen far side, marking the beginning of a decade-long series of unmanned Lunar explorations.

Responding to the Soviet program of space exploration, US President JohnF. Kennedy in 1961 told the U.S.Congress on May25: "Ibelieve that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The same year the Soviet leadership made some of its first public pronouncements about landing a man on the Moon and establishing a Lunar base.

Manned exploration of the lunar surface began in 1968 when the Apollo8 spacecraft orbited the Moon with three astronauts on board. This was mankind's first direct view of the far side. The following year, the Apollo11 Lunar module landed two astronauts on the Moon, proving the ability of humans to travel to the Moon, perform scientific research work there, and bring back sample materials.

Additional missions to the Moon continued this exploration phase. In 1969 the Apollo12 mission landed next to the Surveyor3 spacecraft, demonstrating precision landing capability. The use of a manned vehicle on the Moon's surface was demonstrated in 1971 with the Lunar Rover during Apollo15. Apollo16 made the first landing within the rugged Lunar highlands. However, interest in further exploration of the Moon was beginning to wane among the American public. In 1972 Apollo17 was the final Apollo Lunar mission, and further planned missions were scrapped at the directive of President Nixon. Instead, focus was turned to the Space Shuttle and manned missions in near Earth orbit.

The Soviet manned lunar programs failed to send a manned mission to the Moon. However, in 1966 Luna9 was the first probe to achieve a soft landing and return close-up shots of the Lunar surface. Luna16 in 1970 returned the first Soviet Lunar soil samples, while in 1970 and 1973 during the Lunokhod program two robotic rovers landed on the Moon. Lunokhod1 explored the Lunar surface for 322 days, and Lunokhod2 operated on the Moon about four months only but covered a third more distance. 1974 saw the end of the Soviet Moonshot, two years after the last American manned landing. Besides the manned landings, an abandoned Soviet moon program included building the moonbase "Zvezda", which was the first detailed project with developed mockups of expedition vehicles[21] and surface modules.[22]

In the decades following, interest in exploring the Moon faded considerably, and only a few dedicated enthusiasts supported a return. However, evidence of Lunar ice at the poles gathered by NASA's Clementine (1994) and Lunar Prospector (1998) missions rekindled some discussion,[23][24] as did the potential growth of a Chinese space program that contemplated its own mission to the Moon.[25] Subsequent research suggested that there was far less ice present (if any) than had originally been thought, but that there may still be some usable deposits of hydrogen in other forms.[26] However, in September 2009, the Chandrayaan probe of India, carrying an ISRO instrument, discovered that the Lunar regolith contains 0.1% water by weight, overturning theories that had stood for 40 years.[27]

In 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush called for a plan to return manned missions to the Moon by 2020 (since cancelled see Constellation program). Propelled by this new initiative, NASA issued a new long-range plan that includes building a base on the Moon as a staging point to Mars. This plan envisions a Lunar outpost at one of the Moon's poles by 2024 which, if well-sited, might be able to continually harness solar power; at the poles, temperature changes over the course of a Lunar day are also less extreme,[28] and reserves of water and useful minerals may be found nearby.[28] In addition, the European Space Agency has a plan for a permanently manned Lunar base by 2025.[29][30] Russia has also announced similar plans to send a man to the Moon by 2025 and establish a permanent base there several years later.[6]

A Chinese space scientist has said that the People's Republic of China could be capable of landing a human on the Moon by 2022 (see Chinese Lunar Exploration Program),[31] and Japan and India also have plans for a Lunar base by 2030.[32] Neither of these plans involves permanent residents on the Moon. Instead they call for sortie missions, in some cases followed by extended expeditions to the Lunar base by rotating crew members, as is currently done for the International Space Station.

NASAs LCROSS/LRO mission had been scheduled to launch in October 2008.[33] The launch was delayed until 18 June 2009,[34] resulting in LCROSS's impact with the Moon at 11:30 UT on 9 October 2009.[35][36] The purpose is preparing for future Lunar exploration.

On September 24, 2009 NASA announced the discovery of water on the Moon. The discovery was made by three instruments on board Chandrayaan-1. These were the ISRO's Moon Impact Probe (MIP), the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) and Mini-Sar, belonging to NASA.[37]

On November 13, 2009 NASA announced that the LCROSS mission had discovered large quantities of water ice on the Moon around the LCROSS impact site at Cabeus. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, relativized the term 'large': "The 30m crater ejected by the probe contained 10million kilograms of regolith. Within this ejecta, an estimated 100kg of water was detected. That represents a proportion of ten parts per million, which is a lower water concentration than that found in the soil of the driest deserts of the Earth. In contrast, we have found continent sized regions on Mars, which are 600,000 parts per million, or 60% water by weight."[38] Although the Moon is very dry on the whole, the spot where the LCROSS impactor hit was chosen for a high concentration of water ice. Dr. Zubrin's computations are not a sound basis for estimating the percentage of water in the regolith at that site. Researchers with expertise in that area estimated that the regolith at the impact site contained 5.6 2.9% water ice, and also noted the presence of other volatile substances. Hydrocarbons, material containing sulfur, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia were present.[39]

In March 2010, NASA reported that the findings of its mini-SAR radar aboard Chandrayaan-1 were consistent with ice deposits at the Moon's north pole. It is estimated there is at least 600million tons of ice at the north pole in sheets of relatively pure ice at least a couple of meters thick.[40]

In March 2014, researchers who had previously published reports on possible abundance of water on the Moon, reported new findings that refined their predictions substantially lower.[41]

Placing a colony on a natural body would provide an ample source of material for construction and other uses in space, including shielding from cosmic radiation. The energy required to send objects from the Moon to space is much less than from Earth to space. This could allow the Moon to serve as a source of construction materials within cis-lunar space. Rockets launched from the Moon would require less locally produced propellant than rockets launched from Earth. Some proposals include using electric acceleration devices (mass drivers) to propel objects off the Moon without building rockets. Others have proposed momentum exchange tethers (see below). Furthermore, the Moon does have some gravity, which experience to date indicates may be vital for fetal development and long-term human health.[42][43] Whether the Moon's gravity (roughly one sixth of Earth's) is adequate for this purpose, however, is uncertain.

