Conference 7.286::space

re Note 858.0 by HELIX::MAIEWSKI:

>   If we are unable to tame either of these locations, both of which have oxygen
> at the front door or a hose length away respectively, how can we expect anyone
> to collect their mail in outer space which is many times more expensive to
> reach and many times more expensive for supporting life?
  
        Perhaps the issue isn't "taming" but of scientific value.

        Do humans need to inhabit, as opposed to visit, an
        environment in order to study it best?

        Bob

I think the "many times more expensive to reach" may be a pro and not a con for
living in space.  People studying the antartic stay for a few weeks, go home and
write journal articles or do followup study, then come back and collect more
data.  That M.O. would be too expensive for space.  Much more cost-effective to
find people who are willing to live on Mars or on a space station than to keep
shuttling them back and forth.

Burns

    
    Besides, due to the environmental sensitivity of the Antartic I don't
    think there are any plans to inhabit it.  (I thought it was U.N. policy
    to only use it for research purposes).
    
    Chris

    Re .0 (George)

> Basically the thing that bothers me is that with all our technology we still
> don't have a single small colony of people living either in Antarctica or on
> the ocean floor. Research stations on the former, yes, but no one calls either
> place home and we don't even have a research station on the latter.
    

Space has 3 things that neither the Antartic or the Ocean floor has:

	1.  Zero Gee  
	2.  Solar Power
	3.  And most importantly, "An expanding frontier".

People don't like the idea, that we are confined to Earth both physically 
and mentaly.   And Space gives us a way out, new lands to be explored and
exploited, and new knowledge to be discovered, learned, and used.

Both Antartic and the Ocean floor are important, but they are "ours" already.
They are part of our home the Earth,  part of the "inner" resources available
to the human race and waiting use or abuse acording to our political,economic,
and moral will.

While Solar System Space is out of our current zone of exploitation and
only recently coming into our zone of exploration. 

Its the difference between farming a vegetable garden in your own back yard 
and taking a boat and going fishing. You need worms to keep the ground in 
shape but you much rather use a few of them to catch yourself some fish, its 
more interesting, besides who knows what else you will find while you are 
looking for the fish.

Gil

  Let's compare the ocean floor to outer space and think about land area. The
ocean floor is somewhere from 2 to 3 times larger than the dry area of earth.
Now how much land area exists in outer space? How does the total surface area
of the moon and Mars compare to the ocean floor? I would think they are about
the same. 

  As for other surface area in space, it's pretty much out of the question.
Mercury and Venus are too hot, the Gas giants have crushing air pressure on the
surface, and Pluto is too far away. There are a few large moons around the gas
giants but they are also small and far away. 

  By contrast, the ocean floor is close and has an enormous surface area. It's
more like the neighboring town than our back yard yet we've made no effort to
even establish a research station under water.

  George

>more like the neighboring town than our back yard yet we've made no effort to
>even establish a research station under water.


I assume you me a permanent operation (like that on Antarctica)?  There
have been several, moderately long, underwater research stations running
anywhere from a few months to over a year (over the past 30 years or so).

- dave

re .4,
Consider the depth of water covering most of the ocean floor. ALL of the research
`colonies' that have had people living on the sea bed have been on a continental 
shelf, in relatively shallow water. 

I would hazard a guess that the water pressure at the depth of most of the ocean 
floor may well be comparable to that a long way down into the atmosphere of the 
gas giants.

While energy supply to undersea colonies may not be too much of a technical 
problem, I doubt that there has been any environmental impact study done to 
compare the effects of differing ways to provide the energy needs of such a 
colony. 

	JT:

    re .5
    
    Some back of the envelope calculations give:
    
    surface area of Earth = 460
                    Mars  = 144
                    Luna  =  38
    
    (units 10^12 m�)
    
    The Earth's surface is pretty close to 3/4 ocean.
    
    By the way, recent research suggests that the poles of Mercury may have
    surface ice so it may not be as hot as you imply.

