Space! Heading out there...

First some fascinating news about how seriously some of our leaders in politics and industry are starting to take Our Future In Space.

Shall we begin “bootstrapping” our space technologies toward the goal of a Solar System Civilization? The idea is no longer science fiction alone. “Right now, the mass we use in space all comes from the Earth. We need to break that paradigm so that the mass we use in space comes from space,” said one NASA official – quoted on a page at the site of the White House. 

Yes, the White House. Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and his page is a down payment on what might become a special program out of the president’s office, aimed at helping spur the techs we'll need, in order to use space resources.  Look it up… and stay tuned.

Pie-in-the-sky?  Well, the potential methods for extracting space resources are looking more and more manageable, starting with the plentiful water contained in some kinds of asteroids.  Probably the most needed-desirable of all materials in space, and the most expensive need we must fulfill, both for life support and fuel, if humans are to live and work out in space.

Unlike the gold and platinum and iron that our children will relish from rocks out there, water may be accessible much sooner, according to the folks at Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.  And TransAstra Corp, where Caltech engineering prof Joel Sercel has worked out a plausible method. In optical mining, thin-film inflatable reflectors and containment bags are used to extract, collect, and store water from asteroids, using concentrated sunlight to crack asteroids and extract the water they contain. Once the water is stored in bags it can be used directly as rocket propellent in a type of engine called a solar thermal rocket. Later solar systems will crack and divide H2O into hydrogen and oxygen, allowing even more effective propulsion and portable power.

== More Space! More Space! ==

Um... At risk of making you all howl over the (utterly deserved and necessary) repetition... have I said already this is our best year in space since the seventies… and possibly ever? 

The roll call of stunning milestones just keeps flowing, with data from Mercury, Venus and Earth… orbiting and mapping Ceres (with its weird white spots and possible underground lakes), tons from Mars (including a comet swooping past the Red planet!), news of a likely Europa mission, wonders from Cassini at Saturn, including amazements from Titan…

…plus landing on a comet!  And of course, New Horizons swooping past Pluto (Watch this beautiful 16 second composite video and remember your civilization did something this competent.)

An article about Pluto Truthers… who claim the New Horizon images are faked, like everything else in the space program.  Eep.

== What more could you want? ==

                                                                                                

Well how about another Mars landing, next year?  InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investi­ gations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep inte­rior.

But that’s 2016. Heck we might have a Singularity by then, so let’s stay focused. (Did I elsewhere promise 2014 - 2015 would be transformative?)

Meanwhile, the mavens who gave us spectacular Pluto-Charon images have chosen New Horizons’ next target!  The spacecraft is to make a similar examination of a small, Kuiper Belt object, an icy body known as 2014 MU69 in 2019. Pluto is about three billion miles from the sun; 2014 MU69 is almost a billion miles beyond Pluto. “The New Horizons spacecraft is to adjust course through a series of four thruster firings in late October and early November. New Horizons would also make more distant measurements of 20 other Kuiper belt objects en route to 2014 MU69.”That they can do this at all, with their excellent fuel reserve, is one more checkmark of stunning human competence.  Let’s bring that back into fashion!

Technicians have begun assembling the world's largest radio telescope, with a dish the size of 30 football grounds, deep in the mountains of southwest China's Guizhou Province. Yesterday afternoon, they began to assemble the telescope's reflector, which is 500 meters in diameter, compared to Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters. "Having a more sensitive telescope, we can receive weaker and more distant radio messages. It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe," Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society said.

Okay fine. But please read the first few chapters of Liu Cixin’s epic Science Fiction novel (and 2015 Hugo Award winner) The Three Body Problem. That will teach you caution not to press SEND with any “outgoing messages.” Listening is good.

== Other space news? ==

How about a patent on a 20km tall inflated tower from which payloard can be more easily launched into orbit?  This vision from Thoth Technology sounds exciting. Indeed… this is exactly what I described in 1980, in my novel Sundiver. Remember the “Vanilla Needle?” Except that my concept in Sundiver was even grander: an inflated tower that went up past 70,000 feet and was cavernous enough inside so that cargoes would rise up in it using... balloons! 

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered tiny primordial galaxies, which are estimated to have formed only 600 million years after the universe came into existence.  

                                                                                                         

By now you’ve heard about the discovery of a possibly Earthlike planet orbiting a very sunlike star. And you were wondering… are there aspects of this that I’m not seeing in even the science press?  I wonder what David Brin makes of this!  Did I read your mind? All right, in a nutshell…

… While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. When Earth is that age, it will already be baked by our sun's shifting CUZ or Goldilocks zone. The Kepler 452 CUZ is probably shifting, too.

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have tasted space-grown lettuce. The red romaine lettuce leaves were grown entirely by the team and it marks the start of the "veggie project" that will see more food grown in space.

I often mention that I serve on the Board of External Advisers for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group… or NIAC… which offers grants for developing far-out-but-plausible concepts for advancing space exploration.  Now see a handy website explaining the criteria used for judging grants!  

A deep astronomical study (the 2015 Space Weather Workshop) found stellar flares on other G-type main sequence stars (of about the same size and rotational period as the Sun) that had far more energy than anything observed by humans coming from the Sun. Combine this with an update on the mysterious "774-775 carbon-14 anomaly," showing that another anomaly happened about the year 993, and the report concludes that superflares 1000 times more energetic than those observed in our historical records of the Sun could be expected to occur about once every 5000 years.  

We need more resilience.