{"id":17946,"date":"2019-09-09T22:02:25","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T14:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/after-50-years-space-settlement-experts-update-their-vision-for-off-planet-outposts\/"},"modified":"2019-09-09T22:02:25","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T14:02:25","slug":"after-50-years-space-settlement-experts-update-their-vision-for-off-planet-outposts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/after-50-years-space-settlement-experts-update-their-vision-for-off-planet-outposts\/","title":{"rendered":"After 50 years, space settlement experts update their vision for off-planet outposts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Gateway Foundation\u2019s Von Braun Rotating Space Station would take advantage of a ring structure to create artificial gravity. (Gateway Foundation Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fifty years ago, a Princeton physicist named Gerard O\u2019Neill asked his students to help him come up with a plan for setting up settlements in space.<\/p>\n

Just a few years later, O\u2019Neill published the resulting vision for freestanding space colonies as a book titled \u201cThe High Frontier\u201d \u2014 a book that helped inspire Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos\u2019 vision of having millions of people living and working in space.<\/p>\n

Now the keepers of the \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d flame at the California-based Space Studies Institute are revisiting O\u2019Neill\u2019s original vision, with an eye toward updating it for the 21st century.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact is, a lot has changed in the last half-century,\u201d Edward Wright, a senior researcher at the Space Studies Institute, said today at the start of a two-day conference presented by the institute at Seattle\u2019s Museum of Flight.<\/p>\n

The experts and entrepreneurs attending this week\u2019s meeting are surveying concepts that have spun off from the idea of O\u2019Neill habitats, as well as NASA-led initiatives such as the moon-orbiting Gateway and the Artemis effort to send astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. They\u2019re also talking about strategies to turn O\u2019Neill\u2019s dreams of massive, enclosed space habitats \u2014 which some now see as stale fantasies \u2014 into economically viable realities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge for all of us in this room \u2026 is not engineering,\u201d said John Blincow, a former airline pilot who is now president of the Gateway Foundation. \u201cWe\u2019ve got brilliant engineers here. It\u2019s economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blincow\u2019s concept is a case in point: The Gateway Foundation\u2019s Von Braun Rotating Space Station would be a 625-foot-wide space ring that looks as if it could roll right out of a scene from \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d It\u2019s meant to accommodate up to 400 people in low Earth orbit and offer amenities including restaurants, movie theaters and sports facilities.<\/p>\n

Projected cost? $70 billion, Blincow says.<\/p>\n

That sum may sound like a lot. But it\u2019s less than the estimated $100 billion expense of building the International Space Station, which has the volume of a six-bedroom house. Bezos, the world\u2019s richest individual, could cover the cost all by himself if he unloaded his Amazon stock all at once rather than selling it off a mere billion dollars\u2019 worth at a time.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vTNP01Sg-Ss<\/p>\n

Bringing space costs down to earth<\/h4>\n

Visions of space settlement are getting a fresh look in part because of Bezos and other space-minded billionaires, such as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson. SpaceX already has driven the cost of access to space down to levels that make the logistics of building orbital stations seem more doable, and Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture aims to do the same.<\/p>\n

Al Globus, a longtime space settlement advocate whose resume includes a long stint at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center, figures that it would take 60 launches of SpaceX\u2019s yet-to-be-built Super Heavy rocket to put the hardware for a 360-foot-wide rotating space station called Kalpana 2 into orbit. That\u2019s a dramatic improvement over the tens of thousands of launches that NASA contemplated in the 1970s for a much more massive design known as the Stanford Torus.<\/p>\n

Globus recommends starting even smaller. \u201cA space hotel has requirements fairly similar to a space settlement,\u201d he said. \u201cSo you can build a small hotel, which you could do with a single launch, and you could start gaining revenue. If your small hotel is successful, you build a bigger one.\u201d<\/p>\n

He argued that lower launch costs could bring the price point for space settlement closer to down-to-earth levels.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you take the most optimistic rumors floating around about the [SpaceX] Starship and so forth and so on, and you assume that the cost of the stuff and construction is no greater than the cost of transportation \u2014 which is a big if, by the way \u2014 then you can argue that it\u2019d cost a couple about $5 million to move in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n