RE              <<< Note 858.8 by AUSSIE::GARSON "nouveau pauvre" >>>

>    By the way, recent research suggests that the poles of Mercury may have
>    surface ice so it may not be as hot as you imply.

  So if you add that area to the calculation, what do you get?

  According to the following:

>    surface area of Earth = 460
>                    Mars  = 144
>                    Luna  =  38

  Doing a little more math we get:

  .75 X 460 is 345    - and - 
  144 +  38 is 182

  345/182 is 1.8956 so there is almost twice the surface area on the ocean
floor as there is between the top of the atmosphere and the asteroid belt 
(not counting the hot areas of Venus and Mercury).

  Anyone got any speculation as to the technological problems that would
differentiate trying to live on the ocean floor v. the surface of Jupiter
in terms of pressure and other factors?

  One obvious difference is in getting there. A trip to Jupiter is a major
undertaking. It would take 4 different types of crafts, one to get into Earth
orbit, one to travel to Jupiter, one to go down to the top of it's atmosphere
(reentry) and one to survive the pressure.

  A pressurized train could transport people to anywhere on the ocean floor in
a matter of hours or days. 

  George

re .9
    
>  So if you add that area to the calculation, what do you get?
    
    The poles of Mercury do not materially alter your statement. I just
    mentioned the factoid because I thought it would be interesting to the
    readers of this conference.

>  so there is almost twice the surface area on the ocean floor as there
>    is between the top of the atmosphere and the asteroid belt

    If surface area is the only problem then perhaps it would be more
    sensible to inhabit the surface of the ocean (rather than its floor)
    in floating cities (not an idea original to me).
    
>  Anyone got any speculation as to the technological problems that would
>differentiate trying to live on the ocean floor v. the surface of Jupiter
>in terms of pressure and other factors?
    
    I don't have hard data but I speculate that two factors peculiar to
    Jupiter would be significantly lower temperatures (at some 'altitudes')
    and different chemicals i.e. the ocean floor is relatively benign on
    both of those counts.
    
    One thing that has always bothered me about a hypothetical ocean floor
    dwelling is geological stability. Perhaps I have watched one too many
    episodes of "Marine Boy". It's not clear where such a dwelling would
    get energy also.

    Living Space is not all that is needed, if it was that, there is lots of
    empty space "between the top of the atmosphere and the asteroid belt" (-;
    
    As a matter fact there is a lot of empty space right here on Earth's 
    Land Masses. And if we ran out of that, there is also the Oceans Surface
    as well as the shallows around the continental land masses...
    
    No, space is not sufficient the other factors count more, that is material
    resources (food, clothing, housing, entertainement, etc availability at
    least in raw material format) as well as energy availability and last but 
    not least the plain old human desire to live/work there.
    
    Gil

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Nick Szabo" 20-JUL-1993 01:29:56.63
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Comet Mining -- An Overview

Comet Mining -- An Overview
Copyright 1993 by Nick Szabo
Permission to redistribute w/attribution granted

-- Introduction --

A relatively unexplored area of space development, comet mining, may 
play a central role in cracking open the space frontier.  Volatile
extraction, considered by this author and others[1] to be an important 
near-term catalyst for large-scale space industrialization, involves
the delivery and processing of volatile ice (water, methane, ammonia, 
etc.) delivered via ice rocket from Jupiter-family comets,  which 
have elliptical orbits between Earth and Jupiter.  A visual presentation 
and marketing analysis were given in [2], technical presentations can be 
found in [3-4], and various technical and marketing issues have been 
discussed in [1].  Government [4,10] and commercial [9] organizations
are starting to sponsor research in this area.  This paper attempts to 
unite this information into a comprehensive introduction to comet mining.