In addition, the Moon is the closest large body in the Solar System to Earth. While some Earth-crosser asteroids occasionally pass closer, the Moon's distance is consistently within a small range close to 384,400km. This proximity has several advantages:

There are several disadvantages to the Moon as a colony site:

Three criteria that a Lunar outpost should meet are:[citation needed]

While a colony might be located anywhere, potential locations for a Lunar colony fall into three broad categories.

There are two reasons why the north pole and south pole of the Moon might be attractive locations for a human colony. First, there is evidence that water may be present in some continuously shaded areas near the poles.[62] Second, the Moon's axis of rotation is sufficiently close to being perpendicular to the ecliptic plane that the radius of the Moon's polar circles is less than 50km. Power collection stations could therefore be plausibly located so that at least one is exposed to sunlight at all times, thus making it possible to power polar colonies almost exclusively with solar energy. Solar power would be unavailable only during a lunar eclipse, but these events are relatively brief and absolutely predictable. Any such colony would therefore require a reserve energy supply that could temporarily sustain a colony during lunar eclipses or in the event of any incident or malfunction affecting solar power collection. Hydrogen fuel cells would be ideal for this purpose, since the hydrogen needed could be sourced locally using the Moon's polar water and surplus solar power. Moreover, due to the Moon's uneven surface some sites have nearly continuous sunlight. For example, Malapert mountain, located near the Shackleton crater at the Lunar south pole, offers several advantages as a site:

NASA chose to use a south-polar site for the Lunar outpost reference design in the Exploration Systems Architecture Study chapter on Lunar Architecture.[64]

At the north pole, the rim of Peary Crater has been proposed as a favorable location for a base.[65] Examination of images from the Clementine mission appear to show that parts of the crater rim are permanently illuminated by sunlight (except during Lunar eclipses).[65] As a result, the temperature conditions are expected to remain very stable at this location, averaging 50C (58F).[65] This is comparable to winter conditions in Earth's Poles of Cold in Siberia and Antarctica. The interior of Peary Crater may also harbor hydrogen deposits.[65]

A 1994[66] bistatic radar experiment performed during the Clementine mission suggested the presence of water ice around the south pole.[23][67] The Lunar Prospector spacecraft reported enhanced hydrogen abundances at the south pole and even more at the north pole, in 2008.[68] On the other hand, results reported using the Arecibo radio telescope have been interpreted by some to indicate that the anomalous Clementine radar signatures are not indicative of ice, but surface roughness.[69] This interpretation, however, is not universally agreed upon.[70]

A potential limitation of the polar regions is that the inflow of solar wind can create an electrical charge on the leeward side of crater rims. The resulting voltage difference can affect electrical equipment, change surface chemistry, erode surfaces and levitate Lunar dust.[71]

The Lunar equatorial regions are likely to have higher concentrations of helium-3 (rare on Earth but much sought after for use in nuclear fusion research) because the solar wind has a higher angle of incidence.[72] They also enjoy an advantage in extra-Lunar traffic: The rotation advantage for launching material is slight due to the Moon's slow rotation, but the corresponding orbit coincides with the ecliptic, nearly coincides with the Lunar orbit around Earth, and nearly coincides with the equatorial plane of Earth.

Several probes have landed in the Oceanus Procellarum area. There are many areas and features that could be subject to long-term study, such as the Reiner Gamma anomaly and the dark-floored Grimaldi crater.

The Lunar far side lacks direct communication with Earth, though a communication satellite at the L2 Lagrangian point, or a network of orbiting satellites, could enable communication between the far side of the Moon and Earth.[73] The far side is also a good location for a large radio telescope because it is well shielded from the Earth.[74] Due to the lack of atmosphere, the location is also suitable for an array of optical telescopes, similar to the Very Large Telescope in Chile.[44] To date, there has been no ground exploration of the far side.

Scientists have estimated that the highest concentrations of helium-3 will be found in the maria on the far side, as well as near side areas containing concentrations of the titanium-based mineral ilmenite. On the near side the Earth and its magnetic field partially shields the surface from the solar wind during each orbit. But the far side is fully exposed, and thus should receive a somewhat greater proportion of the ion stream.[75]

Lunar lava tubes are a potential location for constructing a Lunar base. Any intact lava tube on the Moon could serve as a shelter from the severe environment of the Lunar surface, with its frequent meteorite impacts, high-energy ultra-violet radiation and energetic particles, and extreme diurnal temperature variations. Lava tubes provide ideal positions for shelter because of their access to nearby resources. They also have proven themselves as a reliable structure, having withstood the test of time for billions of years.

An underground colony would escape the extreme of temperature on the Moon's surface. The average temperature on the surface of the Moon is about 5C. The day period (about 354 hours) has an average temperature of about 107C (225F), although it can rise as high as 123C (253F). The night period (also 354 hours) has an average temperature of about 153C (243F).[76] Underground, both periods would be around 23C (9F), and humans could install ordinary heaters.[77]

One such lava tube was discovered in early 2009.[78]

The central peaks of large lunar craters may contain material that rose from as far 19 kilometers beneath the surface when the peaks formed by rebound of the compressed rock under the crater. Material moved from the interior of craters is piled in their rims.[79] These and other processes make possibly novel concentrations of minerals accessible to future prospectors from lunar colonies.

A colony in lunar orbit would avoid the extreme temperature swings of the Moon's surface. Since the orbital period in low-lunar orbit is only about two hours, heat would only radiate away from the colony for a short period of time. At the Lagrangian points one and two, the thermal environment would be even more stable as the Sun would be almost continuously visible. This increased solar duration would allow for an almost constant supply of power. Additionally, the colony could be made to spin as has been examined with designs similar to the O'Neill cylinder so as to provide Earth-like gravity. Various lunar orbits are possible such as a Lissajous orbit or a halo orbit. Due to the Moon's lumpy gravity, there exist only a small number of possible orbital inclinations for low lunar orbits. A satellite in such a frozen orbit could be at an inclination of 27, 50, 76, or 86.

There have been numerous proposals regarding habitat modules. The designs have evolved throughout the years as mankind's knowledge about the Moon has grown, and as the technological possibilities have changed. The proposed habitats range from the actual spacecraft landers or their used fuel tanks, to inflatable modules of various shapes. Some hazards of the Lunar environment such as sharp temperature shifts, lack of atmosphere or magnetic field (which means higher levels of radiation and micrometeoroids) and long nights, were unknown early on. Proposals have shifted as these hazards were recognized and taken into consideration.

