Commercialization of Space

Letter to Dr. Tony Phillips, who puts on the Science at NASA Podcast:

Dr. Phillips,

Thank you for taking the time to put on the Science at NASA podcast. It's great. I enjoy listening to it in Spanish, too, as a good way to brush up my language skills.

I listen and dream about space and how we approach it politically, and this seemingly huge hurdle of getting to our next step. Space has always been a governmental concern, and as such, will be forever stalled by the politics of publics funding. Commercialization is the key to getting lots of people into space. We always worry about how someone is going to make a profit on space, and I think we have to prime the pump. We want a robust movement, almost to the point where you have a space gold rush. Private investors throwing investment money at getting into space would make for rapid advances in space travel. I think the government should partner with someone like Martin Marietta (who has expertise in both space travel and mining) and go to the asteroids with the dual mission of learning to deflect Earth-killer satellites, and mining and exploiting the mineral (and liquid and hydrocarbon) riches of the asteroid belt. An asteroid cycler - a take on the Martian cycler concept where you put a large ship - almost a space station, in orbit between the Earth orbit and the asteroid belt, and people simply hop on one end and jump off the other. These things would be huge, with artificial gravity in the form of centrifugal spin and massive slag shields against cosmic radiation. Once there, you do the most important first work, monitoring and categorizing the belt. Then you would employ proximity gravimetric techniques to change killer asteroid orbits (hover close for long enough, and you exert a small force on the orbit). You could also use selective albedo alteration, inducing a spin or movement by "painting" one side of the asteroid. Additionally, you practice landing, mining, and physically moving asteroids in a more direct manner, possibly employing slug driver magnetic rails with iron for reaction mass.

On another subject, I would be interested in knowing if equipping Lunar Satellites with Ion Drives would be sufficient to maintain polar lunar orbits. On your 11/29/06 podcast, you discussed the gravimetric anomalies that degrade lunar orbits. I understand that an Ion Drive uses very little fuel and is a very low power, like the drive recently used on ESA's SMART-1 [see http://www.esa.int/science/smart1 ] spacecraft. If you just employ a small push at the same point in every orbit, can you correct the way the moon pulls objects out of stable orbits with only solar power input to the satellite?

I also think we need to develop a robotic Earth orbit scouring device. Maybe with an ion drive, maybe just a disposable module with little deployable boosters. It's about time we thought about station keeping in Earth orbit. Something long term and fairly autonomous that takes a really long time to slowly match an orbit of (first the largest of the) orbital debris, maybe attaches a small rocket, backs off and activates the booster to push the debris into the Earth atmosphere for burn up.

The 1976 bicentennial issue of National Geographic is something to go back and look at. I still remember it after all these years. It had a space colonization plan in it. One aspect, besides the lunar mining, the space factories, and the bicycle wheel space stations, was the space power plants. Huge arrays of solar panels that would collect power and then beam it to the Earth in microwaves. I've always wondered whether that was a good idea, or could ever be made practical, but now I have a different twist to this. Why not put the solar panel array in one of the Lagrange points between Earth and the Sun (I admit that I don't know if there is a stable intra Earth-Sun orbit). Then you could make the array enormous, and work it like a huge venetian blind. In this way, you could selectively ramp down solar input and mediate some of the effects of global warming. Once global warming was fixed, you could use it to stabilize and influence Earth's weather. I've always thought it would be wonderful to "terraform" the Sahara desert (it was once a tropical jungle, not that long ago). This would do a great deal to alleviate population pressure on Earth, while also teaching us techniques that we might be able to use to terraform Mars or maybe even Venus.

Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to unload these ideas. I'm sure you're very busy, and if you've even stuck with this email to this point, that's gratifying to me that someone has heard these ideas. I'm a Mechanical Engineer who became interested in science during the moonshot era and have never lost the bug. While I'm disappointed that we don't have cities on the Moon and inhabited space stations, I still believe that space is our future and I still dream about doing something in that field. Thanks for doing your part to feed the hunger that I and many others have to push humanity towards its next frontier.