Category Archives: Transhuman News

Is water the new oil of space?

It may be to Middle Eastern oil states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are looking at space as a way to diversify out of the earthly benefits of fossil fuel.

Middle East oil states are investing in satellite technology and trying to transform their domestic economies into digital economies and knowledge-based economies, said Tom James of Navitas Resources, an energy consultant based in London and Singapore.

As space colonizers such as Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos (owner of The Washington Post) aspire to shrink the cost of space travel, interest has picked up among oil states and others in how to power space settlements using water and minerals mined from the heavens.

Oil states are investing in companies and infrastructure that could one day mine minerals and water found on the moon and in asteroids.

They are investing in it in order to attract business to the Middle East, James said. Oil states have large, empty spaces, relatively small populations and are located near the equator. The UAE has launched a multipronged effort to establish a space industry in which it has invested more than $5 billion, and that includes four satellites already in space and another due to launch in 2018.

The Middle East is ideal for launching rockets and spaceships, James said. Its the long-term solution. Oil and gas may not run forever. So they are looking to invest and be part of the new, future economy.

The water is critical. It can be turned into hydrogen to fuel the spaceship, oxygen for breathing or left untouched for drinking and everyday use. Requiring only a four-day trip and containing lots of ice, the moon is a prime candidate for resource extraction.

The interest in space mining and industrialization has picked up in recent years as Musk, Bezos and others push outward. Part of the key to unlocking affordable space travel and space industrialization is finding extraterrestrial materials such as water and minerals that do not have to be rocketed up from Earth.

Goldman Sachs wrote a recent research note explaining that space mining could be more realistic than perceived. The bank in the same report said the storage of water as a fuel could be a game changer by creating orbital gas stations.

Most of the minerals will remain for use in space. Some rare, highly valuable commodities could be brought back to Earth. Goldman Sachs, for instance, was quoted in a 2012 interview with Planetary Resources that estimated that a football field-size asteroid could contain up to $50 billion worth of platinum.

Asteroid mining could very quickly supply an emerging on-orbit manufacturing economy with nearly all the raw materials needed, according to the Goldman Sachs report.

The possibilities are beginning to register with the business sector.

Within the next five years, James said, mining and energy companies will start thinking about space mining before the shareholders start asking, What is your strategy? and they answer, Oh, we dont have one.

The technology already exists. NASA launched a billion-dollar mission in September to vacuum materials from an 2,000-foot-wide asteroid called Bennu. The spacecraft is scheduled to sidle up to the asteroid in 2018, extend its arm and pull in its cargo. The ship will return to Earth a couple of years later.

But it is unclear whether mining on a wider scale is a real business, said Paul Chodas, an astronomer and asteroid expert with NASA.

The technology is there, but its not simple. Asteroids travel through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Tracking asteroids and determining their composition is difficult.

Its hard to determine which ones will have the most valuable minerals, Chodas said. He said it is doable, but the question is cost-benefit. Is it worth the cost? We dont know yet. There is simply more work to be done to determine whether space mining is profitable. But its promising.

Chris Lewicki is chief executive of Planetary Resources, a Seattle-area company studying asteroids to find one that is an appropriate candidate for mining.

Lewicki said the mining industry is a natural to make the first move when it comes to recovering space minerals because of its earthbound expertise. He foresees a small, robotic mining operation drilling for water on an asteroid in as soon as about 10 years.

This is how [the mining industry] continues, Lewicki said. Mining asteroids isnt a space project. Its a resource project. In the same way having minerals and materials are very important for our economy, space becomes a new medium for furthering that economy.

The regulatory phase got a major boost in 2015, when President Barack Obama signed legislation recognizing asteroid resource property rights.

The law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.

In addition to the UAEs space industry, Bloomberg News reports that the Saudis signed a pact with Russia in 2015 for cooperation on space exploration. Abu Dhabi is an investor in Richard Bransons space tourism venture, Virgin Galactic.

Several private companies, including Deep Space Industries, Planetary Resources and Shackleton Energy, are trying to crack the mining potential.

If you have any significant human activity in space, then you are going to need resources, said Peter Stibrany, chief strategist and business developer for Deep Space Industries. It will get too difficult to launch everything from the ground.

Deep Space Industries is four years old and living off seed money from investors and founders. Stibrany said the company is in the technology development stage and working to create delivery systems for lower orbit launches.

He said mining space resources faces what he calls a four-dimensional problem.

The first two are technological and regulatory, which are being addressed.

While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower, according to the Goldman Sachs report. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each, and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6 billion.

James pointed to nano-sats, small satellites priced relatively inexpensively at $2 million each, far less than the hundreds of millions needed to place current satellites in orbit.

The third concern is the lack of a current market in asteroid resources. That should resolve itself when the space population hits critical mass, demanding infrastructure.

Then a business will follow if investors see that a reasonable return is likely over a reasonable amount of time with appropriate risks. That is the fourth hurdle.

The end game, Stibrany said, is that if you have 1,000 or 10,000 people living and working in space, there is no practical way that is going to work without using in-space resources.

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Middle East oil states investing companies, infrastructure to one day ... - The Denver Post

April 28, 2017 Science fiction has long painted space settlements as inevitable, and talk of Martian brick-building and life-supporting gardens makes it feel closer than ever. But some suggest a simpler path to long-term living in space: orbital habitats near Earth.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk placed colonization underserious consideration last fall at theInternational Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico,when he announced his intention to bring 1 million people to Mars. But while the presentation was heavy on rocket technicalities, it left out details ofhow colonists will survive, much less raise children in a high-radiation, low-gravity environment millions of miles away.

