Category Archives: Moon Colonization

Saskia Vermeylen, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University for The Conversation UK 2014-10-19 12:45:16 UTC

Whether you're into mining, energy or tourism, there are lots of reasons to explore space. Some "pioneers" even believe humanity's survival depends on colonizing celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars, both becoming central hubs for our further journey into the cosmos. Lunar land peddlers have started doing deals already a one-acre plot can be yours for just 16.75 pounds ($26.96).

More seriously, big corporations, rich entrepreneurs and even United States politicians are eyeing up the Moon and its untapped resources. Russia has plans for a manned colony by 2030 and a Japanese firm wants to build a ring of solar panels around the Moon and beam energy back to Earth.

We need to be clear about the legal validity of extraterrestrial real estate as the same ideas that were once used to justify colonialism are being deployed by governments and galactic entrepreneurs. Without proper regulation, the Moon risks becoming an extra-planetary Wild West.

To figure out whether "earthly" laws can help decide who owns what in space or if anything can be owned at all we must first disentangle sovereignty from property. Back in the 17th century, natural law theorists such as Hugo Grotius and John Locke argued that property rights exist by virtue of human nature but that they can only have legal force when they are recognized by a sovereign government. Within the context of space law, the big question is whether sovereignty reaches infinity how high must you go to escape your country?

When the U.S. was confronted with this query in the early 1950s, it lobbied for the recognition of outer space as a global commons. The Soviet Union was difficult to infiltrate to gather intelligence, so open access to Soviet air space was crucial for the U.S. during the Cold War. Perceiving outer space as a commons was also another way of preventing national sovereignty in space. But neither the USSR nor the U.S. was keen to fight out the Cold War on yet another front. Geopolitics dictated the decision to treat outer space as being non-appropriable.

This principle can be found back in Article 2 of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which clearly forbids "national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, means of use or occupation by any other means." It has been widely accepted: No one complains the various Moon landings or satellites in space have infringed their sovereignty.

However, legal commentators disagree over whether this prohibition is also valid for private appropriation. Some space lawyers have argued for the recognition of real property rights on the basis of jurisdiction rather than territorial sovereignty.

Historical records of the Space Treaty negotiations clearly indicate people were against private appropriations at the time, but an explicit prohibition never made it into Article 2. Lessons have been learned from this omission and the ban was far more explicit in the subsequent Moon Agreement of 1979. However only 16 countries signed the agreement, none of which were involved in manned space exploration, leaving it somewhat meaningless as an international standard.

Consequently, space entrepreneurs such as Dennis Hope from the Lunar Embassy Corporation seem to think that there is a loophole in Article 2 which allows private citizens to claim ownership of the Moon. Most space lawyers disagree however. They point out that states assume international responsibility for activities in space, whether by national companies or private adventurers, and therefore that the same prohibition extends to the private sector.

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Who Owns the Moon?

Anyone who grew up with the Apollo moon launches in the 1970s, along with the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" (which premiered in 1968), was left with the impression that there would be colonies on the moon any day now. Given that it's now more than 30 years later and there's been no significant progress, it's safe to assume there won't be a moon colony any time soon. But it's still a tantalizing thought. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to live, vacation and work on the moon?

Let's say we did want to colonize the moon. There are some basic needs that the moon colonists would have to take care of if this were any sort of long-term living arrangement. The most basic fundamentals include:

It would be ideal to get as much of these resources as possible from the moon itself, because shipping costs to the moon are unbelievable -- something on the order of $50,000 per pound. Just one gallon of water weighs about eight pounds, so it costs $400,000 to get it to the moon! At those rates, you want to carry as little as possible to the moon and manufacture as much as you can once you get there.

Obtaining breathable air, in the form of oxygen, is fairly easy on the moon. The soil on the moon contains oxygen, which can be harvested using heat and electricity.

Water is trickier. There's now some evidence that there may be water, in the form of buried ice that has collected at the south pole of the moon. If so, water mining might be possible, and it would solve a lot of problems. Water is necessary for drinking and irrigation, and it can also be converted to hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel.

If water isn't available on the moon, it must be imported from Earth. One way to do that would be to ship liquid hydrogen from the earth to the moon, and then react it with oxygen from the moon's soil to create water. Since water molecules are 67 percent oxygen and 33 percent hydrogen by weight, this might be the cheapest way to get water to the moon. As a side-benefit, the hydrogen can react with oxygen in a fuel cell to create electricity as it creates water.

