Could space tourism enable lunar and orbital colonization to reach critical mass? I view colonization critical mass to be over 300k people. Around 1745, the American colonies passed a population of 1 million. This population had doubled twice from 250,000 people in 1700 and nearly tripled by 1780 to 2.7 million. SpaceX Super Heavy Starship …
A new study finds 40,000 square kilometers of the lunar surface has the capacity to hold water, which is about double previous estimates. 0.15% of the lunar surface is permanently shadowed, with ~10% of this area distributed in patches smaller than 100 m, that is at scales smaller than previously mapped by LOLA topography-based illumination models. …
The University of Southern California ASTE527 Graduate Space Concepts Studio within the Department of Astronautical Engineering and in the Graduate Space Architecture Seminar in the School of Architecture presented a lunar tourism paper. Space Experience Tourism might be “low hanging fruit” that will spur on the development of a self-sustaining space economy in the near …
Elon Musk talked about needing one thousand Starship flights to create a sustainable Mars city. American Airlines is the airline with largest fleet of passenger airplanes. American has 957 planes. 157 widebody planes and 782 narrow-body planes. American is a $43 billion company. SpaceX is already valued at over $30 billion. Elon would want to …
SpaceX Principal Mars Development Engineer Paul Wooster talked about SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy (BFR) at Mars Society Convention 2019. Paul described the impact of full reusability for the Super Heavy Starship to lower costs. He also described the in-orbit refueling to get large payloads to Mars, the Moon and other destinations. Paul confirmed that …
SpaceX will leave most Starships on Mars or the Moon, when they are flown for long-range missions. SpaceX Starships will probably cost about $20-40 million and they can be parked in orbit, the moon and Mars for the cheapest space stations and bases around the solar system. One Starship has close to the volume of …
In 2014 there was a weekend retreat to explore the possibility of a moon base at a price 10-100x lower than commonly believed. The $5 billion or less resulting price was so low that it begs the question: could a single wealthy individual decide to finance the establishment of a permanent human lunar settlement? Wealthy …
Three SpaceX Starships for a Space Station With Simulated Gravity
First 100 SpaceX Super Heavy Starship Flights From 2021-2026. The next seven years could see space habitation increase hundreds of times. We can go from about three to six people in space to hundreds in a larger rotating one gravity space station and a lunar mining base.
The Von Braun Station will be a dual-use station that is economically self-sustaining. Von Braun Stations creation will also form a space construction industry with bots, pods, drones, construction arms, new space suits, and large-scale truss building machines designed for building large structures in space. This video was made for NASA and other aerospace engineers …
Open Lunar Foundation is a San Francisco based non-profit that had the goal of creating settlements on the moon. Steve Jurvetson and executives from Planet Labs are among those involved. There is $5 million invested in the organization. They were founded in 2018 and recently have appeared in Bloomberg. Their analysis is that will be …