-- Comets, the Jupiter Family, and the Need for Volatiles --

The only hard and fast rule to distinguish between comets and
asteroids is that comets have been seen to outgas.
Several asteroids have recently been reclassified as comets
when outgassing was discovered, eg Charon.  The outgassing
indicates active sublimating volatiles.  Asteroids either
lack free volatiles or they never get warm enough to outgas.
Different volatiles (H2O, CO2, CH4, NH3, etc.) outgas
at different temperatures.  Objects in circular orbits
tend to reach an equilibrium temperature where outgassing
stops; all known comets are in elliptical or chaotic orbits 
where temperatures change over the course of the orbit.

By far the largest proportion of materials used by most processing
industries are volatiles and organics.  This is true for Earth
industry -- oil for energy, wood for structure, plants and animals for
food, and vast amounts of water and air for nearly industrial
processes, which we often take for granted.  In space, SSF expendables
consist overwhelmingly of volatiles: air, water, propellant, etc.  The
most advanced theoretical technology, worked out in detail by K. Eric
Drexler[8] relies primarily on volatile and organic materials,
especially carbon.  The most promising microgravity industry,
pharmaceuticals, would be dominated by volatiles and organics.  By far
the greatest bulk of near-raw materials launched from Earth into space
are volatile propellants.  Even metals extraction and refining
industries rely on much larger amounts of air and water than they
produce in metal product, and it is quite a leap to assume we can
eliminate this dependency without costly R&D efforts and while
maintaining reasonable levels of efficiency and thruput. 

That's bad news, given that practically all native
materials work today has, for historical and political
reasons, focused on the dry Moon, and to a lesser extent
dry asteroids.  The good news is that volatile
extraction from ice is much easier than trying to
split oxidized metals into oxygen and metal (not to
mention trying to capture solar wind particles for
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, etc.).  Comet ice, full of 
a rich diversity of water, nitrogen, and organic compounds, 
is readily available.

The best currently known targets for volatile extraction
are the Jupiter-family comets.  These have been tossed into 
the inner solar system by Jupiter, into highly elliptical orbits, 
with perihelions as low as Mercury's orbit (0.4 AU) and aphelions 
near Jupiter's.  Influenced by the inner planets, the orbits slowly 
circularize.  Most of the perihelions are near 1 AU, although
to some extent that's observational selection; we're less
likely to see objects with perihelions at 2 AU, and ice there
sublimates much more slowly.

The comets live very short active lives on a geological timescale,
100,000's to millions of years, but Jupiter's gravity well
is quite hungry and continually replenishes the supply when
comets wander its way from the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud.
Some of these visitors get a rought welcome; we recently saw a
comet calve into dozens of pieces as it swung in too close to 
Jupiter.  Caught in orbit around Jupiter, these pieces, the
largest c. 10 km diameter, are projected to collide with the gas 
giant (on the far side, alas) in 1994[7].

Most such comets are whipped into heliocentric orbit (ie orbit
around the sun), with aphelion at Jupiter and perihelion
in the inner solar system.  Over the comet's lifetime this orbit continues 
to circularize until one of the following happens: (1) all the 
volatiles exposed to the sun bake out, and the comet turns into an
asteroid, or (2) perihelion increases, and volatiles 
remain frozen during the entire orbit, again turning the
comet into an asteroid.  For this, reason, many scientists
believe that many earth-crossing asteroids, especially types
C and D, may be old Jupiter-family comets, and some may still
contain frozen volatiles.  We know that many earth-crossing 
asteroids contain water, and perhaps ammonia, locked to the regolith by 
hydration.  This is harder to extract.  We should consider
these closer objects as alternate targets for volatile extraction,
comparing the tradeoff in transport and equipment costs.

Thousands of earth-crossing asteroids are believed to exist
with round-trip delta-v's from Earth orbit lower than the
lunar surface.   Jupiter-family comets take somewhat more energy
to get to; escape + 8 km/s one way for good windows, shaving off
a few km/s on the way there and/or the way back if we
can use Venus, Earth, or Mars for gravity assist [1,3,5].
With a slightly more sophisticated mission we can manufacture
aerobrakes by sintering comet dust, eliminating most of the
return delta-v [6].  A speculative method called
"cometary aerobraking" has also been proposed [1].

