Star Trek, first show. Of course, they weren’t in a settlement, but still ...

I haven’t seen Zenon. Sorry. There have been free space settlement in two big time movies lately, Elysium and Interstellar. Elysium was awfully big and had no roof — both implausible but important for the story. Intersteallar was reasonably accurate for the free-space settlement at the end, although long skinny…

Yes. We’ve known how to do this for a long time. Rotate your structure! Works fine. See http://space.alglobus.net/papers/Rotatio… for details.

First, we’re not looking at trillions of dollars. NASA’s budget is a bit below $19 billion/yr, only part of which goes to space settlement enabling work. Most approaches to settlement these days involve single digit billions per year of taxpayer money for a few decades, not anywhere near trillions.

Write the software and don’t screw up.

IMPORTANT: I am not a NASA employee and I don’t speak for NASA in any way shape or form. I am a contractor at NASA Ames. I work for San Jose State University and part of my responsibilities is the nasa ames space settlement contest.

Write the software, and don’t screw up.

The ‘Easy’ presentation mentioned above describes an approach that reduces the mass of settlement designs by a factor of 200 - 10,000. This radically changes things. See http://space.alglobus.net/papers/Rotatio… and http://space.alglobus.net/papers/Radiati… for details. Still, we need at least 10x, and better 100x,…

Space settlements aren’t necessarily mico-g. In fact, most designs rotate the structures to get artificial gravity at 1g. For a detailed discussion see http://space.alglobus.net/papers/Rotatio…

Some recent discoveries suggest that much smaller settlements with very little radiation shielding are possible. This is because you can increase the rotation rate to around 4-6 rpm and if you stay in low earth orbit over the equator radiation levels are much smaller. This means the mass of the settlement is measured…

This year we received 994 entries from 3,007 students sponsored by 380 teachers. Entries came from 21 countries: Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Rebublic, India, Ireland, Japan, Malayasia, Mexico, Montenegro, Nepal, Pakistan, Romania, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and…

If all you want to do is visit space and learn some stuff, the robots are great. My interest, however, is settlement — large numbers of people living permanently in space. This is a little like what happened to life hundreds of millions of years ago when life expanded out of the oceans and onto land — which eventually…