Space development and space science together, an historic opportunity

Abstract

The national space programs have an historic opportunity to help solve the global-scale economic and environmental problems of Earth while becoming more effective at science through the use of space resources. Space programs will be more cost-effective when they work to establish a supply chain in space, mining and manufacturing then replicating the assets of the supply chain so it grows to larger capacity. This has become achievable because of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. It is roughly estimated that developing a lunar outpost that relies upon and also develops the supply chain will cost about 1/3 or less of the existing annual budgets of the national space programs. It will require a sustained commitment of several decades to complete, during which time science and exploration become increasingly effective. At the end, this space industry will capable of addressing global-scale challenges including limited resources, clean energy, economic development, and preservation of the environment. Other potential solutions, including nuclear fusion and terrestrial renewable energy sources, do not address the root problem of our limited globe and there are real questions whether they will be inadequate or too late. While industry in space likewise cannot provide perfect assurance, it is uniquely able to solve the root problem, and it gives us an important chance that we should grasp. What makes this such an historic opportunity is that the space-based solution is obtainable as a side-benefit of doing space science and exploration within their existing budgets. Thinking pragmatically, it may take some time for policymakers to agree that setting up a complete supply chain is an achievable goal, so this paper describes a strategy of incremental progress. The most crucial part of this strategy is establishing a water economy by mining on the Moon and asteroids to manufacture rocket propellant. Technologies that support a water economy will play an important role leading toward space development.Please cite this article in press as: P.T. Metzger, Space development and space science together, an historic opportunity, Space Policy (2016), http://dx.

Who Will Be the Members of Society 5.0? Towards an Anthropology of Technologically Posthumanized Future Societies

“…Examples of developments in recent history that might be cited as milestones along this path to the technological posthumanization of societies and the advent of Society 5.0 include the development of the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) in 1945 (Mauchly 1980); the creation of the first physical artificial neural networks, beginning around 1960 (Adhikari and Kim 2014); the introduction of the first commercial personal computers, in the 1970s (Freiberger and Swaine 2000); the first computer to win a match against a reigning world chess champion, in 1997 (Campbell et al 2002); the establishment in 2001 of what was likely the first fully automated "lights-out factory" that requires no human workers, operated by the Japanese robotics company FANUC (Metzger 2016); the creation of the first commercial deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants, around 2002 (Gardner 2013); the first use of therapeutic social robots (e.g., PARO), around 2004 (Shibata et al 2004); the introduction of robot chefs that prepare food and robot waiters that deliver food to tables in restaurants, around 2006 (Hong 2006;Chen 2016;Nguyen 2016); the growth of the Internet of Things to include roughly 18 billion networked devices (Nordrum 2016), along with the initial mass marketing of voice-activated smart home assistants (Chung et al 2017;López et al 2017) and VR game systems (Chang et al 2016;Shelstad et al 2017), all occurring around 2016; and the launch in 2018 of the first driverless car service in the US (Buncombe 2018; Young 2018).…”

Research streams on digital transformation from a holistic business perspective: a systematic literature review and citation network analysis

“…Cluster 4 is quite diverse. We excluded specialized topics in the field of space science (Metzger 2016), mobile services (Qi et al 2014) and football robots (Bi et al 2017). Among representative works within this cluster, a visualization platform for IoT to control and monitor wireless sensor networks (Bi et al 2016), resource allocation (Pillai and Rao 2016) and resource bundling (Guo et al 2016) are examined.…”

Commercial lunar propellant architecture: A collaborative study of lunar propellant production

“…60 Based on heritage DOE/NASA designs. 61 Refer to [169] 62 This conversion cycle scales well to high power levels (per Figure 27) and has strong heritage. 63 This conversion cycle is simple, robust, and flight-ready.…”

“…Unit costs for each of these elements through the study period are shown in Table 17 [123] below. 166 http://www.isruinfo.com//docs/LDEM_Draft4-updated.pdf 167 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19890004515.pdf 168 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20020016967.pdf 169 https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/old_site/academics/484S03/oasis_docs/OASIS_FY01_FINAL.PDF Table 17: Development of Unit Costs for STARLITE 10-yr Lunar Architecture Economic analysis included systems-level, operational and life cycle costing, and modeled the costs and benefits of ISRU vs. an all-expendable baseline for steady-state human missions to the Moon and Mars [123]. It is evident from Figure 74 [123] below that lunar-derived propellant can linearize the rocket equation.…”

“…The only way we could deal with threats on these scales is to have an economy on equivalently gargantuan scales, which is not possible within the spatial and energy limitations of a planet. However, once a supply chain is initiated outside the planet with robotic labor and solar system-scale resources, it will take only a few decades for it to expand itself through exponential growth to the scale necessary to make human life, and all species of life, safe on a planet in our region of space [168] [169]. This may have seemed like science fiction in the past, but the emergence of robotics and the prospects for putting industry in space have made this a reality we can address today.…”