-- Ice Rockets --

The industrial flexibility of volatiles makes its first 
and most dramatic impact in deep space transportation technology.
We can combine easily extracted native thermal propellants with a tankless 
rocket design, eliminating the need to launch either propellant,
tanks, or heavy electric powerplants from Earth.  The specific transport 
technology that embodies this principle has been dubbed the "ice 
rocket" [1].  The ice rocket design [1,2,3] consists of a long cylinder 
about the same size and shape as a Space Shuttle's solid rocket booster, 
but made out of ice and coated with a thin insulating paint.  To 
this is attached a tiny thermal rocket, about the size of a fist, 
and a  tiny nuclear reactor, or few square meters of mirror, 
which concentrates sunlight on the rocket engine. The engine 
slowly eats the ice, converting it into a high-velocity vapor 
exhaust. The rocket engine is designed for minitiarization and 
simplicity, so that dozens of them can be built and launched 
on a small, commercial budget at launch costs not much 
lower than today's.   A larger nuclear-powered design is
presented in [4].

To mass-produce the ice rockets we melt cometary ice and 
purify it with a centrifuge, in some designs combined with
an inflatable still.  We form the ice cylinder in two 
steps. First we freeze a thin shell by wetting a large, cold 
cylindrical form.  As this ice gets thicker, it freezes further 
layers more slowly, so we start squirting small spheres
across a shaded vacuum.  These spheres freeze on the 
outside, then accumulate on the inside of the cylinder.  Soon 
the cylinder is filled with partly frozen water, which will 
continue to freeze over several years while the rocket travels 
towards its destination.

The icemaking equipment is the most important part of the 
system.  It must  produce a very high ratio of  ice mass to 
equipment mass (aka mass thruput ratio (MTR): output product
per year divided by equipment mass launched from Earth).
It must be automated and reliable; think of a tiny auto-maintained 
sewage treatment plant. Other parts of the comet (organics, dirt, 
etc.)  can be gathered and attached as payload.   The cylinder is 
then attached to the small rocket engine, whose tiny thrust over the 
course of two or three years delivers the payload to a variety of 
destinations: orbits around the Earth, Jupiter, or Mars, the surface 
of Earth's Moon, or to asteroids. To get to high Earth orbit we must 
exhaust about 90% of the ice, or 80% if we take a  couple 
extra years to use a gravity assist. (See [5] for patched-conic
math to compute such trajectories, and [6] for safety issues
involved in using Earth for gravity assist and aerobraking
of various varieties and sizes of payloads).  We might also find hidden 
in some Earth-crossing asteroids, in Martian moons, or at the 
lunar poles, in which case more than 10% can be obtained. 

If the output of the icemaking equipment is high, even 10% of 
the original mass can be orders of magnitude cheaper than 
launching stuff from Earth.  This allows bootstrapping: the 
cheap ice can be used to propel more equipment out to the 
comets, which can return more ice to Earth orbit, etc.  Today 
the cost of propellant in Clarke orbit, the most important 
commercial orbit, is fifty thousand dollars per kilogram.  The 
first native ice mission might reduce this to a hundred dollars, 
and to a few cents after two or three bootstrapping cycles.

Furthermore, we can deliver volatiles not just to Earth orbit,
but anywhere else in the inner solar system.  A volatile
dump around Mars can slice an order of magnitude off the
propellant needed to launch a large-scale mission to Mars.
Comet volatiles are synergistic with lunar operations, adding
the missing elements needed to make lunar exploration or
industry productive.

Once the volatiles and organics have been separated, they are
fed to a series of chemical microreactors and converted to 
essential  nutrients and construction materials for 
greenhouses.  Greenhouses can be made in a very simple, 
automated fashion, for example by pumping air
into liquid polymer spheres which are then solidified and filled
with nutrients and trellises for the crop.  The crops grow not
only pharmaceuticals, but also fiber and resins to provide structural 
strength for further greenhouses, and genetically engineered 
enzymes are extracted and used in the chemical 
microreactors.  The greenhouses contain a low pressure (c.
1/5 atm), CO2-rich atmosphere to facilitate the growth of
genetically modified fiber plants while keeping the engineering
task of building the pressure vessels minimal.

