Garden the Solar System

Green the Galaxy

A Visual Manifesto

By Howard Bloom

Chairman: The Space Development Steering Committee

Member of the Board of Governors: The National Space Society

Co-founder and Chair: The Asian Space Technology Summit

Bring space to life by bringing life to space.
Nature
has given us a challenge.  How do we get from here,
to here?
Not to mention here.
An O’Neill colony parked between the Earth and the Moon. Don Davis
Don Davis
Or here.
How do we bring space to life?  Simple.  We bring life to space.
Four
billion years ago there was less than half a teaspoon of life.
Half a teaspoon threatened with extinction by a toxic planet. Threatened by a planet of climate catastrophe and volcanic savagery.  How did that half a teaspoon survive? How did it overcome the obstacle of 142 mass extinctions? By turning poisons into pleasures, disasters into delights, and wastelands into fields of waving grain.
Oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus were deadly. So societies of ambitious cells invented ways to use these poisons as gears in the machinery of life. Four-hundred-degree sea vents and an ocean surface whipped by turbulence and bombarded by a form of radiation we call light—life turned those threats to its advantage, too. Life thrived by turning the toxic spaces of an alien planet green.
Then came the first space program.  Nearly three billion years after life began, we took an immense gamble. We crawled from a cozy, comfortable place to a barren wasteland higher than any we had ever dared explore, a sterile and hostile rock face with seemingly nothing to offer.  We went from the nurturing embrace of the sea to the raw, wind-scoured, sunlight-battered stone of land.  A yawning empty space on high. And the move paid off.
Now
how do we take life’s next great leap? How do we garden the solar system? How do we green the galaxy? How do we bring the seeds of life to a cosmos of fire, darkness, stone, and ice?
Terraforming Mars
And how do we use space to save the planet?  How do we expand Mother Nature’s sway? How do we take the resource load off earth?  How do we lift the poor and the oppressed of Earth’s seven continents?  How do we triple the GHP, the Gross Human Product, the total contribution of humanity?
The answer?  We are already on our way.
Here’s
a quick how-to, a sketch of the steps to a cosmos alive with ecosystems. Alive with greenery.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the biggest rocket currently operating on—and off—earth.
The first step? Rockets that can lift cargo and passengers to orbit, then can land on their tails, be serviced and refueled in ten hours, and can launch another load to space.  Rockets as reusable as trains, buses, and airplanes. Reusable rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy boosters landing for reuse.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard landing so it can take off again.
Ever since we landed on the Moon in 1969, space has been expensive. Why? To take one trip to orbit, we’ve built a billion dollar rocket, then we’ve thrown it away and for our next trip, we’ve built another. This is like buying a Boeing 737, flying it from New York to LA, then throwing it away in the Pacific Ocean and buying another to take the return flight.   Using this technique, a round trip from New York to LA would cost you three quarters of a billion dollars.  But buy the Boeing 737, pack it with passengers, fly it for 30 years, and a trip to LA would cost you $300.   That’s the Reusability Revolution.  And that’s what Musk and Bezos are achieving in space.
An early version of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket has landed and taken off eleven times. That’s reusability.
The next step? SpaceX’s Starship, designed to carry 100 passengers to Mars in cruise ship comfort. The Starship will lower cost to orbit from $10,000 per pound to $200 per pound.