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What if we lived on the moon? - HowStuffWorks

In the 2020s, Mars One essentially a Dutch-made extraplanetary reality TV show willsend amateur astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars. Their attempts to colonize the Red Planet will be televised which, according to a new report by aerospace researchers at MIT, might make for particularly morbid viewing. The MIT researchers analyzed the Mars One mission plan and found that the first astronaut would suffocate after 68 days. The other astronauts would die of starvation, dehydration, or incinerationin an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The analysis also concludes that 15 Falcon Heavy launches costing around $4.5 billion would be needed to support the first four Mars One crew. In short, the colonization of Mars will make for some seriously compelling TV.

Following the announcement of its one-way mission to Mars in 2012,some 200,000 people registered their interest on the Mars One website. That number has now been whittled down to 705 candidates a fairly even mix of men and women from all over the world (but mostly the US, of course!) Several teams of four astronauts (two men, two women) will now be assembled, and training will begin. The current plan is to send a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the first team of four to Mars in 2022 just eight years from now.The whole thing will be televised as a reality TV show. In the interim, a number of precursor missions supplies, life-support units, living units, and supply units will be sent to Mars ahead of the human colonizers. More colonists will be sent fairly rapidly thereafter, with 20 settlers expected by 2033.

The technology underpinningthe mission is rather nebulous, though and indeed, thats where the aerospace researchers at MIT find a number of potentially catastrophic faults. Basically, while we kind of have the technology to set up a colony on Mars, most of it is at a very low technology readiness level (TRL) and untested in a Mars-like environment. Mars One will rely heavily onlife support and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) squeezing water from Martian soil and oxygen from the atmosphere but these technologies are still a long way off large-scale, industrial use by a nascent human colony on Mars. NASAs next Mars rover will have an ISRU unit that will make oxygen from the Red Planets atmosphere of CO2 but that rover isnt scheduled to launch until 2020, just two years before the planned launch of Mars One.

Read:Musks million man march to Mars

After 68 days, oxygen levels will spike after the first wheat crop reaches maturity and then all hell will break loose

The paper prepared by the MIT researchers [PDF] is rather damning. Basically, due to the difficulty of shipping supplies to Mars, the colonists will mostly live off the land. The problem is, plants produce a lot of oxygen and in a closed environment, too much oxygen is a bad thing (things start to spontaneously explode). So, you have to vent the oxygen but we dont yet have the technology to vent oxygen without also venting the nitrogen, which is used to pressurize the various Mars One pods. As a result, air pressure will eventually get so thin that the colonists cant breathe with the first one dying of hypoxia after 68 days. Other potential modes of death are: starvation (the current Mars One plan simply doesnt contain enough calories for the colonists); dehydration; CO2 poisoning; and death by spontaneous immolation due to a rich oxygen atmosphere.

Read:NASAs Space Launch System is officially all systems go for Mars and Moon landings

The researchers also note that Mars Ones plan of sending more colonists after the original four is a bad, bad idea. Not only will this exacerbate any technological issues, but therell be an ever-increasing demand on resources like food and water, and faster wear-and-tear that will require more replacement parts. All of these factors willincrease the number of resupply craft, pushing the total cost of the project into tens of billions of dollars.

Breakdown of the first few cargo missions as part of the Mars One colonization. Note the growing percentage of ECLSS (life support) spare parts. It is expected that stuff will break down a lot on Mars, and new parts have to be flown in from Earth. (Or 3D-printed in-situ, but were not there yet.)

In short, the MIT researchers find a lot of problems with the current plans laid out by Mars One. Dutch entrepreneur and CEO of Mars One,Bas Lansdorp, disputes the contents of the MIT report, saying oxygen concentrators already exist and if oxygen levels and air pressure can be kept stable, then many of MITs other assertions about dehydration and starvation are moot.

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The first Mars One colonists will suffocate, starve, and be incinerated, according to MIT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: David M. Perry is an associate professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois. He writes regularly at the blog How Did We Get Into This Mess? Follow him on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- In October 2013, my daughter came home from school excited about Christopher Columbus. He had come to visit her class! During his visit, he told the children that he had figured out the world was round and then bravely led his crew to discover America. Then they all made telescopes.

As a father and history professor, I was caught off-guard. Columbus actually didn't figure out the world was round. He didn't really discover America, either. And telescopes weren't around until about a century after Columbus died. But what do you tell a 5-year-old who has bought into a myth? And how do you do it without constructing an anti-myth, pegging the explorer as one of the most evil people to walk the Earth? What should we tell our children about Columbus?

