The KSC Swamp Works is developing technologies for exploring the Moon, Mars, and asteroids
Learn more
Experiments of gas jets blowing soil in lunar and Martian gravity have identified the physical relationships that predict how much soil will be blown when landing on the Moon or Mars
Learn more
Testing In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) technologies, to use sunlight and the lunar soil to extract oxygen.
Learn more
Built by the KSC Swamp Works to simulate a rough lunar terrain with boulders and craters for testing rocket landings and rover operations.
Learn more
The KSC Swamp Works tests lunar mining, roving, asteroid surface operations, and other activities in the world's largest indoor bin of simulated extraterrestrial regolith.
Learn more
Elizabeth Howell at Universe Today did a 3-part interview with me on strategies to begin settling beyond Earth, right now.
Read hereThis is NASA's premier college-level competition where we learn how to robotically mine in space. Watch the video wrap-up of 2014's event!
Watch hereFor lunar or Martian landings, rocket exhaust will blow rocks and dust onto the outpost at damaging velocities. Our team has been developing technology to build landing pads out of native soil.
Learn moreWe held Keck Institute workshop on printing structures on the Moon, Mars and asteroids. See the presentations here.
Learn more
I am sitting in a room at at the Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Apps Challenge. It is late at night, I’m very tired, and there are eight other people in the room: all much younger than me, all college students, all writing software for a game called “Moonville“. It will be a […]
From a certain point of view, California remained an “unprofitable” part of the world for hundreds of years after the Westerners arrived in the early 1500’s. It was a long distance to ship anything around the southern tip of South America from California to the Eastern U.S. There was little industry to produce things in […]
We are living in an awesome generation, the first one that will mine space! Some companies want to mine the Moon. Others want to mine asteroids. Here’s a brief survey of the Who and the Where. At the most recent count, I found eight companies with a focus on space mining. They are at various […]
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 […]
People sometimes ask me if space industry is “for real”. They want to know if you really can make a profit launching rockets into space, doing exotic activities like deep mining on Mars, bringing back metal ore to Earth, refining it, and selling it on the Earth’s metal markets at a profit. How can that […]
What is the one most important thing that makes Earth special for life? You are thinking water, and that’s right…but the funny thing is that Earth has hardly any water at all (by solar system standards). Water Wars If the Earth were an apple, you could dip the apple into a bucket of water, pull […]
What happens when we suddenly have a billion times more of everything? There is a revolution brewing. It’s an economic revolution, like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, but this one is the Space Resources Revolution, and I think it will be the greatest one of all. It will bring the billion-fold greater resources of our […]
Some time ago, our ancestors discovered that the Earth isn’t quite as flat as it seems. Nowadays the mathematicians will tell us that it has “positive curvature.” Well, it might be positive, but it’s not that positive. It’s hardly curved at all. You can’t notice it when driving your car to the grocery store, for instance. […]
In the next few posts I will lay out the case for starting up mining and industry in the solar system. Such an industry offers us brilliant possibilities; it offers to make us more secure here on planet Earth, to ramp up our economy, to create jobs, to pay off the national debt, to end […]
Do you want to be a space explorer? Many internet billionaires are turning into commercial space explorers: flying as space tourists, building and launching their own rockets, and starting space mining companies. They do this because the technology to take human civilization into the solar system has arrived. Space colonization is now possible, and we […]
Recent Comments