SpaceX and Blue Origins’ reusable rockets will share the emerging space environment with inexpensive rockets that can launch small satellites.
Rocket Labs’ Electron rocket at one of its launch pads, this one in New Zealand. The Electron had made five successful launches to orbit by May 30, 2019. But Rocket Labs is competing with dozens of rocket companies vying for the small satellite market.
Rocket Labs’ Electron Rocket carries a mere 330 pounds. But with miniaturized electronics, small satellites can have big capabilities. Reusable rockets and small satellite launchers will slowly lower cost to orbit to $10 per pound.
The Richard Branson-backed Virgin Galactic spaceports from which Branson’s  space planes will take off. These planes will carry tourist rockets and launch them high in the sky. One spaceport is in New Mexico. Another is planned for Abu Dhabi.
What will be the fruits of lowering the cost to orbit from $10,000/lb. to $10?
We
will expand mother nature’s sway. Nature is ambitious. Her basic drive? To kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead atoms as possible.
To insert those lifeless things into the grand project of life. There’s a new space race to mine the moon and the asteroids. The moon is rich in oxygen, silicon, iron, magnesium, calcium, aluminum, manganese, and titanium. All substances that life aches to use as pistons, struts, and gears.
Moon Express, an American company, wants you to honeymoon on the moon.
China plans to “industrialize” the moon, mining among other things for Helium3, a potential source of clean power.
One asteroid of modest size can have $31 trillion worth of platinum—more than the gross domestic product of the United States, China, Japan, and France combined. Two American companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, went after the asteroid mining bonanza, but failed.  Now China is planning to pick up where the American pioneers left off.  With their deep pockets and tenacity, the Chinese will succeed. The nation challenging the Chinese for preeminence in asteroid mining is, of all places, Luxembourg.  In partnership with Russia.  But don’t count out the greatest asteroid-exploring nation of all, Japan. The United States must get back into the asteroid-mining race.
Establishing a foothold on an asteroid.
Mining an asteroid.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to take you to Mars by 2025.  Step one?  Complete testing and production of the Starship, an enormous spacecraft capable of carrying 100 passengers.  Or 220,000 pounds of cargo.  Or 175 tons of fuel.  Why fuel?  To tank up the Starship for its return from Mars to Earth.
The Starship will come in three versions, a passenger version, a cargo version, and a tanker.  The tanker will carry a massive wallop of fuel into orbit.  It will function as a gas station.  A gas station in orbit.  A gas station on the moon.  Or a gas station on Mars.
A starship tanker fuels a passenger Starship in earth orbit.
Where refueling comes in handy.
After refueling in orbit, the Starship passenger liner will fire its six engines, spread its solar panels, and head for Mars.
The view of Mars from the top deck of Elon Musk’s Interplanetary Transport passenger ship.
On the Martian surface, the passenger liner will offload its passengers, fill up on fuel made from the Martian atmosphere and from the ice just below the Martian surface, pick up travelers going back to terra firma, and head back to Earth.
Musk’s goal: cities of millions on Mars.  And a ticket to Mars you and I can afford.
Meanwhile
there’s the moon.
Dutch architect Hans-Jurgen Rombaut’s hotel on the moon.
Shimizu Corporation’s space hotel.
Relaxing in Spain’s Galactic Suite Space Resort.
The first tiny twinge of green–gardening on the Moon. But that’s just the start.
Deep Space Systems’ moon rover looks for the best spot on the Moon to mine ice—the raw material for rocket fuel and for the oxygen and water that keep humans alive.