Some suggest building the Lunar colony underground, which would give protection from radiation and micrometeoroids. This would also greatly reduce the risk of air leakage, as the colony would be fully sealed from the outside except for a few exits to the surface.

The construction of an underground base would probably be more complex; one of the first machines from Earth might be a remote-controlled excavating machine. Once created, some sort of hardening would be necessary to avoid collapse, possibly a spray-on concrete-like substance made from available materials.[80] A more porous insulating material also made in-situ could then be applied. Rowley & Neudecker have suggested "melt-as-you-go" machines that would leave glassy internal surfaces.[81]Mining methods such as the room and pillar might also be used. Inflatable self-sealing fabric habitats might then be put in place to retain air. Eventually an underground city can be constructed. Farms set up underground would need artificial sunlight. As an alternative to excavating, a lava tube could be covered and insulated, thus solving the problem of radiation exposure.

A possibly easier solution would be to build the Lunar base on the surface, and cover the modules with Lunar soil. The Lunar regolith is composed of a unique blend of silica and iron-containing compounds that may be fused into a glass-like solid using microwave energy.[82] Blacic has studied the mechanical properties of lunar glass and has shown that it is a promising material for making rigid structures, if coated with metal to keep moisture out.[83] This may allow for the use of "Lunar bricks" in structural designs, or the vitrification of loose dirt to form a hard, ceramic crust.

A Lunar base built on the surface would need to be protected by improved radiation and micrometeoroid shielding. Building the Lunar base inside a deep crater would provide at least partial shielding against radiation and micrometeoroids. Artificial magnetic fields have been proposed[84][85] as a means to provide radiation shielding for long range deep space manned missions, and it might be possible to use similar technology on a Lunar colony. Some regions on the Moon possess strong local magnetic fields that might partially mitigate exposure to charged solar and galactic particles.[86]

In a turn from the usual engineer-designed lunar habitats, London-based Foster + Partners architectural firm proposed a building construction 3D-printer technology in January 2013 that would use Lunar regolith raw materials to produce Lunar building structures while using enclosed inflatable habitats for housing the human occupants inside the hard-shell Lunar structures. Overall, these habitats would require only ten percent of the structure mass to be transported from Earth, while using local Lunar materials for the other 90 percent of the structure mass.[87] "Printed" Lunar soil will provide both "radiation and temperature insulation. Inside, a lightweight pressurized inflatable with the same dome shape will be the living environment for the first human Moon settlers."[87] The building technology will include mixing Lunar material with magnesium oxide, which will turn the "moonstuff into a pulp that can be sprayed to form the block" when a binding salt is applied that "converts [this] material into a stone-like solid."[87] Terrestrial versions of this 3D-printing building technology are already printing 2 metres (6ft 7in) of building material per hour with the next-generation printers capable of 3.5 metres (11ft) per hour, sufficient to complete a building in a week.[87]

In 2010, The Moon Capital Competition offered a prize for a design of a Lunar habitat intended to be an underground international commercial center capable of supporting a residential staff of 60 people and their families. The Moon Capital is intended to be self-sufficient with respect to food and other material required for life support. Prize money was provided primarily by the Boston Society of Architects, Google Lunar X Prize and The New England Council of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[88]

On January 31, 2013, the ESA working with an independent architectural firm, tested a 3D-printed structure that could be constructed of lunar regolith for use as a Moon base.[89]

A nuclear fission reactor might fulfill most of a Moon base's power requirements.[90] With the help of fission reactors, one could overcome the difficulty of the 354 hour Lunar night. According to NASA, a nuclear fission power station could generate a steady 40kilowatts, equivalent to the demand of about eight houses on Earth.[90] An artists concept of such a station published by NASA envisages the reactor being buried below the Moon's surface to shield it from its surroundings; out from a tower-like generator part reaching above the surface over the reactor, radiators would extend into space to send away any heat energy that may be left over.[91]

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators could be used as backup and emergency power sources for solar powered colonies.

One specific development program in the 2000s was the Fission Surface Power (FSP) project of NASA and DOE, a fission power system focused on "developing and demonstrating a nominal 40 kWe power system to support human exploration missions. The FSP system concept uses conventional low-temperature stainless steel, liquid metal-cooled reactor technology coupled with Stirling power conversion." As of 2010[update], significant component hardware testing had been successfully completed, and a non-nuclear system demonstration test was being fabricated.[92][needs update]

Solar energy is a possible source of power for a Lunar base. Many of the raw materials needed for solar panel production can be extracted on site. However, the long Lunar night (354 hours) is a drawback for solar power on the Moon's surface. This might be solved by building several power plants, so that at least one of them is always in daylight. Another possibility would be to build such a power plant where there is constant or near-constant sunlight, such as at the Malapert mountain near the Lunar south pole, or on the rim of Peary crater near the north pole. A third possibility would be to leave the panels in orbit, and beam the power down as microwaves.

The solar energy converters need not be silicon solar panels. It may be more advantageous to use the larger temperature difference between Sun and shade to run heat engine generators. Concentrated sunlight could also be relayed via mirrors and used in Stirling engines or solar trough generators, or it could be used directly for lighting, agriculture and process heat. The focused heat might also be employed in materials processing to extract various elements from Lunar surface materials.

In the early days,[clarification needed] a combination of solar panels for "day-time" operation and fuel cells for "night-time" operation could be used.[according to whom?]

Fuel cells on the Space Shuttle have operated reliably for up to 17 Earth days at a time. On the Moon, they would only be needed for 354 hours (14 34 days) the length of the Lunar night. Fuel cells produce water directly as a waste product. Current fuel cell technology is more advanced than the Shuttle's cells PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) cells produce considerably less heat (though their waste heat would likely be useful during the Lunar night) and are lighter, not to mention the reduced mass of the smaller heat-dissipating radiators. This makes PEMs more economical to launch from Earth than the shuttle's cells. PEMs have not yet been proven in space.

Combining fuel cells with electrolysis would provide a "perpetual" source of electricity solar energy could be used to provide power during the Lunar day, and fuel cells at night. During the Lunar day, solar energy would also be used to electrolyze the water created in the fuel cells although there would be small losses of gases that would have to be replaced.

Even if lunar colonies could provide themselves access to a near-continuous source of solar energy, they would still need to maintain fuel cells or an alternate energy storage system to sustain themselves during lunar eclipses and emergency situations.

