[ExI] Fwd: [luf-team] The International Open Space Initiative

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 2:26 PM
Subject: [luf-team] The International Open Space Initiative
To: luf-team at yahoogroups.com




Mike's post on cliff dwellings and the discussion on excavated
habitats brings up an important topic and concept I've been wanting to
introduce here for consideration. As I've been finishing the section
on Avalon in TMP2, I've come to realize there is great and overlooked
potential in the concept of telerobotic pre-settlement as a means to
cultivate public interest, support, and participation. In fact, I
think there is great potential in this concept as the basis of an Open
Source space program that can stand independently of the rest of TMP
while also providing a venue for disseminating the TMP vision.
Discussing this topic in the open manufacturing and Maker circles,
I've noticed much interest in the idea of space telerobotics because
of its participatory accessibility -it potential for many people to
actively participate instead of simply being an audience for the
exploits of the elite.

Recently, we saw a brief wave of global public interest emerge around
the X-Prize competitions. This was driven largely by the impression of
accessibility for the common man. The X-Prize was the realization of
the fantasy of the Astronaut Farmer, creating the impression that
space could, at last, be something many people could participate in.
But then reality set in as the celebrities and zillionaires stepped
forward to steal the spotlight. This was not about the Astronaut
Farmer. This was about Astronaut Oligarchs. Rich people's follies.
Since then the public attention for the X-Prize has waned -
particularly with concerns about the failing global economy and the
resentment toward the upper-classes engendered by their continued
blatant excesses in the midst of it. X-Prize organizers -and the new
space entrepreneurs in general- seem to be retreating into an
increasingly elite and exclusive community that the mainstream public
simply cannot relate to with competitions and events they have no hope
of participating in. And so, once again, we're all outside the fence
looking in. That's what made NASA culturally irrelevant and it's
making the new space industry the same.

But with the concept of telerobotic settlement we have something very
different. The hard reality is that most of us are not astronaut
material, most of us have no chance of becoming employees of the old
or new space companies and participating in building and launching
'real' orbital rockets, and most of us will never be able to afford
space tourism. But a very large number of people -all over the world
and across all demographics- can and do build robots as a hobby. This
makes the development of systems for telerobotic pre-settlement more
immediately accessible than any other area or aspect of space
development. It's the ultimate model train layout -the kind you might
some day move into! And even if you ultimately don't, there's pride in
knowing your electric progeny did. This really is something where some
garage-shop tinkerer from Nowhere can come up with ideas that turn
into hardware on Mars. This is also extremely relevant to education
where, from grade school to university, robots are not a common
educational tool. This would be one of the major sources of
participation. Sure, one still ultimately needs the rockets and such
to deliver this hardware. But, for robots, the needs there are far
more modest than manned space flight (we could theoretically get to
the Moon using Zenit class launch capability -and Zenits are close to
being garage-shop hardware today) and we don't have to worry about
that right away. There's a lot of interesting and creative work to do
ahead of time in the development of the settlement systems -work that
doesn't actually require NASA-like budgets and facilities to do,
doesn't need the elites, yet produces tangible results and very
practical spin-offs. This is something that lends itself to open
competition through public/social events needing no special facilities
and whose results are as useful on Earth as in space.

Consider, in order for telerobotic pre-settlement to realize the
capability for human habitation it must reduce the technologies of a
comprehensive industrial infrastructure -the means to go from dirt and
rocks to microchips- to systems on the scale of home appliances with
near-total automation. Consider the implications of that for how the
existing industrial infrastructure on Earth works. The ability to make
anything one needs freely located anywhere and in a progressively
smaller, cheaper, and more automated package. That more revolutionary
than human space flight. Then there are the manned excavated habitats
themselves, as I've described previously. Here's something that can be
demonstrated in very plausible mock-ups in many locations, has an even
lower bar of sophistication for participation, and direct re-
application to relief architecture, low-cost housing, mainstream
housing, and so on. A telerobotic space program has more direct
terrestrial spin-offs than all past space activity combined. It's not
just more accessible, it's vastly more relevant to our everyday life
because it all has impact on how me make things -practical things like
our own homes- right here on Earth.

So I've arrived at a proposal for an International Open Space
Initiative; a global public space program based on open source
technology and the objective of telerobotic/automated pre-settlement
of the Moon and Mars with the goal of realizing an infrastructure to
support sustainable human colonization. This program would be based on
several elements; an evolving committee-managed 'settlement systems
architecture' that defines the basic collection of systems of the
settlement and the individual capabilities they require, a public
event program intended to host competitions and exposition around the
world for individual system designs, several remote (Iceland, desert
southwest, etc.) -and remotely operated- test settlements for the
latest deployable robotic systems with continuous live web access, and
several manned habitat mock-up settlements which are used to test and
showcase architectural and interior design elements and can be built
most anywhere or even made portable.