 

 

 

 

picture: Anna Nesterova
A base at the Moon’s south pole turning lunar ice into drinkable water, breathable oxygen, and rocket fuel. Moon fans in the aerospace community want to sell fuel to customers like Elon Musk’s Starship. They want to fuel Musk’s regularly-scheduled Mars trips. Then there’s mining the Moon’s minerals. Lunar mines can produce all the materials needed to build space stations, space ships, fuel depots, and entire space colonies. But in lunar mining, humans will be rare. The work will be handled by robots and autonomous vehicles.
Space
is the Green New Deal.
Solar panels on your roof have two small problems—clouds and night.  Solar panels in the Sahara or the Mohave wipe out desert ecosystems.  But solar panels in space are in the sun 24/7, produce no carbon emissions, do not set your tap water on fire, and harvest an energy supply that is endless, renewable, sustainable, and five times as intense as the sun’s energy down on earth.
Harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it to earth using the same sort of signals received by your cellphone.
What’s more, solar power from space is free to all nations without disputes over the possession of islands or seas.
Telstar, the first commercial satellite, started harvesting solar energy in space and transmitting it to earth as communications signals nearly sixty years ago, in 1962.  The medallion-like squares with black grids were photovoltaic panels turning sunlight into electricity. Today solar energy harvested in space powers a third of a trillion dollar industry—the commercial satellite business. And someday that solar power harvested in space will free us from fossil fuels forever.
In fact, Jeff Bezos foresees taking all industry to space and zoning the earth as a residential zone for plants, animals, and humans.  A permanent green zone.
Jeff Bezos’ vision of a colony in space.
How will we transport space resources like the platinum from asteroids or moon dust?  Why transport moon dust at all?  It’s the raw material for the glass, concrete, semiconductors, and steel of space colonies.  To move these things from lunar mines and asteroids to construction sites, we’ll use space tugs and space trucks.
To move entire asteroids, we’ll use space tugs.
Equip an asteroid to move itself using solar energy and ion propulsion, and you turn that asteroid into its own space ship.
A mass driver on the moon—an electromagnetic rail gun that shoots lunar raw materials into space.
Image by Stanley von Medvey
A construction site in space that builds space ships and colonies from moon dust and asteroid metals.  This construction operation is 40 miles long.  And it can handle thousands of tons of materials with ease.  Why?  No gravity. Thanks to weightlessness, you can move a hundred tons with a push of your hand.  If you can find a stable place to stand.
Two of the possible first space stations built from recycled space junk and metals smelted and separated from moon dust, plus titanium, nickel, and iron from asteroid mines.
Aldrin Cyclers will act as shuttles, using gravitational forces to loop back and forth between the Earth and Mars.  Carrying passengers  and cargo.
Illustration: Marcus Mashburn
Then there’s the Mars ferry, a cargo carrier that travels between Mars’ surface and Mars orbit and goes back down to the surface again.
The Mars ferry meets up with a truck stop in space.  A place where cargo can be offloaded from the ferry and shifted by a robotic arm to a vehicle headed for earth orbit.
Mars bases
Exploring Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, and floating in its methane atmosphere.
Yes, methane, a major fuel down here on Earth.  A fuel we will stop using thanks to space solar power.  On terra firma we call methane “natural gas.”
Colonizing Titan
Illustration by Stanley Von Medvey
The space infrastructure, the backbone of a space economy. An economy that will increase the gross human product, the GHP, by a factor of three. And an economy that will grow the evolutionary niches for life exponentially. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, a nuclear and aerospace engineer and one of the world’s most extraordinary space visionaries, foresees a triangle trade between Earth, the Moon, Mars and the asteroid belt, a trade that could make even the poorest among us wealthy.
The triangle trade starts small.
But it grows.
A human-carrying ferry for trips from one tourist destination in space to another.  An imagined competitor to Elon Musk’s Starship.
A SpaceX Starship landing on a Moon of Jupiter. Nice view.
Then
it’s time to build new worlds.
A Bernal Sphere from the outside.  If you look hard at the nested circles on the right, you can make out the green tiers of the farming rings, the agricultural terraces.
Interior of a Bernal Sphere
A view of the Bernal sphere from a slightly greater distance.  The bulging round bulb is where we humans will live.  Windows and mirrors will give us sunshine galore.
Next
will come the really big mothers — the O’Neill Colonies and the Stanford Toruses.
Five hundred square miles or more of farms, forests, parks, puppies, pussycats, sunlight, wildlife, and cities per colony.  Imagine the emptiness of space alive with the innovation, industry, and trade of thousands of these mega-cylinders–the black of space hung with communities like a Christmas tree hung with ornaments.  Green communities.
To generate stability, O’Neill Colonies will often be constructed in pairs.
Which colony would you pick for your next home? Note the heavenly body in the sky. Toto, I don’t think we’re on earth anymore.
Showing off the backyard in your starter home.  Like your pool?
Tired of leaves and grass?  How about moving to an O’Neill colony modeled on Venice?
A theme park in an O’Neill colony.
A family picnic in the weightlessness at an O’Neill colony’s center.
Or
if you’re up for the heroic, how about settling down to homestead… on the fourth planet from the sun, Mars. Your goal? To bring an entire planet to life.
A base on Mars’ moon Phobos. A base designed as a way station to the Martian surface.
Turning the red planet green.
Terraforming Mars.  Giving it an atmosphere like ours. Then gardening the red gravel like crazy.  And letting the carpet of plants make the ruddy planet’s  temperature friendly.
Once
upon a time,
125 million years ago a bunch of loony dinosaurs came up with a weird idea: flying. If dinosaurs could speak, the conservatives among them would have pooh-poohed the entire notion. “Don’t you get it?” the conservatives would have said, “There is nothing up there but empty space. The earth is your mother.” “Every good thing in your life is here on her breast– food, shelter, and company. not to mention greenery. Up there there is absolutely, now listen very carefully and look up above your head.” “What do you see? Absolutely NOTHING.” But a strange thing happened. The dinosaur conservatives with a love of nature and a deep commitment to the earth died out 65 million years ago, and the nutty loons who wanted to loop and play in the empty space above their heads are called birds. What’s more, there are twice as many species of birds as of us nice, conservative ground-walking mammals. Meaning that the fliers have found twice as many ways of making a living in the emptiness of the sky. And fliers, be they birds or flying mammals, live roughly 60% longer than us groundlings. Is nature trying to tell us something? Is there another empty space above our heads waiting for us to ply?