I asked that question of William Phillips, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and co-author of "The Worlds of Christopher Columbus," and of LeAnne Howe, the Eidson Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. In both cases, professors started from the same principle: Tell the kids the truth.

David M. Perry

The story goes that Columbus had to persevere against the odds to get support for his venture, because everyone but him believed the Earth was flat. This just isn't true. The ancient Greeks proved that the Earth was round about 2,000 years ago, and one even used the shadow of the Earth on the moon during an eclipse to estimate its circumference. The problem for Columbus is that he was bad at math and worse at geography, and everyone with an education knew it.

"He failed to get funding for a long time," Phillips wrote, "because his calculations of the earth were on the small side, he thought that dry land covered more of the sphere than it does, and he believed Japan was some 1500 miles off the coast of China." In other words, most people knew roughly the distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia but believed it was filled with a vast ocean in which Columbus would surely die.

Instead of Columbus Day, cities celebrate Indigenous People's Day

Columbus was stubborn. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he refused to give up his plan, and because he was so stubborn, he kept fighting for funding until he finally broke through to the Queen of Spain. His stubbornness also, as both professors noted, kept him from ever admitting that he hadn't reached Asia. For Columbus, the idea of a whole new continent and unknown peoples just didn't fit his worldview.

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The truth about Christopher Columbus

RICHARDSON, Texas (PRWEB) October 10, 2014

WHAT: Prodea Systems CEO and Co-Founder Anousheh Ansari will participate in a roundtable panel at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East, which focuses on innovation and disruption at the intersection of media, entertainment and technology. Ansari will partake in the Planning for 2050: Mars, Lunar Colonies & 20,000 Leagues under the Sea session, which will explore the future of space travel, private investment in space enterprises, and the colonization of the ocean, the moon and Mars.

WHO: The panel will be moderated by Tom Keene, editor-at-large of Bloomberg News and co-host of "Bloomberg Surveillance" and Bloomberg TV & Radio. Ansari will be joined by the following panelists:

Anousheh Ansari launched Prodea Systems alongside her husband, Hamid Ansari and brother-in-law Amir Ansari in 2006. That same year, Anousheh blasted off into space for an eight-day expedition aboard the International Space Station and captured headlines around the world as the first female private space explorer. She also earned a place in history as the first astronaut of Iranian descent, the first Muslim woman, and the fourth private explorer to visit space. As a successful serial entrepreneur and active proponent of world-changing technologies and social entrepreneurship, she along with her family provided the title sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million cash award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Prior to Prodea, the Ansari family founded Telecom Technologies (TTI) and developed one of the telecommunications industrys first softswitch platforms that helped enable the global adoption of Voice over IP (VoIP). TTI was acquired by Sonus Networks in 2000 for approximately $1.2 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in the telecommunications market at that time. The acquisition helped fund Prodea and the Ansari-X Prize.

WHEN: Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East will take place on October 16, 2014. The Planning for 2050: Mars, Lunar Colonies & 20,000 Leagues under the Sea session will take place at 4:00 4:45 p.m.

WHERE: Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East will be held at Location05 (509 West 34th St.) in New York.

Media or analysts interested in one-on-one meetings with Anousheh Ansari, CEO and co-founder of Prodea Systems at Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East should contact Marta Weissenborn at MartaWeissenborn(at)mcgrathpower(dot)com.

About Prodea Systems Prodea is the first company that delivered on the promise of the connected home while finally making a seamless connected life possible for everyone. The Prodea Residential Operating System (ROS) is a unified platform of the Internet of Things that enables diverse Service Providers worldwide to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver autonomous, agnostic and easy to use connectivity and services between people, data and devices. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, Prodea maintains additional offices in New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, London, Johannesburg, and Dubai, UAE. For more information about Prodea Systems, please visit: http://www.prodea.com/.

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Anousheh Ansari to Speak at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing: East Summit

David M. Perry says the truth about Christopher Columbus is often misunderstood.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: David M. Perry is an associate professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois. He writes regularly at the blog How Did We Get Into This Mess? Follow him on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- In October 2013, my daughter came home from school excited about Christopher Columbus. He had come to visit her class! During his visit, he told the children that he had figured out the world was round and then bravely led his crew to discover America. Then they all made telescopes.

As a father and history professor, I was caught off-guard. Columbus actually didn't figure out the world was round. He didn't really discover America, either. And telescopes weren't around until about a century after Columbus died. But what do you tell a 5-year-old who has bought into a myth? And how do you do it without constructing an anti-myth, pegging the explorer as one of the most evil people to walk the Earth? What should we tell our children about Columbus?