Methane, ethane, and several other hydrocarbons have been seen in
varying abundance (<1% to 5% for methane) in comets.  If you want
to get rich in 2020, design a system to extract the methane from
the water & ammonia ice and the gravel/muck of comets, perhaps 
manipulating a large gas/plasma interface (cf. comet tail dynamics).

A refinement of the ice rocket manufacturing process
is a 3D printer to produce very large structures.  Shoots droplets of 
several kinds of materials following a digital pattern.  For example a 
high-temp-sublimating ice, a low-temp-sublimating ice, and a
ceramic slurry.  The target object forms on a very large, cold 
radiator in the shade.  The goal is to have the particles mostly 
freeze before they impact the target, but nevertheless stick to and
accumulate on precise points on the target (in 3-space, layer
by layer) without too much splatter.  If the target itself must
freeze the droplets we run into heat conduction problems pretty
soon, and the target object couldn't get very thick.   The
low-sublimating-point ice allows hidden surfaces to be "etched" by
sublimation when the structure is rewarmed, provided there are
escape holes.

-- Open Issues --

Many engineering tasks need to be undertaken to make comet
mining a reality:

* Simple processes to create 1/5 atm pressure vessels from cometary
	ice & tar, including greenhouse windows
* elaborate/refine 3d printer designs
* variable gravity bolo
* minimize processes requiring gravity
* Gas/plasma separation processes
* plant automation (maintenence, etc.) -- this may be the
primary technological bottleneck
* Nitrogenous fertilizer from ammonia
* Carbon -> CaC -> acetylene vs. syngas (CO + H2) -> hydrocarbons
	via Fischer-Tropsch
* Phenolic resins vs. urea-formaldehyde/fiberboard
* Polyethylene, alpha-olefins, polystyrene, PVC

Among cometary science to do:
* Cometary sources of phosphate, potassium, and halogens
* Detailed analysis of comet surfaces needed to optimize
choices and enable autonomous operations

Among biotechnology to do:
* Detailed design for "self-reproducing" greenhouses 
* Fiber source that facilitates automated processing

Also of great interest are low pressure & plasma manufacturing
processes, especially those that can be greatly scaled up in space. We
would like to manufacture variety of products from cometary and
asteroidal material, including but not limited to: 

* paints (for spacecraft thermal control)
* polymer structures and coatings
* aluminization of polymer surfaces (very large reflectors/solar energy)
* Inconel or silicon carbide frit (for rocket motor)
* radiation shielding
* propellant: thermal, mono- and bipropellant chemical, and ion/MPD
* pressure vessels
* pipes
* single-isotope diamond & fullerenes (C12, C13, C14)
* solar wind isotope separation (eg He3)
* etc. (your ideas go here)

Greenhouse Bootstrapping

The known Jupiter-family comets with lowest-eccentricity may get above
0C at their surface long enough to create an extensive plant growth.
Don't need to move them.  Moving cometary materials to a warm circular
orbit via gravity assist and ice rocket is desirable for some markets,
but it's not necessary to start out the operation if we have a
sufficiently flexible biosystem that can colonize the comet.  There's
also the possibility of chemosynthetic life to live off the energy
frozen in the comet as free radicals, in which case it doesn't matter
how far from the sun we are, but that's speculative so I'll skip it
for now. 

A bigger problem is maintaining sufficient internal pressure to keep
water above the triple point (otherwise it sublimates straight to gas,
like dry ice).  One way is to go back to the bag, except use it as a
greenhouse instead of a still. (Or in addition to a still -- plants
exhale pure O2 and H2O which can be extracted).  A second way, with
much higher MTR (mass thruput ratio), is to have the plants grow their
own pressure vessel, some kind of strong cellulose fiber bound
together with a resin secretion.  It need only hold a CO2-rich
atmosphere at < 1/4 atm. 

