How to Colonize the Solar System in Six Easy Steps

Regolith on Titan

About three years ago, my colleague Rob Mueller asked me if I had an idea for a technical paper we could write for the International Astronautical Congress in Prague, the Czech Republic.  I did, in fact, have a topic that was beginning to fascinate me. I had been looking at pictures from Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, sent back by the Huygens probe in 2005 after parachuting through the thick, orange atmosphere. Seeing Titan’s regolith from less than a meter away, with alien pebbles strewn across the mysterious sand, changed my view of Titan from a mere “moon” to a very real “world.”  (The regolith is the broken up rocky material and soil that covers the surface of a planetary body.)  Suddenly I wanted to go there!  I wanted to head out toward those alien horizons where no human had gone before.  And probably, since I couldn’t realistically go there, a part of me wanted to fulfill the fantasy of exploring Titan by studying its regolith, because studying regolith is what I do in my job. For years we had been developing technologies to work with the regoliths of the Moon and Mars:  to land on it, to drive on it, to excavate it, to process it for resources, to build with it, and to study it for science.  But what about the regoliths everyhere else in the solar system? So I suggested to Rob that we compare and contrast the regoliths of all of the planets, moons and minor planets throughout the solar system.

I had no idea, then, that writing this paper would change the course of my life.

Over the next several weeks, Rob and I along with the help of Jim Mantovani pored over information about the solar system to hastily write this paper.  As we wrote it, we began to notice the beautiful pattern of resources in our solar system.  This has been noted by others, of course.  John Lewis talked about it in at least one of his books.  But for me it was a revelation.  I began to realize that you can’t fully utilize the vast resources of this solar system unless you set up a logistics network to move things around.  Accessible metals are mostly in the asteroid belt.  Accessible volatiles are mostly in the outer solar system.  Humans may want to ship them around so we can do things things on a grand scale all over the solar system:  building colonies everywhere where we can; establishing research stations and observatories everywhere else.  Ships could travel back and forth on regular routes for both people and resources.  This vision of the solar system as a living, pulsating civilization drew me in, and suddenly exploring the Moon and Mars for scientific discovery was not enough.  I wanted to make space colonization happen!

It seemed obvious from the outset that solar system civilization would start by mining the Moon because it is close and we can solve technological problems more easily when we can access the hardware.  I explained this at greater length in a NASA interview a few years ago. I now admit that the asteroid miners might be right; perhaps it will be easier to start industry on Near Earth Asteroids brought into Earth’s orbit rather than on the Moon…or maybe not.  I still lean toward the Moon as the better place to start space industry,  but I am glad that companies are trying it both ways simultaneously so we have a better chance that someone will succeed.  (B.N., there are also those who want to start colonies on Mars right away, and props to them if they pull it off and start space industry first!)

Right about this time I went to the 100 Year Starship Symposium and presented the vision of robots harvesting resources on this vast scale as best I could, telling the attendees that it doesn’t make sense to skip our solar system and go straight to interstellar travel.  I went away realizing that if I wanted people to take this seriously, I needed to prove the point with quantitative analysis.  So I set about developing a computer model of solar system industry.  I eventually focused on just the first phase of this industry:  the process of getting it started on the Moon.  I developed a modeling method and enlisted the help of Rob and Jim, as well as Tony Muscatello for his expertise in the lunar chemical processing hardware.  We reviewed the published literature and obtained data from the hardware that we and our contractors had recently built to utilize space resources during lunar and martian exploration.  We put this information into the computer model and it began spitting out graphs for us.  We analyzed what it meant and wrote another paper and published it. This paper is in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering:

Metzger, P., Muscatello, A., Mueller, R., and Mantovani, J. (2013). ”Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of the Space Industry and Solar System Civilization.” J. Aerosp. Eng., 26(1), 18–29. doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)AS.1943-5525.0000236

The formatted article is copyrighted by the journal but the verbal and graphical content is freely available to the public since it was written by four government employees.  Click on the link at the top of the page to get an uncopyrighted version.

In this paper, I laid out six steps that we could take to develop lunar industry.  Each step is actually a “generation” of robotic hardware and resource processing machines.  Each generation is a little more complex and a little more independent of Earth than the prior generation.  After six of these, the industry becomes completely independent of Earth and makes everything it needs from lunar resources, including the regolith, sunlight, and polar ices.  Once this industry becomes independent of Earth’s resources, it moves to the asteroid belt where the best resources are located.  From there it can grow exponentially.  The modeling shows that within just a couple more decades, this industry could have a million times the industrial capacity of the entire United States.  Within just ten more years, a billion times.  By then we will have achieved a Kardashev Type 2 civilization and will have everything we need to move toward becoming a galactic civilization.

Surprisingly, the model indicates that we can achieve all this for just about 1/3 the cost of the International Space Station, so spread over 40 years it will be about 0.04% of the U.S. federal budget.  This is highly affordable, to say the least!  There is absolutely no reason why we can’t do this, or why we should delay it at all.  We just need to convince the decision makers that this is real.

But suppose my modeling was off by an order of magnitude.  Does that mean it is not feasible?  No, of course not, because then it would be just 0.4% of the federal budget, which is about what NASA gets every year right now.  It is still very feasible.  And there are ways to reduce the cost even further.  We can make it an international project to spread the costs between nations.  We can let commercial space businesses develop significant portions of this industry as a profit-making enterprise supported by consumer demand.  And we can involve crowd-sourcing, where citizen space explorers participate as telepioneers, owning and teleoperating portions of the industry in space.  (I think that should be an important element of our future space industry, and this blog will discuss it at length very soon.)

So for the benefits we will receive, it will cost us next-to-nothing.  I ask you to get a copy of the paper and read it.  Then, please, add to the analysis.  Generate your own concepts.  Improve ours.  Analyze.  Investigate.  Challenge.  Improve.  We need a wider discussion to vet the concepts and in the end, I hope, to build support for going forward.  We stated in the paper that our modeling was intended mainly to create interest in this topic and to encourage a wider set of investigators to look into it.  That means you.

So there you have it.  We can colonize the solar system in six easy steps.  Well, the model is preliminary, so maybe seven steps, or ten, or…the actual count doesn’t matter.  It’s clear that the process of starting up space industry can be short enough that we could do it in our generation and our children will live in a much brighter, much more amazing future, and we can be the ones to watch it, and make it, unfold.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

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Philip Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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Philip Metzger

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