I asked that question of William Phillips, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and co-author of "The Worlds of Christopher Columbus," and of LeAnne Howe, the Eidson Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. In both cases, professors started from the same principle: Tell the kids the truth.

David M. Perry

The story goes that Columbus had to persevere against the odds to get support for his venture, because everyone but him believed the Earth was flat. This just isn't true. The ancient Greeks proved that the Earth was round about 2,000 years ago, and one even used the shadow of the Earth on the moon during an eclipse to estimate its circumference. The problem for Columbus is that he was bad at math and worse at geography, and everyone with an education knew it.

"He failed to get funding for a long time," Phillips wrote, "because his calculations of the earth were on the small side, he thought that dry land covered more of the sphere than it does, and he believed Japan was some 1500 miles off the coast of China." In other words, most people knew roughly the distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia but believed it was filled with a vast ocean in which Columbus would surely die.

Columbus was stubborn. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he refused to give up his plan, and because he was so stubborn, he kept fighting for funding until he finally broke through to the Queen of Spain. His stubbornness also, as both professors noted, kept him from ever admitting that he hadn't reached Asia. For Columbus, the idea of a whole new continent and unknown peoples just didn't fit his worldview.

Read more here:
What Columbus never did

Wernher von Braun was one of the key figures in the history of spaceflight by convincing governments to support his visions of space exploration. (credit: NASA)

In the midst of the most destructive war in history, Wernher von Braun was tasked with making it even worse by developing a ballistic missile to rain down on London: the V-2 rocket. Unfortunately for his masters, Von Brauns personal ambitions for the V-2 were somewhat different. He saw the rockets potential to achieve orbit and carry the first artificial satellite in human history. But every time he proposed this idea, his SS commanders made clear (in increasingly menacing tones) that the Fuhrer wanted a weapon, not a science fiction toy.

Von Brauns clever insubordinationssiphoning resources off from the main weapons program to pursue spaceflight research while making enough progress on the V-2 to remain credible with his superiorswas an act of high-altitude tightrope-walking at its best. He risked his life with every passing day this went on, and it became clear that his superiors eventually intended to kill the V-2 scientists to prevent the Americans or Russians from acquiring their expertise. Only by sensing the right moment and fleeing with fake documents were he and a number of his people able to escape to the American side.

Under a banner of destruction, with the strictest orders to focus only on military applications, one man somehow built, in a few brief years, the foundations for decades of peaceful space exploration, and survived to explain himself to history. Von Brauns dream never made a dent in the madness of the Third Reich, but it formed a virulent spore that would survive to infect both of the superpower heirs to his technology.

From the moment the US and Soviet Union possessed V-2 hardware, both states saw only the strategic weapons the Nazis had intended, and missed or ignored the deeper potential for more than a decade. Seeing the power to leave Earth, the banal thinking of soldiers and bureaucrats could only bookend it with an explosive return on the heads of their enemies.

Von Braun, now working for the United States, no longer had to hide his loftier ambitions, but was careful to avoid alienating his new military hosts by seeming over-enthusiastic for ideas they still didnt understand. They saw him as a strange nerd with odd fixations who might, if handled properly, give them a strategic advantage over Soviet weaponry; and he, in turn, saw them as parochial bumpkins who had to be handheld toward realizing the obvious about the technology now in their hands. The Germans dreams were given short shrift, but they were tolerated as personal quirks.

Meanwhile, the Soviets had to comb their vast, secretive empire for anyone with the expertise to understand and replicate Von Brauns captured work, and the best they could find was Sergei Koroleva man who had spent the last several years toiling in the Siberian gulag under false political accusations. Korolevs experiences and dispositions were strangely symmetric with Von Brauns in the late history of the V-2 program. His government demanded intercontinental missiles, threatened the severest personal consequences if he were to fail, and misunderstood, ignored, or were actively suspicious of, unorthodox ideas like spaceflight.

Korolev kept his head down until he could begin showing results, built up credibility and influence within the government, and sought dual-use synergies between what the Soviet army demanded and the space rockets he wanted to build. His role in the Soviet rocket program became so central, and his talents so valued, that his very identity became a top-level state secret, and he would be known until his death simply as Chief Designer.

Only from this high position was he able to, just barely, whisper subtle suggestions into the ears of the Soviet high command about the possibility for using their weapons for spaceflight. A historical moment for the Soviets was just a push of a button away, he told them, if the Politburo would allow ita moment that would invoke the envy and emulation of the entire world, without the guilt of doing anything unjust or warlike. At the risk of mere embarrassment if they failed, if they succeeded the world would stand in awe.