This presents a chicken-and-egg (or more
properly plant-and-seed :-) problem, so we probably would use
bags for the first perihelion.  The mass thruput ration of
this scheme becomes astronomical (pardon the Saganism :-), reaching 
millions/year by the second decade of operation, far outstripping the 
time cost of money, and all that from just one rocket payload full of 
plastic bags filled with seeds.  This makes it highly economically 
attractive, even with only a minute fraction of the greenhouse products 
being separated (eg by electrophoresis) into pharmaceuticals, etc. and 
sent back groundside, or materials being processed and used as propellant, 
shielding, structure, life support, etc. in interplanetary or Clarke 
orbit, or on the Moon, etc.

Going from native comet goop to pure water, and resin/fiber
for the pressure vessel, is an interesting problem in metabolic
engineering, which combines genetic engineering with an in-depth
knowledge of plant metabolism, in order to optimize certain growth
features (in this case cellulose and resin output, and resistance
to vacuum conditions).  I'd probably started with a fast-growing fiber
plant like hemp or jute or kudzu, and throw in some genes from 
deep-salt-lake creatures that maintain an active water gradient across 
their outer membrane, which should also be pretty good for vacuuum
protection.  Extensive testing/breeding in groundside vacuum chambers 
and micrograv testing in low Earth orbit would be in order.

-- Conclusion --

Extraction and processing of volatiles from the Jupiter-family comets,
combined with the crude but effective technology of ice rockets,
present a wide variety of new possibilities along the path from our
current small scale space operations to large-scale space
industrialization.  Native volatiles can be processed to supply
current space operations, while making possible new industries with
low up-front investment.  Bootstrapping of transporation with native
ice rockets and industry with chemical microreactors and
self-reproducing greenhouses blazes a wide path along fertile
territory, leading to the technological and economic resources for
large-scale space industry and space colonization. 

References

[1] Szabo, various articles posted to sci.space on native volatile
extraction and processing, 1988-present.  See also articles
by Paul Dietz, Gary Coffman, Phil Fraering, and others.

[2] Szabo, "Comet Mining", a presentation to Seattle Lunar Group, Feb.
1992 (visual presentation & initial marketing analysis) 

[3] Szabo, "Some Issues in Comet Mining", May 1992,
unpublished (technical overview)

[4] Zuppero, et. al., in _10th Symposium on Space Nuclear Power
and Propulsion (AIP Conf. Proc. 271, 1993)

[5] Sauer, "Optimization of Interplanetary Trajectories with 
Unpowered Planetary Swingbys", AAS 87-424, pg. 253

[6] Szabo, "Safety of flyby & aerobraking for large payloads at Earth",
sci.space Message-ID: <[email protected]> Mon, 28 Sep 1992

[7] Baalke, "Comet Shoemaker-Levy, Possible Collision With Jupiter in 1994",
sci.astro Message-ID: <[email protected]>,
and subsequent discussion.

[8] Drexler, _Nanosystems_, John Wiley & Sons 1992

[9] Brian Thill, Boeing Corporation, personal communications

[10] Anthony Zuppero, U.S. Department of Energy, personal communications

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% From: Nick Szabo <[email protected]>
% Subject: Comet Mining -- An Overview
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 22:02:42 -0700 (PDT)

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Al Globus" 10-FEB-1994 08:41:37.19
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Space colony design contest, 6-12th grade

Space Colony Design Contest

The NASA Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Division Applied Research
Branch, the NASA Ames Research Center Educational Programs Office, and
John Swett High School, Crockett are jointly sponsoring a space colony
design contest for 6-12th grade students. Individuals and teams will
design future orbital homes, competing for the opportunity to present
their concepts to NASA engineers and scientists. In addition, prizes,
tours of NASA Ames, and certificates of participation will be awarded
to participants. The best submissions will be considered for display
at NASA Ames.

