Envisioning the Future of the Solar System

The Collective Awakening

The solar system is no longer just moving dots in the sky, it is a place for us to go and visit – as Erik Wernquist so eloquently depicted in his short film, “Wanderers.”

The nature of this film struck a chord deep within me. It validated the past 9 months of my life and my teammates, spent laboring on the efforts of Asteroid Ventures. It made my astronomy education and my space interest for the past decade feel like a tangible pursuit rather than an idle dream. It proved that there is not only interest, but fervent passion for the story of our future!

Then, earlier this week (12/2/14), NASA made this jaw dropping announcement just days before the SLS test launch:

We’re sending humans to Mars! Watch our #JourneytoMars briefing live today at 12pm ET: http://t.co/6XtjOi1yJo #Orion http://ift.tt/1yceK1z

— NASA (@NASA) December 2, 2014

While this is hardly news to anyone following the SLS program, having a public declaration this bold is worth getting excited over! In 1962, the best way to fire up the public was to put a figure of power (President Kennedy) in front of the entire world and make an announcement enmasse. Today, politics is messy, science is political, but the American public and the world over operates around authority and broadcasting through the open lens of social media. This Twitter announcement was directly fed to the movers and shakers who wanted to hear it the most, it riled up an interest group frothing at the mouth to push thoughts into action!

Personal Relevance

I grew up reading all walks of science fiction, always with a preference for “hard scifi” because it described places that could actually become real. In 2004, reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy in High School, a future in space felt achievable. NASA announced the “Vision for Space Exploration” with the CEV, Scaled Composites was busy winning the X-Prize with SpaceShipOne. To a young kid watching the Science Channel non-stop, the space renaissance felt immediate. I even job-shadowed at LiftPort Group, a space elevator company in Bremerton WA. Michael Laine’s pursuits were entirely real, and his efforts might ultimately be one of the most profitable projects for the entire industry. Putting material and spacecraft into orbit without rockets would be game-changing.

In college I studied astronomy and joined several different research projects to learn methods of observation and digital discovery. While I looked for exoplanets, white dwarfs, and planetary nebulae, friends of mine worked on finding asteroids. A good majority of these projects all used the same data set, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Located in New Mexico and co-owned by a university consortium, Sloan mapped “strips” of sky every night, generating a massive data repository from which thousands of papers written and hundreds of millions of objects mapped out. The spiritual successor the SDSS, the Large Synoptic Space Telescope (LSST) will be several orders of magnitute more powerful than the SDSS, more on that below.

Martin Kronberg and I at McDonald Observatory in 2008

Professionally, I’ve lived through hell. Being a contractor at large tech companies means 1/4 the pay, no benefits, and getting treated like a second class human. (Although still far better than the 3rd world.) From supervisors, I’ve been told things like “do as you’re told without question” and “follow directions more closely so that you can be more entrepreneurial.” After you’ve calculated variations of the Friedmann equations, or pointed a 30 tonne telescope at a pulsating collapsed star hundreds of light years away… Well let’s just say that the banalities of coloring an Excel report “correctly” or trying to arbitrate the office politics of a dysfunctional work culture… It all seems so pointless. As soon as your superiors perceive your disinterest, they’ll find a way replace you. Work in the early 21st century isn’t just about performance, it’s about around the clock commitment and obedience.

If you’re more committed to a different set of goals than those your employer wants you to have, or can’t feign those interests well enough, you’re done. I’m hopeful that Asteroid Ventures will be my own chance to create real solid value in the world, but also that it will generate enough interest that it will expand the rise of space entrepreneurialism. The boundary between work and play doesn’t exist anymore, so there needs to be a market demand for explorers and idealists. Already the Maker Movement and Startup culture is pushing into this arena, but we want to give the movement a goal: Space. Our game intends to evangelize that need and provide a place for dreamers to learn how to become doers.