Conventional rockets have been used for most Lunar explorations to date. The ESA's SMART-1 mission from 2003 to 2006 used conventional chemical rockets to reach orbit and Hall effect thrusters to arrive at the Moon in 13 months. NASA would have used chemical rockets on its AresV booster and Lunar Surface Access Module, that were being developed for a planned return to the Moon around 2019, but this was cancelled. The construction workers, location finders, and other astronauts vital to building, would have been taken four at a time in NASA's Orion spacecraft.

Proposed concepts of Earth-Moon transportation are Space elevators.[93][94]

Lunar colonists will want the ability to transport cargo and people to and from modules and spacecraft, and to carry out scientific study of a larger area of the Lunar surface for long periods of time. Proposed concepts include a variety of vehicle designs, from small open rovers to large pressurized modules with lab equipment, and also a few flying or hopping vehicles.

Rovers could be useful if the terrain is not too steep or hilly. The only rovers to have operated on the surface of the Moon (as of 2008[update]) are the three Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicles (LRV), developed by Boeing, and the two robotic Soviet Lunokhods. The LRV was an open rover for a crew of two, and a range of 92km during one Lunar day. One NASA study resulted in the Mobile Lunar Laboratory concept, a manned pressurized rover for a crew of two, with a range of 396km. The Soviet Union developed different rover concepts in the Lunokhod series and the L5 for possible use on future manned missions to the Moon or Mars. These rover designs were all pressurized for longer sorties.[95]

If multiple bases were established on the Lunar surface, they could be linked together by permanent railway systems. Both conventional and magnetic levitation (Maglev) systems have been proposed for the transport lines. Mag-Lev systems are particularly attractive as there is no atmosphere on the surface to slow down the train, so the vehicles could achieve velocities comparable to aircraft on the Earth. One significant difference with lunar trains, however, is that the cars would need to be individually sealed and possess their own life support systems.

For difficult areas, a flying vehicle may be more suitable. Bell Aerosystems proposed their design for the Lunar Flying Vehicle as part of a study for NASA. Bell also developed the Manned Flying System, a similar concept.

Experience so far indicates that launching human beings into space is much more expensive than launching cargo.

One way to get materials and products from the Moon to an interplanetary way station might be with a mass driver, a magnetically accelerated projectile launcher. Cargo would be picked up from orbit or an Earth-Moon Lagrangian point by a shuttle craft using ion propulsion, solar sails or other means and delivered to Earth orbit or other destinations such as near-Earth asteroids, Mars or other planets, perhaps using the Interplanetary Transport Network.

A Lunar space elevator could transport people, raw materials and products to and from an orbital station at Lagrangian points L1 or L2. Chemical rockets would take a payload from Earth to the L1 Lunar Lagrange location. From there a tether would slowly lower the payload to a soft landing on the lunar surface.

Other possibilities include a momentum exchange tether system.

A cis-Lunar transport system has been proposed using tethers to achieve momentum exchange.[102] This system requires zero net energy input, and could not only retrieve payloads from the Lunar surface and transport them to Earth, but could also soft land payloads on to the Lunar surface.

For long term sustainability, a space colony should be close to self-sufficient. Mining and refining the Moon's materials on-site for use both on the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System could provide an advantage over deliveries from Earth, as they can be launched into space at a much lower energy cost than from Earth. It is possible that large amounts of matter will need to be launched into space for interplanetary exploration in the 21st century, and the lower cost of providing goods from the Moon might be attractive.[80]

In the long term, the Moon will likely play an important role in supplying space-based construction facilities with raw materials.[95] Zero gravity in space allows for the processing of materials in ways impossible or difficult on Earth, such as "foaming" metals, where a gas is injected into a molten metal, and then the metal is annealed slowly. On Earth, the gas bubbles rise and burst, but in a zero gravity environment, that does not happen. The annealing process requires large amounts of energy, as a material is kept very hot for an extended period of time. (This allows the molecular structure to realign.)

Exporting material to Earth in trade from the Moon is more problematic due to the cost of transportation, which will vary greatly if the Moon is industrially developed (see "Launch costs" above). One suggested trade commodity, Helium-3 (3He) from the solar wind, is thought to have accumulated on the Moon's surface over billions of years, but occurs only rarely on Earth. Helium might be present in the Lunar regolith in quantities of 0.01 ppm to 0.05 ppm (depending on soil). In 2006 3He had a market price of about $1500 per gram ($1.5M per kilogram), more than 120 times the value per unit weight of gold and over eight times the value of rhodium.

In the future 3He may have a role as a fuel in thermonuclear fusion reactors.[103] If the technology for converting helium-3 to energy is developed, there is the potential that it would produce 10 times more electricity than fossil fuels. It should require about 100 tonnes of helium-3 to produce the electricity that Earth uses in a year and there should be enough on the moon to provide that much for 10,000 years.[104]

To reduce the cost of transport, the Moon could store propellants produced from lunar water at one or several depots between the Earth and the Moon, to resupply rockets or satellites in Earth orbit.[105] The Shackleton Energy Company estimate investment in this infrastructure could cost around $25 billion.[106]

Gerard K. O'Neill, noting the problem of high launch costs in the early 1970s, came up with the idea of building Solar Power Satellites in orbit with materials from the Moon.[107] Launch costs from the Moon will vary greatly if the Moon is industrially developed (see "Launch costs" above). This proposal was based on the contemporary estimates of future launch costs of the space shuttle.

On 30 April 1979 the Final Report "Lunar Resources Utilization for Space Construction" by General Dynamics Convair Division under NASA contract NAS9-15560 concluded that use of Lunar resources would be cheaper than terrestrial materials for a system comprising as few as thirty Solar Power Satellites of 10 GW capacity each.[108]

In 1980, when it became obvious NASA's launch cost estimates for the space shuttle were grossly optimistic, O'Neill et al. published another route to manufacturing using Lunar materials with much lower startup costs.[109] This 1980s SPS concept relied less on human presence in space and more on partially self-replicating systems on the Lunar surface under telepresence control of workers stationed on Earth.

Notes

General references

Excerpt from:
Colonization of the Moon - Wikipedia

Saturns largest moon Titan is one of several candidates for possible future colonization of the outer Solar System.

