White Paper on Cislunar Development
Aerospace Corporation White paper: Cislunar Development: What to Build – and Why
“The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy (CSPS) released a new policy paper that explores future opportunities in cislunar space – essentially, the space inside the moon’s orbit and the orbital area around the moon. Cislunar Development: What to Build – and Why discusses the possible applications for cislunar space – for example, outposts on the moon, extraterrestrial mining operations, interplanetary waystations – and determines the infrastructure that will be needed to realize those ambitious goals. Author Dr. James Vedda, senior policy analyst with CSPS, says that the cislunar region remains a largely underdeveloped resource, and any coherent, long-term strategy for space commerce and exploration will need to make better use of it.”
This seems to be a good overall synopsis of the pluses and minuses for CisLunar, especially from an author who does not seem to have ever worked in the space industry directly. The two best points in my opinion are as follows:
1) “…more needs to be done to reach agreement on
what the development of cislunar space should seek to achieve…”
2) “Before we set up a lunar economy based on use of that ice for water, oxygen, and rocket fuel, the deposits need to be located precisely and their extent has to be estimated more accurately.”
These are extremely long tent poles in going forward and need to be addressed and not overly sold as reasons for action.
Yep. And you don’t need to work directly in the space biz to cogently comment on space policy.
Or, I guess, to make an idiot of oneself, either 🙂
*****
Many here have commented on the “what” question: as in, why will we DO in space? Leave out science. And leave out Earth-facing telecommunications or remote sensing.
That is what is so great about SpaceX and Blue Origin, they will make it possible to find out what to do in space.
The Virginia Company settlers though Virginia had lots of gold and sliver. Instead the made their fortune on tobacco and cotton. The folks up in New England believed it would be great for farming. Instead they succeeded by fishing and ship building.
What will make money from the Moon, Mars and beyond for the entrepreneurs. Something that will be as surprising as the revenue sources the earlier English developed. But the really great thing about the BFR is that being able to deliver goods to the Moon for about $50/lb and return materials at about the same price means there will be many economic possibilities to explore to generate wealth.
The huge difference given your examples is that life was very different and closely tied to the land historically, not so today and definitely not so off Earth. Settlers anywhere on Earth did not have to create, from scratch, all the living conditions they needed. This can not happen in space in a scaled financial sense. No resource off Earth has been identified in a cost effective mining sense and no one is out there to use anything that might be there. And economies only developed beyond the local group once sufficient populations and transportation routes existed. Therefor, the start-up and sustainability costs are huge and outside the hands and pockets of individual settlers. The one-to-one analogy to the colonization and settlement of the new-world is only marginally useful. Try making an analogy with the waves of the gold rush in California, as variables are probably more comparable.
But those same settlers did not have the level of technology we now have and also the detailed knowledge of conditions at the settlement site. That is why so many starved at both Plymouth and Jamestown.
But the basic principle of complexity economics, that new products and industries emerge from exploiting local opportunities once they are recognized, is as valid in space as it was in the economic developments of the North American and Caribbean settlements. That is why we won’t know the killer apps for the economic development of the Moon until we start working on the Moon.
Good survey of the current state of play.
Not as much focus on the essentiality of an affordable transportation system as I’d prefer (but then I’m an “it’s the transportation, stupid!” type from way back) but he does touch on some of the likely elements thereof.
That’s transportation _system_. Not any particular vehicle, but rather a system of various reusable serviceable vehicles, propellant sources, and propellant storage/transfer points, that supports affordable transit between and among Earth, LEO, higher Earth orbits, EML’s, Lunar orbit, Lunar surface, and (longer term) inner Solar System destinations in general.
“What to build and why?” It is the right question but other than surveying some aspects of the current situation the authors do not get us any closer to the answer to their question.
The most glaring error of omission is that the authors failed to identify that there is a million pound, multi tens of billions of $$ elephant in cislunar space called ISS and a decision needs to be made about what to do with it. They talk about space habitats, orbital servicing, space industrialization, multipurpose infrastructure, standardization, materials processing, but they make it sound like these are new concepts that have not been thought about previously.
I can remember papers just like this one from 1985, all about Earth orbit as the jumping off point for cislunar space; it was one of the bases from which the ISS was designed. Now the authors have disregarded it entirely.
Another shameless point to promote an old paper of mine:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/a…
Next paper in the works.
The title includes “What to build — and why”. It didn’t really address that very well. It was a summary of possibilities with generic conclusions. It doesn’t seem to add much to the conversation.
It isn’t clear who commissioned the white paper, or why. Essentially all the potential applications discussed for the DSG were originally proposed for the ISS, indeed the main distinction between ISS and DSG, actually noted in the papaer, is that the latter is smaller and farther away. Finailly although the need for robotic capabilities is noted, there is no explanation what can be achieved funcitonally with a human crew that cannot be accomplished robotically.
To me the most significant problem with the current programmatic strategy is the abandonment of the ISS and diversion of the resources which currently support it, without fully exploring and developing ISS capabilities and without explanation as to why they woyuld be more appropriate for the DSG. The significant advantages of the ISS over the DSG in cost of access, experiment suppport capabilities, and use as a platform for Earth observation are not addressed.