Transcript Orbital Space Settlements

Orbital Space Settlements
and a Solar System Wide
Web
Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames
November 2000
Humanity could be life's ticket to the stars
(The dinosaurs weren’t space-faring)
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/shuttle-mir/photos/sts71/mir-imax/hmg0018.jpg
People Live Everywhere
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Every continent, including Antarctica
Hottest, driest deserts
Coldest, iciest regions
Wettest rain forests
On water
For short periods, in orbit
6,000,000,000 people on Earth
Life is Everywhere
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On nearly all land areas
In nearly all waters
In the rocks under the Earth
In near-boiling water
In ice
On desert rocks
On a spacecraft on the Moon
Next Target: Orbit
• Your lifetime: thousands of people
living in orbit
• A few centuries: most of humanity in
orbit.
• Next
millenium:
generation ships
to the stars
Orbital Space Settlement
• Who? Ordinary people.
• What? Artificial ecosystems inside
gigantic rotating, pressurized
spacecraft.
• Where? In orbit; near Earth at first.
• How? With great difficulty.
• Why? To grow.
• When? Decades.
• How much will it cost? If you have to
ask, you can't afford it.
Who
• Today: highly trained astronauts.
– $20-40 million tourist trip to Mir
– Survivor in Space
• Tomorrow: everyone who wants to go.
– 100 - 10,000,000 people per colony
– Ultimately, thousands or even millions of
colonies
• Sounds unrealistic?
– A hundred years ago nobody had ever flown in
an airplane.
– Today ~ 500 million person/flights per year.
What
• A space settlement is a home in orbit,
not just a place to work.
• Live on the inside of air-tight,
kilometer scale, rotating spacecraft.
Where
• In orbit, not on a planet or moon.
• Moon (1/6g) and Mars (3/8g) gravity
too low.
– Children will not have the bones and
muscles needed to visit Earth.
– Orbital colonies rotate for 1g.
• Continuous solar energy.
• Large-scale construction easier.
• Much closer: hours not days or
months.
How
• Materials
– Moon
• Oxygen, silicon, metals, some hydrogen for
water.
– Near-Earth Asteroids
• Wide variety of materials including water,
carbon, metals, and silicon.
– Radiation protection
• Life support: Biosphere II scientific
failure, engineering success!
• Transportation critical and difficult.
Why
• Growth = survival.
• Largest asteroid converted to space
settlements can produce living area
~500 times the surface area of the
Earth.
– 3D object to 2D shells
– Uncrowded homes for trillions of people.
– New land.
• Nice place to live.
Real Estate Features
• Great views
• Low/0-g recreation
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Human powered flight
Cylindrical swimming pools
Dance, gymnastics
Sports: soccer
• Environmental independence
• Custom living
– Weather art
When
• A few decades should be sufficient to
build the first one.
• No serious effort now.
• Technology requirements:
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Safer, cheaper launch
Extraterrestrial materials
Large scale orbital construction
Closed ecological life support systems
And much more
How much will it cost?
• If you have to ask, you can’t afford
it.
– How much did Silicon Valley cost?
• Orbital space settlements will be far
more expensive:
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all materials imported
transportation difficult
build all life support
hostile environment
new techniques must be developed
Key Problem: Launch
$/kg
$/me
(73 kg)
Failure rate
22,000
1,606,000
0.5-1%
2,600-30,000
189,8002,190,000
6 - 33%
5
365
1/2,000,000
2010 NASA goal
2,200
160,600
1/10,000
2020 NASA goal
220
16,060
1/10,000
Shuttle
Commercial
launcher
airline
Launch Data Systems
• Major opportunities for information
technology.
– SIAT: wiring trend data were very
difficult to develop.
• Some launch failures caused by
software
– Sea Launch second flight
– Ariane V
– The comma “,”
Information Power Grid
• IPG: integrated nationwide network of computers,
databases, and instruments.
• The Network is the Computer
• IPG value
– help reduce launch costs and failure rates
– support for automation necessary to exploit solar system
exploration by thousands of spacecraft
• Problems:
– low bandwidths
– long latencies
– intermittent communications
Integration Timeline
NAS
•Single building
•A few supercomputers
•Many workstations
•Mass storage
•Visualization IPG
•Nation wide
•Remote access
•Many supercomputers
•Condor pools
This talk
•Mass storage
•Solar system wide
•Instruments
•Terrestrial Grid
•Satellites
•Landers and Rovers
•Deep space comm.