According to Cassini data from 2008, Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth. These hydrocarbons rain from the sky and collect in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.[1] "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing materialit's a giant factory of organic chemicals", said Ralph Lorenz, who leads the study of Titan based on radar data from Cassini. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan." Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves.[2]

Radar images obtained on July 21, 2006 appear to show lakes of liquid hydrocarbon (such as methane and ethane) in Titan's northern latitudes. This is the first discovery of currently existing lakes beyond Earth.[3] The lakes range in size from about a kilometer in width to one hundred kilometers across.

On March 13, 2007, Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that it found strong evidence of seas of methane and ethane in the northern hemisphere. At least one of these is larger than any of the Great Lakes in North America.[4]

The American aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin identified Saturn as the most important and valuable of the four gas giants in the Solar System, because of its relative proximity, low radiation, and excellent system of moons. He also named Titan as the most important moon on which to establish a base to develop the resources of the Saturn system.[5]

Dr. Robert Zubrin has pointed out that Titan possesses an abundance of all the elements necessary to support life, saying "In certain ways, Titan is the most hospitable extraterrestrial world within our solar system for human colonization." [6] The atmosphere contains plentiful nitrogen and methane, and strong evidence indicates that liquid methane exists on the surface. Evidence also indicates the presence of liquid water and ammonia under the surface, which are delivered to the surface by volcanic activity. Water can easily be used to generate breathable oxygen and nitrogen is ideal to add buffer gas partial pressure to breathable air (it forms about 78% of Earth's atmosphere).[7] Nitrogen, methane and ammonia can all be used to produce fertilizer for growing food.

Titan has a surface gravity of 0.138 g, slightly less than that of the Moon. Managing long-term effects of low gravity on human health would therefore be a significant issue for long-term occupation of Titan, more so than on Mars. These effects are still an active field of study. They can include symptoms such as loss of bone density, loss of muscle density, and a weakened immune system. Astronauts in Earth orbit have remained in microgravity for up to a year or more at a time. Effective countermeasures for the negative effects of low gravity are well-established, particularly an aggressive regime of daily physical exercise or weighted clothing. The variation in the negative effects of low gravity as a function of different levels of low gravity are not known, since all research in this area is restricted to humans in zero gravity. The same goes for the potential effects of low gravity on fetal and pediatric development. It has been hypothesized that children born and raised in low gravity such as on Titan would not be well adapted for life under the higher gravity of Earth.[8]

The atmospheric pressure on Titan's surface is about one and a half times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere at sea level, making Titan the only celestial body in the Solar System besides Earth with a surface atmospheric pressure tolerable to humans. To put it into perspective, 1.5 atmospheres is approximately equivalent to the pressure experienced by a scuba diver on Earth at a water depth of only five meters, whereas the typical maximum recommended depth for recreational scuba divers is forty meters (equivalent to about five atmospheres of pressure). Matching the pressure of a habitat on Titan's surface to the ambient pressure would greatly reduce certain engineering difficulties. Titan's atmosphere is not toxic to humans, however the methane and hydrogen components are flammable in an oxygen atmosphere and would therefore need to be filtered out of buffer gas made from its atmosphere.

On the other hand, the temperature on Titan is about 94 K (179C, or 290.2F), so insulation and heat generation and management would be significant concerns. However, because of the colder temperature the density of the air is closer to 4.5 times that of Earth sea level. At this density, temperature shifts over time and between one locale and another would be far smaller than comparable types of temperature changes present on Earth. The corresponding narrow range of temperature variation reduces the difficulties in structural engineering.

Relative thickness of the atmosphere combined with extreme cold makes additional troubles for human habitation. Unlike in a vacuum, the high atmospheric density makes thermoinsulation a significant engineering problem.

The engineering considerations for a spacesuit suitable for extravehicular activity on Titan's surface are radically different compared to a spacesuit designed for use in a vacuum. On the one hand, such a spacesuit would not need to be pressurized, but it would need to protect the wearer from the extreme cold, in addition to providing a breathable atmosphere. Compared to a vacuum, heat would rapidly dissipate in Titan's thick atmosphere. The degree of difficulty associated with working in such a spacesuit constructed with current technology would probably be at least equivalent to the difficulty associated with using a pressurized spacesuit in a vacuum.

The very high ratio of atmospheric density to surface gravity also greatly reduces the wingspan needed for an aircraft to maintain lift, so much so that a human would be able to strap on wings and easily fly through Titan's atmosphere while wearing a spacesuit that could be manufactured with current technology.[6] Another theoretically possible means to become airborne on Titan would be to use a hot air balloon-like vehicle filled with an Earth-like atmosphere at Earth-like temperatures (because oxygen is only slightly denser than nitrogen, the atmosphere in a habitat on Titan would be about one third as dense as the surrounding atmosphere), although such a vehicle would need a skin able to keep the extreme cold out in spite of the light weight required. Due to Titan's extremely low temperatures, heating of any flight-bound vehicle becomes a key obstacle.[9]

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Colonization of Titan - Wikipedia

En route to Mars, the Moon

Why colonize the Moon before going to Mars? NASA scientists give their reasons.

March 18, 2005: NASA has a new Vision for Space Exploration: in the decades ahead, humans will land on Mars and explore the red planet. Brief visits will lead to longer stays and, maybe one day, to colonies.

Why the Moon before Mars?

"The Moon is a natural first step," explains Philip Metzger, a physicist at NASA Kennedy Space Center. "It's nearby. We can practice living, working and doing science there before taking longer and riskier trips to Mars."

Right: The Moon, an alien world in Earth's backyard. Photo credit: International Space Station astronaut Leroy Chiao. [More]

The Moon and Mars have a lot in common. The Moon has only one-sixth Earth's gravity; Mars has one-third. The Moon has no atmosphere; the Martian atmosphere is highly rarefied. The Moon can get very cold, as low as -240o C in shadows; Mars varies between -20o and -100o C.

Even more important, both planets are covered with silt-fine dust, called "regolith." The Moon's regolith was created by the ceaseless bombardment of micrometeorites, cosmic rays and particles of solar wind breaking down rocks for billions of years. Martian regolith resulted from the impacts of more massive meteorites and even asteroids, plus ages of daily erosion from water and wind. There are places on both worlds where the regolith is 10+ meters deep.

Answering these questions on Earth isn't easy. Moondust and Mars dust is so ... alien.

Try this: Run your finger across the screen of your computer. You'll get a little residue of dust clinging to your fingertip. It's soft and fuzzy--that's Earth dust.