The Real Science of Asteroid Detection

As I mentioned before, the Large Synoptic Space Telescope (LSST) will be coming online with “first light” in 2019, with survey operations between 2022-2032. The telescope will have an affective light collecting area of 35 square meters, but the term “aperture” doesn’t directly apply, because unlike most other large telescopes, this one will be dedicated solely to being a survey instrument. With it’s 3.2 gigapixel camera (that’s 3200 megapixels) the LSST will take a high resolution image of the entire sky every single night – generating 30 TerraBytes of raw data per night! With such enormous power at its disposal, a significant chunk of asteroids are going to be discovered relatively quickly:

With its capability to detect objects as faint as 25th magnitude in 15 seconds, only the LSST will be able to find virtually all significant PHAs [Potentially Hazardous Asteroids] 100 meters in size and over 50% of all NEOs 100 meters in size. During its survey of the sky LSST can find 90% of the PHAs over 140 meters in diameter.
-LSST Site

[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]The process of finding asteroids is fairly simple. Telescopes have special “Charge Coupled Device” (CCD) cameras which are very sensitive but take images in all colors. Astronomers don’t always need color pictures, sometimes they just need a single specific color. So you put a filter on the optics to effectively assign a color to each image.

 

So you take a series of images of the same part of the sky in several different colors, usually 3 or 4 for surveys, then you combine the images. Normally, the software will use the position of the stars to line up the image so that the 3 colors are overlapping to make white.![/ezcol_1half_end]

However, if you take a picture of something that is moving – a satellite or asteroid, you get three different colored streaks. This is how surveys find asteroids very easily

 

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The LSST won’t be searching alone in the hunt though. In fact, its those other 10% of PHA’s which Sentinel will be likely to find. Its orbit will be approximately the same distance of Venus looking outwards. The lack of atmosphere and position in orbit will let the Sentinel, along with Planetary Resources’ Arkyd fleet – to scope out that remaining 10% of larger asteroids. Plus, it will be scanning in infrared, which means that low albedo asteroids will be less of a problem. So long as the asteroid is warmer than the interstellar media (they are) they will show up much more readily.

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So by 2030, we’re going to know where pretty much every rock larger than a football field is located, and that’s a very good thing for both public safety and commercialization. This number will be between 30-40 million, which brings us to resource extraction.

The Real “New Space Economy”

The human species has a diminishing amount of resources and an ever increasing population.

Without mitigation, we are heading towards decades or even centuries of stagnation and decline. Barring any sort of transhumanist techno-rapture, if the population goes beyond our carrying capacity, there’s only two options: Extermination or Migration. I prefer the one where everybody gets to stay alive, but how do we pull that off? Space.

Not only does moving people to space assist in preventing existential destruction, it also will teach us how to live in self-sustaining micro-ecologies – which will help us back home too! There’s something in common with both living on Mars and living in impoverished regions of the world – tools for making potable water, highly resilient food production, and sanitation where personal space is at a minimum.

 

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The New Space Economy isn’t something that is right around the corner, it’s happening NOW!

Do you have any idea how many commercial satellites have been launched in the last 50 years? It’s MIND BOGGLING! We understand as a species how to put things into orbit. Lots of small payload launches over a long period of time has been the silent groundwork of the “revolution” under tow.

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What’s happening now is that private players are stepping up to fill roles that NASA previously had sole supervision over. This is effectively a similar paradigm to the rise of the FAA in parallel to the birth of the commercial air travel and air freight industry. Private companies have been building manned spacecraft for NASA for a long time, but a few groups are starting to build spacecraft for themselves! Which is something the TELCOM companies have been doing for decades.

There is a menagerie of players in the mix. Just look at all the members in the Commercial Space Federation or of groups listed on Wikipedia. That’s just the tip of the iceburg, there are hundreds  component suppliers for each member listed on there. The space economy already exists and it is HUGE! Again though, what we are seeing now is a transfer of routine flight operations from NASA to private players, principally the contracts awarded to Boeing and SpaceX represent the biggest change.

Mainly, I think the current state of affairs can be summarized in 5 groups:

• Aerospace & Defense Giants: Enormous corporations founded over 50 years ago that originally started in aviation or military purpose and have since become gigantic monsters. Ex: Boeing, Lockheed Martin.
• TelCom Era: Founded in the late 70s-mid 90′s – these companies helped establish commercial satellites as a service or assisted in the Shuttle program. Only a few big players survived until today Ex: Orbital Sciences
• DotCom Boomers: The early 2000′s saw a lot of fortunes made. From that, a lot of entrepeneurs moved from information to aerospace. Ex: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace
• Post-Millenial Startups: Avoiding the recession, most of these formed in past few years (early teens). Ex: Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, RocketLab
• Sleepers Companies: Companies which have existed in some form for decades, but only recently have come into true prominance. Ex: Sierra Nevada Corporation

There are of course, hundreds of other stories which fit into this spectrum, each company its own unique story. Even Google sponsored the Lunar X-prize and has some secrets happening in their “X-labs.”  This also precludes the plethora of non-profits working  in the periphery. Some advocate broadly for interest at all like the National Space Society or Planetary Society, others have a unique focus or motivation. Some have even managed to launch their own spacecraft or have ongoing projects. The boundary between these non-profits sometimes leads into partnership with government groups, NASA being the biggest player obviously, but there are plenty of other defense groups.