Note: if you use the World Wide Web (e.g., Mosaic) you
can find this information and more at URL:

Space colonies are permanent communities in orbit, as opposed to
living on the Moon or other planets. The pioneering work of the late
Dr. Gerard O'Neill and others has shown that such colonies are
technically feasible, although expensive. Settlers of this high
frontier are expected to live inside large pressurized rotating
structures holding hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people
along with the animals, plants, and single celled organisms vital to
comfort and survival. There are many advantages to living in orbit:
terrific views, zero-g sports, plentiful solar energy, environmental
independence, and variable (pseudo-)gravity to name a few. There's
plenty of room for everyone who wants to go; the materials from a few
asteroids are sufficient to make space colonies with living space
equal to more than 1000 times the surface area of the Earth.

Individual submission are encouraged, and we hope that teachers will
make this contest part of their lesson plan. While designing a space
colony, students will have a chance to learn and integrate physics,
mathematics, space science, chemistry, environmental science, biology,
computer science, engineering and/or many other disciplines. We would
like students outside the science classes to participate as
well. Thus, contest submissions may include short stories, models, and
artwork. Students can design entire colonies or focus on power,
thermal, environmental, transportation, housing, recreation, economic,
social, political, agricultural, or other systems. A class or group of
classes can submit a joint project where small teams tackle different
areas in a coordinated fashion. Thus, teams in the science class could
design the basic structure and support systems, the art class could
provide pictures of the interior and exterior, wood shop could build a
scale model, and anyone could propose new low-g games. Each individual
team, as well as the group as a whole, will be eligible to win the
contest.

For information on how to submit and to get background material,
contact Tug Sezen, 800 Sante Fe Court, Oakley, CA 94561, phone (510)
679-8121 or email [email protected] on the Internet. Include a
self addressed stamped envelope. If you include a Macintosh floppy
disk, you will also receive copy of a Hypercard stack that teaches
space colonization basics. To enter the contest, send a submission to
Al Globus, MS T27-A, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
94035-1000 by May 1, 1994 (email [email protected]). The contest is
open to all middle and high school students in the San Francisco Bay
area. Submissions from outside this area will be considered for
prizes, certificates, and display, but not for the grand prize or NASA
Ames tours because transportation cannot be provided.

We hope that this contest will provide an exciting educational and
creative opportunity for students and begin training those who will
build the first space colonies: the engineers, scientists, and poets
who will start Life's expansion throughout the solar system.
Contest Details

General information:

-Two categories: 6-9 and 10-12 grade students.

- Individuals, teams of up to five, and groups of teams (where each
   team works on a particular design aspect) can participate.

- Cooperation between teams is encouraged.


Format:

- Focus: what part of space colonization does your speculative
   engineering focus on? (1 sentence) 

- Summary (1 paragraph)

- Background materials used

- Description and justification of design

- Qualitative and quantitative analysis

- Pictures, video, video of models, etc.


Suggested areas:

- Complete design

- Structure

- Recreation

- Agriculture

- Electrical power

- Environment

- Thermal

- Weather design

- Social system

- Government

- Internal transportation

- External transportation

- Mines

- Fiction

- Artwork

- Feasibility analysis

- Models (physical, computer, math)


Constraints:

- Population: size of your school or city/town

- Size: not overcrowded

- Minimal mass from Earth

- Within two weeks travel time of Earth

- Break no physical laws

- Reasonable extrapolations of existing technology

- Clean internal environment

- Minimal leaks

- Use metric units


Judging criteria will be based on but not limited to:

- Creativity

- Thoroughness

- Accuracy

- Neatness

- Technical merit

- Attention to detail

- Organization

- Thoroughness of background research


Awards:

- Grand prize: Give a presentation of your project to NASA scientists
and engineers at NASA Ames Research Center and a personal tour of
NASA-Ames Space Encounter and Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS)
division (transportation is not included). In addition, a visitor's
tour of the research center will be arranged. To enter the Ames 
contest one must be a U.S. citizen or under 18 years old. 