Lunar dust is different: "It's almost like fragments of glass or coral--odd shapes that are very sharp and interlocking," says Metzger. (

"Even after short moon walks, Apollo 17 astronauts found dust particles had jammed the shoulder joints of their spacesuits," says Masami Nakagawa, associate professor in the mining engineering department of the Colorado School of Mines. "Moondust penetrated into seals, causing the spacesuits to leak some air pressure."

Above: Dust flies from the tires of a moon buggy, driven by Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. These "rooster-tails" of dust caused problems, which the astronauts solved using duct tape. [More]

In sunlit areas, adds Nakagawa, fine dust levitated above the Apollo astronauts' knees and even above their heads, because individual particles were electrostatically charged by the Sun's ultraviolet light. Such dust particles, when tracked into the astronauts' habitat where they would become airborne, irritated their eyes and lungs. "It's a potentially serious problem."

Dust is also ubiquitous on Mars, although Mars dust is probably not as sharp as moondust. Weathering smooths the edges. Nevertheless, Martian duststorms whip these particles 50 m/s (100+ mph), scouring and wearing every exposed surface. As the rovers Spirit and Opportunity have revealed, Mars dust (like moondust) is probably electrically charged. It clings to solar panels, blocks sunlight and reduces the amount of power that can be generated for a surface mission.

For these reasons, NASA is funding Nakagawa's Project Dust, a four-year study dedicated to finding ways of mitigating the effects of dust on robotic and human exploration, ranging from designs of air filters to thin-film coatings that repel dust from spacesuits and machinery.

The Moon is also a good testing ground for what mission planners call "in-situ resource utilization" (ISRU)--a.k.a. "living off the land." Astronauts on Mars are going to want to mine certain raw materials locally: oxygen for breathing, water for drinking and rocket fuel (essentially hydrogen and oxygen) for the journey home. "We can try this on the Moon first," says Metzger.

Both the Moon and Mars are thought to harbor water frozen in the ground. The evidence for this is indirect. NASA and ESA spacecraft have detected hydrogen--presumably the H in H2O--in Martian soil. Putative icy deposits range from the Martian poles almost to the equator. Lunar ice, on the other hand, is localized near the Moon's north and south poles deep inside craters where the Sun never shines, according to similar data from Lunar Prospector and Clementine, two spacecraft that mapped the Moon in the mid-1990s.

If this ice could be excavated, thawed out and broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen ... Voila! Instant supplies. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, due to launch in 2008, will use modern sensors to search for deposits and pinpoint possible mining sites.

"The lunar poles are a cold place, so we've been working with people who specialize in cold places to figure out how to land on the soils and dig into the permafrost to excavate water," Metzger says. Prime among NASA's partners are investigators from the Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). Key challenges include ways of landing rockets or building habitats on ice-rich soils without having their heat melt the ground so it collapses under their weight.

Testing all this technology on the Moon, which is only 2 or 3 days away from Earth, is going to be much easier than testing it on Mars, six months away.

So ... to Mars! But first, the Moon.

Read more from the original source:
En Route to Mars, The Moon | Science Mission Directorate

The Continental Congress - Founding Fathers:

Lost New York runs using HTML TADS Interpreter 3 LOSTNY.zip (353Kbytes) WinZip File, by Neil deMause. "As a bored tourist in the Big Apple, you discover a time-travel device that lets you witness first-hand the development of the city in four centuries. A well-researched period piece with good wry descriptive prose, rather sad in many places about the passing of old landmarks and the ruthlessness of modernity. Good explorability, although towards the end trekking about and waiting for trains can get to be a chore. The puzzles are mostly (but not entirely) straightforward, but careful examination of scenery is required to obtain equipment. The geography is representative rather than exhaustive - walking north from 14th Street, for example, takes you to 23rd Street."

New York City, New York State - one of the Great Cities of the World. Site of Interest: (1) The Battery Park, (2) The Brooklyn Bridge, (3) Central Park, (4) Empire State Building and Grand Central Station, (5) Wall Street, (6) Pennsylvania Station, going to Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Long Island, and New Jersey.

Other attractions include the Statue of Liberty [built 1886] (on Liberty Island), Ellis Island [1892-1954] (were European Immigrants came in), the United Nations Building (in the Upper East Side, next to Queens Borough Bridge), and lots of Museums. And New Style Taxis, Hotels, Bloomingdale's Department Store, Staten Island Ferry, and JFK Airport on Long Island. 'the El' or Subway Train Network has several branches including the Hudson Line, Harlem Line, New Haven Line, New Canaan Branch, and Danbury Branch.

As an aside, it is known Randolph and Mortimer from the Trading Place's Movie live by the Hudson River, in the West Bronx Borough. New York City is also home to Marvel Comics: Superman, Spiderman, Johnny Voltaire etc...

The name Ledgard is of Norman French origin, Anglicized during one of our numerous Wars with France ending with the Napoleonic Wars. It means 'Keeper of the Keep' - their Job was to raise and lower the Drawbridge and Portcullis which protected the entrance to the Castle. A Portcullis is on the 1 Pence Coin.

William I (the Conquer - as Duke of Normandy) was the First King in the British Royal Family. In 1066 at the Battle of Hastings (in East Sussex) he beat the Anglo-Saxon King Harold II. Who had just repelled the Viking King Harold Harade at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Fulford near York; and force marched his men to Southern England.

King William was Crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. And the Normans soon built a network of Motte and Bailey Wooden Castles up and down the Country. Founding Newport SE Wales, and Newcastle as frontier Towns. The Tower of London in East London on the Thames was built as a Royal Castle for the King and his entourage. Later Castles were rebuilt in Stone, as were new Cathedrals and Monasteries.

I had a friend called Sleigh (a Norman Foot Soldier) who worked as a High Level Computer Programmer for battery monitoring equipment which a two PIC Microcontrollers on each battery. One read the battery Ampage, the other Rx and Tx signals down a fibre optic loop to a Psion Computer that reported if the battery was faulty. He likes going the caf and is from East London, and a bit of a Geezer. He says there aren't any houses for local people to move in to to start a family in London.

My Brother Jonathan looks a lot like the TV personality Frasier, and seems to have 1/3 Norman Blood which makes his strong and confident, while being decent and compassionate, re-emerging from a Ancestor way back when buried in the DNA.