Relevant IPG Research
• Reservations
– insure CPUs available for close encounter
• Co-scheduling
– insure DSN and CPU resources available
• Network scheduling
• Proxies for firewalls
– Extend to represent remote spacecraft to hide:
• low bandwidth
• long latency
• intermittent communication
IPG Launch Data System
Vision
• Complete database: human and machine
readable
• Software agent architecture for
continuous examination of the database
• Large computational capabilities
• Model based reasoning
• Wearable computers/augmented reality
• Multi-user virtual reality optimized for
launch decision support
• Automated computationally-intensive
software testing
2020 Tourism
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Hotel
Doctors
Maids
Cooks
Recreational directors
Reservation clerks
etc.
These may be the first colonists.
Low/0-g
Handicapped/Elderly Colony
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No wheelchairs needed.
No bed sores.
Easy to move body even when weak.
Never fall and break hip.
Grandchildren will love to visit.
Need good medical facilities.
– Telemedicine
• Probably can’t return to Earth.
AsterAnts: A Concept for
Large-Scale Meteoroid Return
Deliver
extraterrestrial
materials to LEO
Support solar
system
colonization
Al Globus, MRJ, Inc.
Bryan Biegel, MRJ Inc.
Steve Traugott, Sterling Software, Inc.
NASA Ames Research Center
Near Earth Object
Materials
• Mining of large NEOs very difficult
to automate
– Mining involves large forces
– Materials properties are unknown and
variable
• Capture of small NEO may not require
human life support
• 10 million - 1 billion 10m diameter
NEOs
• Far more 1m diameter NEOs
Solar Sail in Earth Orbit
World Space Foundation
Znamia 1993
Guy Pignolet
• 20 meter diameter spinning mirror
• deployed from Progress resupply vehicle
Solar Sailing 1
Net force
Photons
Sun
Sail
Solar Sailing 2
Orbital velocity
Outward spiral
Propulsive force
Sail
Orbital velocity
Sun
Inward spiral
Sail
Propulsive force
NEO Characterization
Project
Solar System Exploration
• High launch cost of launch = small number
exploration satellites
– one-of-a-kind personnel-intensive ground
stations.
• Model based autonomy = autonomous
spacecraft
• Requirement drivers
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Autonomous spacecraft use of IPG resources
low bandwidths
long latencies
intermittent communications
Each Spacecraft
• Represented by an on-board software
object.
• Communicates with terrestrial proxies to
hide communication problems
– know schedule for co-scheduling and reservations
• Data stored in Web-accessible archives
– virtual solar system
• Controlled access using IPG security for
computational editing
Spacecraft Use of IPG
• Autonomous vehicles require occasional
large-scale processing
– trajectory analysis
– rendezvous plan generation
• Proxy negotiates for CPU resources, saves
results for next communication window
• Proxy reserves co-scheduled resources for
data analysis during encounters
Conclusion
The colonization of the solar system
could be the next great adventure
for humanity. There is nothing but
rock and radiation in space, no living
things, no people. The solar system is
waiting to be brought to life by
humanity's touch. And computer
science can help.
NEO Composition
• Widely varied, includes large amounts
of:
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Water
Carbon
Metals, particularly iron
Silicon
• Spectral studies don’t agree very well
with meteorite analysis
Detection of 1-meter
diameter meteoroids
• Current Earth-based optical asteroid
telescopes
– Smallest found < 10m diameter
– Maximum 1m detection distance ~ 106 km
– 2,000 to 200,000 within range at any given
time
– 5-7 hit the Earth each day
• Radar required for accurate trajectory
and rotation rate
Solar sail experience
• Solar sailing used by Mariner 10
mission to Mercury for attitude
control
– Enabled multiple returns to Mercury by
reducing control gas consumption
• Ground deployment test by World
Space Foundation
• Zero-g deployment test by U3P in
aircraft
• Russian Znamia mirror February, 1993
Solar sail meteoroid return
• Characteristic acceleration of 1 mm/s2
produces 1.3 km/s delta-v per month
• 170-182 meters square sail for 500 kg
NEO return at 0.25 mm/s2 characteristic
acceleration
• Once design is refined, mass production of
AsterAnts spacecraft
• ?NASA build first one open source, then
pay for meteoroid materials by the ton?
Summary
• Capture ~1 m diameter NEOs (Near
Earth Objects)
• Return to LEO (Low Earth Orbit)
• Solar sails for propulsion
• Start with one small spacecraft, scale
up with copies
• Early returns have scientific value,
later materials for construction and
resupply
Conclusion
• Benefits
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small down payment (one small spacecraft)
scales by mass production
missions can probably be automated
no consumables
• Challenges
– 1m NEO detection difficult
– solar sails have little flight experience
– geosynchronous applications require space
manufactured sails