- Other prizes for first, second, and third in each category.

- All participants will be recognized with a certificate of participation.

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" 22-SEP-1994 22:06:19.88
CC:	
Subj:	Space Colony Design Contest

Have your kids send in stuff to this, and get the local schools involved!

Al Globus

Second Annual NASA Ames Space Colony Design Contest

Students in grades 6-12 are invited to submit orbital space colony
designs to NASA Ames by 15 March 1995. Individuals and teams will
compete for prizes and the opportunity to work with NASA scientists to
add their work on the NASA Ames Internet World Wide Web space colony
designs portfolio. All participants will receive a certificate and a
tour of NASA Ames will be arranged for those living nearby. 

Space colonies are permanent communities in orbit, as opposed to liv-
ing on the Moon or other planets. The work of Princeton physicist Dr. 
O'Neill and others have shown that such colonies are technically fea-
sible, although expensive. Settlers of this high frontier are expected to 
live inside large air-tight rotating structures holding hundreds, thou-
sands, or even millions of people along with the animals, plants, and 
single celled organisms vital to comfort and survival. There are many 
advantages to living in orbit: environmental independence, plentiful 
solar energy, and terrific views to name a few. There is plenty of room 
for everyone who wants to go; the materials from a single asteroid can 
build space colonies with living space equal to about 500 times the sur-
face area of the Earth.

Why should colonies be in orbit? Mars and our Moon have a surface 
gravity far below Earth normal. Children raised in low-g will not 
develop bones and muscles strong enough to visit Earth comfortably. 
In contrast, orbital colonies can be rotated to provide Earth normal 
pseudo-gravity in the main living areas.

We hope teachers will make this contest part of their lesson plan. 
While designing a space colony, students will have a chance to study 
physics, mathematics, space science, environmental science, and 
many other disciplines. We would like students outside the science 
classes to participate as well. Thus, contest submissions may include 
short stories, models, and artwork. Students can design entire colonies 
or focus on one aspect of orbital living. A class or school may submit 
a joint project where small teams tackle different areas in a coordi-
nated fashion. For example, consider a cross curriculum project where 
science classes design the basic structure and support systems, art stu-
dents create pictures of the interior and exterior, English students write 
related short stories, social studies students develop government and 
social systems, woodshop builds a scale model, and the football team 
proposes low-g sports.

Schools and teachers may consider ongoing multi-year projects, each 
year's students add detail to a space colony design that becomes part 
of the school or class portfolio. In this case, teachers assign students to 
different parts of the design, gradually building a more and more com-
plete and practical space colony concept. Each year the project can be 
submitted to the contest.

Submissions should be sent to Al Globus. MS T27A-1, NASA Ames 
Research Center, Moffett Field, CA. 94035-1000, email: globus@na-
s.nasa.gov. Be sure to include your name, address, and age. Teachers 
using the contest in their class should submit all projects together, 
include the name and address of the school, and provide a phone number.

Background information is provided in two forms. To get a Macintosh 
Hypercard stack, send a self addressed stamped envelope with a Mac-
intosh floppy disk to Tug Sezen, 800 Sante Fe Court, Oakley, CA 
94561, email: [email protected], phone (510) 679-8121. Mr. 
Sezen will be happy to share his experience using orbital space colony 
design in his ninth grade classroom. For Internet users with Mosaic or 
other WWW browser, look at URL: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/RNR/
Visualization/AlGlobus/SpaceColonies/spaceColonies.html.

This contest is sponsored by the NASA Ames Research Center and 
John Swett High School, Crockett, CA.

We hope that this contest will provide an exciting educational and cre-
ative opportunity for students and begin training those who will build 
the first space colonies: the engineers, scientists, and poets who will 
start Life's expansion throughout the solar system. 

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date: Thu, 22 Sep 94 22:04:48 EDT
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% From: [email protected] (Al Globus)
% Subject: Space Colony Design Contest
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