My Genome, by David Magnus Ledgard:

Peoples who have excelled in the Fields of Invention, Culture, and Manufacturing:

Southern Italy is Poor because it is too hot to work much, except on the land. They grow the Olive in Southern Italy, and Greece, for Olive Oil to cook with, or make healthy 'Butter' Margarine. Italy also makes Beef, Milk (for Cheese), Tomatoes (without Greenhouse) and Wheat (for Spaghetti), and Garlic. Also Italy is fond of Coffee e.g. Cappuccino, Mocha (half Chocolate), or Latte. There used to be a lot of Lemons grown in Sicily once, but it's Population is greater now.

There are also two other important jobs:

What are WizKids??? WizKids are young people who know about Computers, programme them, enjoy programming them, and make something Fun or Useful. Like Bill Gates of Microsoft Fame who programmed MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System [5.25 Inch Disk]), and Windows 95 / 98. With some help. When Men were Men, and Programmers were Programmers listings used to come with ribbon feed, and you could look right done the listing as each page was connected to the other.

You may have noticed there have been a lot of Intel Microprocessor types coming out lately. Here is a list of some of the IBM Clone PC (Personnel Computer) Chipsets by Intel:

Currently there are 10 Million Computers with a Base Unit, Keyboard, Mouse, and Monitor of type Pentium IV, and Core Multi-processors in Warehouses in the East, and the United States of America. As Computers use a lot of Rare Metals it seems a waste that they aren't used, or sold at a knock down price. There have been endless Laptops made which have very little Software on them. Just film websites, and office programmes. There seems to be a desperate shortage of Software, and 2D and Strategy Computer Games. FEW NEW COMPUTERS are being sold because people might forget their passwords stored in "cookies", and they have to copy all files across - either by going to the Computer Shop, or using the Read/Write CD-ROM (Compact Disk ROM). Remember you can order a Proper Computer with Big Screen and Keyboard from DELL off the internet with a Base Unit. Don't Forget to Buy a Manual from amazon.co.uk for example in e.g. BASIC Programming.

The well known and liked Micro-Computers the Commodore 64, and BBC Micro where 8-bit (1-byte) Computers. This meant they could have Colour 0-255. 16-bit (2-byte, or Word) Computers like the very popular Commodore Amiga could have richer Colour 0-65536. 32-bit (4-byte, or Longword) Windows PC Computers could have xxRRGGBB ($00-$FF) Red-Green-Blue Colour. Which can make Red (xxFF0000) for example or any mix of Colours. The Nintendo 64 has 64-bit (8-byte, or Octbyte) i.e.. 4 x 16 lines on it's custom built chip. No 128-bit Computer ever seems to have been made as it is 'inconceivable and 'near infinitely complex'.

Networks of Transputer Computer Chips can be connected together to make a super-computer with Parallel Processing. Used to make Computer Graphics and Films like 'toystory'.

The Microprocessor I learned consisted of a ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit), RAM (Read Only Memory), and Control Unit (which processed Op-codes, the Accumulator, and the Status Register). The BASIC programme itself could be stored in ROM (Read Only Memory), now most of it is on the Hard Disk Drive. The 3.5" floppy disk has fallen out of use, as did the 5.25" drive before it.

Example Op-codes (also known as Mnemonics by some people - written perfectly by some very clever and thoughtful Computer Scientists) include:

Variables are required to Run a Computer Programme:

There is also a Status Register with Flags like Division by Zero Error (if this happens the computer crashes); Carry (if two 8-bit numbers are added they might go one to make a 9-bit number - this is stored in the Carry Bit); Branch (Equal, or NOT Equal - for the IF/THEN/ELSE Statement).

A letter can be stored as an 8-bit Number (0-255) in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange): 0-31 are control codes like 7 for the BELL sound, or 13 for Carriage Return; 32 is Space; 48-57 is 0-9; 65-89 is A-Z; 97-116 is a-z (+32, or twiddle bit 6 to TRUE). C is good at bit twiddling.

As an interesting point of Mathematics and Physics it is said that 1/0 (one divided by 0) has no meaning or is infinite!!!!!

ROM's (Read Only Memory):

The BASIC Programming Language [Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Language] was designed by Dartmouth Naval College New England.

What Happened to the Old COMPUTER MANUAL? It used to tell you how to do all types of things on a Computer. The Electronic One is hardly ever Read. It was the Computer Programmers BIBLE. For BASIC, Pascal, Windows 95...

There are two famous BASIC programmes for Beginners, or Quick BASIC if you use labels and not line numbers, it compiles as it runs i.e. a run-time language:

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Colonization Home Page

Moon Colonization Whose idea was it?

NASA came up with the idea of a colony of human life on the moon. In 1835, John Herschel said the moon was sustainable for human life. This later became known as the "Great Moon Hoax." Alan Wasser was the first to propose the idea of a human settlement on the moon. PROS One pro of moon colonization would be self sufficiency. It would test the human race to see how we would survive away from all our natural resources. Another pro of space colonization would be food transportation. Dehydrated food is cheap and would be a necessity for moon colonization. Hydroponic farming is also an option. It is efficient and would help with the water supply being limited on the moon. The idea of space colonization is making NASA and other space transporting companies very wealthy. Entrepreneurs are paying billions of dollars in stocks to try and get a spot in a private moon expedition. The very fist hotel said to be built on the moon will be a Hilton. CONS One con about landing a colony on the Moon would be the weather and terrain. The Moon has a rocky surface, but lunar dust storms are a large problem on the face of the Moon. The Moon also experiences extreme temperatures ranging from 224 degrees to -397 degrees Fahrenheit. Another con would be trying to govern a Moon colony. The Moon is not our home planet, therefore no one has claimed it and our government rules are not the same. Anyone who wanted to travel to the colony or take over the colony could. The colony could not be limited to a single nation power. The main problem with Moon colonization is the expense. It would be about $50,000 per human to send to the Moon. By 2030, we will have spent tens of billions of dollars if Moon colonization is successful. The Moon also provides very little chance of human survival due to the conditions of the planet. FUN FACTS One gallon of water costs $400,00 to send to the Moon. If we needed electricity, we could harvest it from the soil on the moon. Houses on the moon would be made of inflatable products that would protect us from lunar wind and dust storms. The US Air Force has planned to build a 21 man underground Lunar Air Force base on the moon. CITATIONS! http://www.spacesettlement.org/#25 http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/pros-and-cons-of-colonizing-the-moon.htm http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=4841 https://www.euvolution.com/prometheism-transhumanism-posthumanism/10-pros-and-cons-of-colonizing-the-moon-discovery-channel/ http://www.futuretimeline.net/22ndcentury/2100-2149.htm http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/colonize-moon-much-cost-81543/ http://www.astrofiles.net/naissance-systeme-solaire http://www.dezeen.com/2013/01/31/foster-partners-to-3d-print-buildings-on-the-moon/ http://www.cuisinartresort.com/index.php?catID=25 http://science.howstuffworks.com/what-if-moon-colony.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_Moon

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Moon Colonization by Margaret Fitzgerald on Prezi

NASA could dramatically cut the cost of returning humans to the moon if it is willing to mine and sell the moon's natural resources, according to a study commissioned by the agency.