Much like the administration of Linux development, an architectural
committee would establish a working definition of the settlement, its
individual systems, and their functions, necessary capabilities,
standards for ruggedness, modular interface standards, etc. A public
forum on this would allow open community input into this evolving
settlement architecture. From this proposals for specific systems are
used as the basis of open design and engineering competitions -the
products of which are all considered Open Source content. At regional
events across the globe and across each year, individual designs are
showcased and built systems placed in tests and competition against
the architectural standards and against each other. The ultimate
winners of these competitions then have their systems 'deployed' -
using working lander systems deployed from aircraft- for testing at
one or more field test sites where an actual working model of a
telerobotic settlement is built to put these machines through their
paces. The field test settlements would be functionally identical to
the real space settlements, having to accomplish the same tasks, build
the same structures and capabilities, and using natural materials and
shipped-in equivalents of known lunar and Martian natural raw
materials. Just like the real thing, they would be teleoperated from
one or more distant control centers linked purely by
telecommunications. Human activity on the site would be limited to
dealing with major failures, assisting in the removal of failed
hardware, and deployment of systems prior to the availability of test
lander systems -usually using special dump and drop sites some
distance from the main settlement site. The sites would be chosen to
supply analogous geology/geography and in some cases may be divided
between open surface complex sites and excavated complex sites where
analogs for both cannot be found in close enough proximity.

A similar approach would be employed for the development of manned
habitat systems and components, divided into several phases based on
the several phases of manned habitat development. These have much more
flexible options for their showcase test sites but underground
facilities might still be used for the sake of added realism. These
would also include their own compliment of robots as adaptations of
the pre-settlement robots would likely be employed in maintenance of
these habitats when the number of human residents is small. It's much
more difficult to truly replicate an analogous environment for the
human habitats beyond the topology of spaces because we can't provide
different gravity and low-pressure atmosphere environments, But the
employ of CELSS technology and systems of indoor farming/gardening,
domestic industry, and so on are still likely to be featured in this.

Eventually launch and transorbital systems would become part of this -
something which would overlap MUOL development- but this would be a
much later area of development pursued when the IOSI has a much larger
degree of gravitas. Generally, there's nothing new needed in rocketry
for this program. There's nothing for this sort of development to
prove. What we have at-hand in this respect would actually be quite
sufficient. Where new challenges in rocketry are an issue is in
'rough' and 'soft' lander technology and fabrication, on-orbit
construction of transorbital spacecraft supported by small scale
launch capability, and so on and that would still be largely within
the realm of the same level of sophistication and participation as the
telerobotics.

Philanthropic support for the IOSI would be sought to sponsor events,
test sites and their control centers, grants for development of more
promising systems or school programs, scholarships for outstanding
student participants, regional fab labs for public access, media and
web sites, and program marketing. Because there's so much practical
commercial spin-off potential from this, we can anticipate that, at a
certain critical mass of attention, corporate sponsorship is likely
even given the open source nature of all the technology developed and
employed. It's taken a while, but a lot of companies are starting to
grasp the potential in open source and when they realize what can come
out of this they will see the product potential there for them to
exploit. Unlike the X-Prize support network, we can anticipate the
communications and computing industries to have most interest. This
could be the sort of thing people like Steve Wozniac have been waiting
for. National space agency support would also be likely, though most
likely in a bottom-up manner. The IOSI will offer engineers in these
agencies a venue to independently explore concepts that they cannot
get 'official' support for from administrations with less rational
space agendas. Eventual awareness of the cultural gravitas of the
program will lead to more official participation as agencies realize
the public awareness and goodwill benefits offered. This being an
international effort, there could be some competitiveness here as
support from smaller, more nascent, and more imaginative space
agencies in smaller countries draws in the agencies of the larger
nations by making them appear less progressive. This international
approach is a key element to this concept. IOSI would be something
that has never existed before; a space program that truly belongs to
the people of the world and not just governments of superpower
nations. Citizens of every country can have a part to play in this.

I think this concept represents something we can actually do now, in
the present, with at-hand resources. It wouldn't take a million
dollars or some sugar daddy. The only resource the LUF is really
missing for getting this off the ground is Makers. There just doesn't
seem to be too many people among us with an active interest in making
things even for fun and the key to getting this started is getting a
crude mock-up settlement made from scratch to illustrate this concept
and draw a little attention from the media and the Maker and Hacker
factions of the blogosphere. We're talking RC hobby stuff here. It
shouldn't be that hard. But can we actually do even that? Is there the
will?

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com

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- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
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