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The strange contagion of a dream

From where did Phobos arise or arrive? The Inner or Outer Solar System? Is it dry or wet? Should we flyby or sample &return? Orshould it be Boots or Bots? In the illustration, space probes (L-R) Phobos-Grunt 2, JPL/SAR, ARC PADME. Also, Stardusts return capsule, Phobos above Mars, the Solar Nebula and the MRO HiRISE photo of Phobos. (Photos: NASA, Illustration:T.Reyes)

Ask any space enthusiast, and almost anyone will say humankinds ultimate destination is Mars. But NASA is currently gearing up to go to an asteroid. While the space agency says its Asteroid Initiative will help in the eventual goal of putting people on Mars, what if instead of going to an asteroid, we went to Mars moon Phobos?

Three prominent planetary scientists have joined forces in a new paper in the journal Planetary and Space Science to explain the case for a mission to the moons of Mars, particularly Phobos.

Phobos occupies a unique position physically, scientifically, and programmatically on the road to exploration of the solar system, say the scientists. In addition, the moons may possibly be a source of in situ resources that could support future human exploration in circum-Mars space or on the Martian surface. But a sample return mission first could provide details on the moons origins and makeup.

The Martian moonsareriddles, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Phobos and its sibling Deimos seem like just two asteroids which were captured by the planet Mars, and they remain the last objects of the inner solar system not yet studied with a dedicated mission. But should the moons be explored with flybys or sample-return? Should we consider boots or bots?

The publications and mission concepts for Phobos and Deimos are numerous and go back decades. The authors of The Value of a Phobos Sample Return, Murchie, Britt, and Pieters, explore the full breadth of questions of why and how to explore Phobos and Deimos.

Dr. Murchie isthe principal investigator of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters CRISM instrument, a visible/infrared imaging spectrometer. He is a planetary scientist from John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) which has been at the forefront of efforts to develop a Phobos mission. Likewise, authors Dr. Britt, from the University of Central Florida, and Dr. Pieters, from Brown University, have partnered with APL and JPL in Phobos/Deimos mission proposals.

An MRO HiRise image of the Martian moon Phobos. Taken on March 23, 2008. Phobos has dimensions of 27 22 18 km, while Deimos is 15 12.2 11 km. Both were discovered in 1877 at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. (Photo: NASA/MRO/HiRISE)

APL scientists are not the only ones interested in Phobos or Deimos. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ames Research Centerand the SETI Institute have also proposed several missions to the small moons. Every NASA center has been involved at some level.

But the only mission to actually get off the ground is the Russian Space Agencys Phobos-GRUNT[ref]. The Russian mission was launched November 9, 2011, and two monthslater took a bath in the Pacific Ocean. The propulsion system failed to execute the burns necessary to escape the Earths gravity and instead, its orbit decayed despite weeks of attempts to activate the spacecraft. But thats a whole other story.

See the article here:
Making the Case for a Mission to the Martian Moon Phobos

Why is Russia Going to the Moon?
Russian officials confirmed plans for a lunar expedition, but what do they plan to do once they get there? Follow Christian Bryant: http://www.twitter.com/br...

By: Newsy Science

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Why is Russia Going to the Moon? - Video

RUSSIA: US space tourism firm Space Adventures is offering a spaceflight around the moon to private tourists on "proven" Russian Soyuz spacecraft - saying that the sponsors will not have to wait for long for their trip.

Space Adventures has posted a statement describing its 'Circumlunar' mission on its website.

"Using flight-proven Russian space vehicles we will fly two private citizens and one professional cosmonaut on a free return trajectory around the far side of the moon. They will come to within 100km of the moon's surface," the statement said.

The exact price of the space trip is not listed. "The price of the spaceflight depends on the vehicle you choose, the timing and the exact mission profile."

Meanwhile, Space Adventures estimates that the first mission will kick off by 2018.

Some of the main attractions on the journey will include an "illuminated far side of the moon" and "Earth rising above the surface of the moon."

The space adventure will begin with the launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. The travelers will then disembark at the International Space Station where they will spend 10 days.

A second rocket will then launch a Lunar Module, which would consist of a lunar living module and a propulsion module.

The Soyuz spacecraft will rendezvous with the Lunar Module in low-Earth orbit. The other part of the journey will take six days, according to the company.

Space travel has been making waves in the entrepreneurial world of space discovery.

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Space tourism firm offers flight around the moon on Soyuz craft