NASA contractor and colonization advocate Al Globus says theres a radically easier way:large, round habitats known as ONeill cylinders that orbit nearby, spinning at just the right speed to create the sensation of normal gravity inside.

Its tough to do things 50 million kilometers away, he says.

Nestled into the protective bubble of Earths magnetic field, such a colony could sidestep some of the biological challengesposed by Martian living to focus on the immediate technical problems of space construction and resource recycling. Plus, it would be close. Whether you need a new carbon dioxide scrubber or a quick escape, help would be hours, not months, away.

Indeed, we don't really know how livable we can make Mars. Musk, NASA headquarters, the movies, all assume that [living in] one-third gravity will be essentially the same as [living in Earth] gravity, says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. But we have zero data to support that assumption. If it turns out that one-third gravity has the same physiological effects on humans as zero gravity, then Mars is not an option for long-term colonization in the way that Musk is thinking.

Advocates expect humans to adapt as they have in the past. President of the Mars Society Robert Zubrin compares settling Mars to settling the Earth's Northern Hemisphere: We evolved in Kenya. Winters would have killed an unshielded human in a single night.

Princeton physicist Gerard ONeill first crunched the numbers decades agofor the design that now bears his name,and found no theoretical obstacles to building miles-long habitats free from the punishing forces that batter Earthly structures.

Globus has updated that work with plans for a more modest starting point, a third-of-a-mile-wide cylinder in Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO), where he envisions it supporting hundreds to thousands of people in a relatively low-radiation environment with Earthlike pseudo-gravity.

The curved interior of Kalpana One, a roughly 800 by 1000 foot cylindrical space habitat that engineers calculate could support 3,000 people.

Bryan Versteeg/spacehabs.com

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Caption

But theres no such thing as a free lunch, especially in space. If concerns about gravity and radiation hinder a Mars colony, material scarcity threatens the creation of orbital settlements. A proper ONeill cylinder would need millions of tons of rock and metal.

Earth-launched materials could support early, smaller habitats, but more robust colonies would eventually require resources from the moon and nearby asteroids.

If you want to get less dependent on Earth then you have to develop a transportation system that can get lunar materials.... This is not an impossible task. This is merely difficult, Globus says with the characteristic optimism of a space engineer.

But schemes to mine and shuttle raw materials seem impracticable to many experts. Dr. Zubrin, for one, is skeptical. Its a lot easier to settle a planet than to build one, he says.

Globus counters that Mars is a big place, and no single site will offer all the necessary materials. Developing a transportation system on Mars is difficult too.... Its probably easier on Mars, but on the other hand its also 50 million kilometers away, he explains.

He cautions against what Dr. ONeill originally called the mental hangup of assuming that worlds are inherently easier to colonize than open space: You have to build all the same stuff on Mars that you have to build in orbit. You need pressure vessels, you need radiation shielding (which we actually dont need in ELEO), you need a power system, you need life support.

Either type of settlement would be highly dependent on Earth for decades to centuries, and, for Globus, the shipping costs alone justify starting closer to home.

Neither vision would come cheap.Space agencies will help, but some economic drive is necessary for sustained colonization, and experts have settled on two candidates: entrepreneurial settlers and rich tourists.

The Mars camp favors a pioneering model, much like how Americans spread west. I think that Mars is gonna be a great place to go, said Musk at Guadalajara. It will be the planet of opportunity.

Zubrin sees Mars in a similar light, a rich but harsh environment ill-suited for vacationing. Pioneering is for people with a stoic ethic who believe that happiness is a life where you can accomplish great deeds. It will be a real long time before space, even Earth orbit, is a place of safety and comfort.

He predicts a Mars colony would become "a pressure cooker for invention.

Globus, however, suggests that ticket sales could drive development. No one knows the size of the space-tourism market, but private individuals have paid tens of millions of dollars to visit the ISS, and more than 600 people have put down large deposits for spots on Virgin Galactics waiting list for five minutes in space.

The key to expanding that market, in Globuss opinion, would be habitats big enough to keep even pampered tourists happy.

"Most people dont want to live in what basically boils down to some huts connected by tunnels under [30 feet] of stuff [on Mars], he explains, adding that it would be easier to build large structures in orbit than on Mars.

Globus sees small-scale tourism as the path to large-scale colonies, starting with orbiting hotels much like the onesBigelow Aerospace is developing. A hotel is not a whole lot different from a settlement. It has to be pressurized. It might want to recycle its air. It might want to rotate, he says.

NASA's Dr. McKay points to Antarctica as precedent for tourists paying thousands to visit an inhospitable place: Their demand and resources enable an infrastructure that enables me to do research there. I love that model. I see that model as applicable to the moon, to space, and maybe even to Mars.

Floating cylinders and world-based colonies have at least one thing in common: Both seem highly implausible.

But big thinking demands strong justification.Musk frames the enterprise as a response to existential threats, but McKay questions the assertion that space colonies are the obvious first line of defense, mentioning arctic seed banks and massive underground bunkers as survival strategies that might take priority.

Globus finds the existential argument convincing, but offers a second motivation: a moral responsibility to spread life beyond Earth. No other species is even remotely in a position to settle space.... Its our duty.

Space settlements may be science fiction today, but lunar landers and flying cars once were, too. Classifying a concept as such neither assures its failure nor guarantees its promise. But for now, questions and dreams abound while firm answers are few.

Long term, we need to determine if [colonization is] possible, says McKay. Were assuming that its possible ... but I want to emphasize that we dont know that its possible.

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To colonize space, start closer to Earth - Christian Science Monitor