The Space Frontier Foundation-penned study encourages NASA to mine the moon's hydrogen for the "commercial production of cryogenic propellant". The report estimates that there are 10 billion cubic meters of water on the moon's poles -- equivalent to Utah's Great Salt Lake. The mining operation could potentially reduce the cost of sending humans to the moon by 90%.

First, however, NASA must send robotic scouts to confirm that the polar water is even harvestable. "This will be a complex operation requiring a period of growth, trial and error, failure, repair, and maintenance as the process matures in operations and procedures," the report concedes.

A lunar propellant production facility and fuel depot could be significantly beneficial to future missions to Mars, as well as routine launches carried out by the Department of Defense, according to the report.

Despite the dramatic proposed savings from propellent production, the overall cost of the lunar colony doesn't come cheap: NASA will still need to cough up nearly $40 billion to establish the colony.

"This is the way that America will settle the final frontier, save taxpayers money and usher in a new era of economic growth and STEM innovation," said Space Frontier Foundation's Chairman Jeff Feige.

Click here to read the full report

Learn more about lunar colonies:

More here:
Study: Lunar Colonization Could be Surprisingly Cheap ...

Playlist Description

Have you ever weighed the pros and cons of colonizing on the moon: to be, or not to be? That has seemed to be the question for decades since humankind first put a man on the moon in the 1960s. As we learn more about our solar system, it would seem as if the next logical step after space exploration would be to establish a colony on the moonright? One of the first things to consider when you're 238,855 miles away from Earth would be implementing a self-sufficient lifestyle. This means food and water supply, as well as waste, would need to have sustainable systems in place. The good news is, researchers have found a crater with literally one billion gallons of water.

Many believe that although long-term residency may still be a far cry away, small nano-structures may pop up within the next decade. There is still much to be learned before making the big move. How will lunar weather systems will affect human life? How is government, an economy, a job market and housing constructed? Learn more about what we'd need to accomplish in order to fulfill a long-term future in space.

Playlist by Linze Rice

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Could We Live On The Moon In The Future? - Playlist

Darby Dyar, professor of astronomy and geology at Mount Holyoke College, says the moon is to people today what the New World was to Europeans 600 years ago. They had been there a few times, said Dyar, but it took time to work up the courage to send people there to stay.

Its no fantasy. Scientists like Dyar have been working on the prospect of colonizing the moon for decades. In my lifetime, she said, we will establish some kind of permanent station on the moon. Mind you, I plan to live another 50 years!

Now Dyar is serving on the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. The virtual part refers to the fact that the monthly meetings and collaboration between team members takes place mostly through video-conferencing.

The project involves nine teams around the country, of which Dyar serves on three. She will be studying minerals on the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids.

Among her tasks: Figure out how future residents on the moon can get at that chemical compound that is essential to human existence water. No water, no life.

The moon is a very dry place, said Dyar. Thats why its difficult to imagine living on it.

The challenge is to find out where the water is and how to tap it, said Dyar. We have to understand how water got to the moon, how much is still there, and how hard it would be to extract water for human consumption for a settlement, she said.

Some water was formed at the same time as the moon was formed, she said, and is locked in its minerals in tiny amounts. Its a concept thats hard to understand for people who are used to water flowing freely.

Water would also come from comets that have crashed on the moon. Comets are made of ice, said Dyar, and the heat of the impact melts the ice. Some of the water is preserved in permanently shadowed craters where the sun cannot reach it.

By far the most common way water gets to the moon is by solar wind, said Dyar. Solar wind is composed of highly charged particles, some of which are hydrogen ions that bond with microscopic particles. They are spraying the moon all the time, and sometimes they stick. Hydrogen is one of the components of water the H in H20.

Getting water from moon rocks would involve heating them in a still a daunting process.

One reason for serious space exploration is global politics. Americans may think the moon is theirs because they were the first to plant a flag on it. No such thing, says Dyar. Who owns the moon is still up for grabs, she said.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed first by the major powers and subsequently by about 100 other countries, governs exploration and use of celestial bodies. Among the rules: No nuclear weapons up there.

Another reason for serious space exploration: If an asteroid were to hit the earth, people could survive temporarily on the moon, said Dyar.

She is referring to the kind of asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. If you read the literature, its very pragmatic, she said. We all know the U.S. and other countries monitor the skies. What would we do?

One of the three teams to which Dyar is assigned is based at Stony Brook University in New York. It studies how to extract as much information as possible from very small rock samples from outer space.

Many of the techniques that have been used for such analysis require a pretty big sample, said Dyar, who serves as co-leader of this team, and a big sample is not always available. Mount Holyoke lab instructor and asteroid expert Tom Burbine is also on that team.

Another team, based at Brown University in Providence, R.I., works on how to identify minerals long-distance from an orbiting spacecraft. Dyar also has a lead role in this one. She and her Mount Holyoke students will train Brown faculty and graduate students on how to use complicated data processing equipment to conduct the research.

Dyar is a spectroscopist, which means that she analyzes of the distinct patterns that light makes when it bounces off surfaces.

The third team project, based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., studies how much hydrogen is trapped in minerals on the moon.

Though she holds the august academic title of Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Astronomy at Mount Holyoke, Dyar is as lively and excited as a kid when she talks about her work.

Its a fun project, she said. You gotta rememberI started working on lunar samples in 1979. Ive had a lifetime to get used to how amazing this is!

Read the full story at Mass Live.

Posted by: Soderman/SSERVI Staff Source: PAT CAHILL/ http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2014/01/mount_holyoke_professor_part_of_massive_study_of_outer_space.html

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Colonizing the Moon? | Solar System Exploration Research ...