There are also lots of foreign players, mainly at a national level though. Russia quite obviously, China has done manned flights now too. India has an orbiter around Mars, and Japan has a lot of pseudo private ventures and unique specializations. Europe has a thriving aerospace presence through their European Space Agency with private company Arienespace.

Now while there a lot of players, there is not yet a clear and defined gameplan for the interaction between all of these players. Moreover, a lot of how space is explored will be an emergent set of interactions between players both competing and collaborating for different segments of performing missions – both manned and robotic. We’re at a stage where production is beginning on a lot of different projects, NASA is starting its Deep Space Initiative, and the future is hanging before us, brighter than ever. Yet, to keep us on track, goals need to be set, and that’s what the NGOs are doing best. One of my favorite videos is one by the Space Frontier Foundation – “There is Another Way”

Why Space is Important

[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]There are of course as many detractors now as there have always been. People who think NASA, and space exploration in general is a pointless pursuit. “We have enough problems to fix at home”is the most reoccurring blanket argument. Poverty, crippling debt and inequality, starvation, ethnic warfare, human trafficking, government super-surveillance, corrupt politicians and broken banks. [/ezcol_1half_end]

The list of bad things in this world is long and it always will be. Up there we’d have a fresh start, we would learn to be autonomous, self sustaining and extremely dedicated caretakers of our artificial environments.

Moreover, building energy infrastructure in space and finding rare resources benefits the Earth dramatically. There’s no need to strip mine or plunder the earth when there’s lots of easily accesible resources in space. Even forest ecology could benefit from space colonization. People in space will still need  a fresh food, a variety of paper products, plastics, and other synthetic materials. Learning how to do environmental and genetic engineering for materials in space will  have a thousand-fold impact on people who live on the earth. We will be able to do more with less, letting us revert more of our agricultural footprint back to wilderness.

The case against space is easy to refute, but only against opponents with an open mind. If a politician has the goal of appeasing the gratitude of his campaign financiers or his pastorally inclined constituency, there will be no chance of changing his mind. The US political system is argued, is no longer a democracy. To some we are effectively a police state propping up a set of broken banks and a swollen intelligence conglomerate that uses questionable motives to increase the federal discretionary budget towards security instead of truly beneficial purposes.

The intelligence community alone brings in a whopping $45+ billion a year compared against NASA’s paltry $17.5 billion. Then compare that to defense spending, which hovers at around $640 billion. The disparity is so large in fact, that a few spy satellites are going to be re-purposed as space telescopes. We’ve had multiple Hubble replacements for decades, but only in secret. It really makes you wonder what other large military and defense projects are currently being carried out. In any case, at least military contingency in space has fueled the need to improve our launch systems over time.

However, building a tool to spy on the general public doesn’t help improve the future of our infrastructure. The only economic benefit is that it lets us undercut foreign trade deals or manipulate insider trades domestically. Mass surveillance is expensive, oppressive, and much more destructive than constructive. Comparably, endeavors in space have a force multiplier effect due to the enormous economic benefits that stand to be gained. Fighting against secondary powers like Russia, China and Iran over the last scraps of petroleum and mineral rights on the surface of the Earth is like a pack of junkyard dogs fighting over a bone because they don’t know want to dig under the fence to reach the butcher shop across the street.

Why We Want to Build a Game!

The public can get excited listening to news and announcements, but excitement is not enough to propel us headlong into the 21st century. We need understanding, true understanding among a younger generation that thrives primarily in an interactive environment.

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Our game needs to be addicting, it needs to be fun, but it also has to be authentic and enlightening. By seeking to emulate the mechanics of real space travel, astronomy, prospecting, and engineering, we are appealing that same hungry audience that wants to explore space. I was born 15 years after the last moon landing, and NASA won’t be landing on Mars until I am nearly 50 years old. There are nearly 90 million people who would be classified as Millennials. We are providing wish fulfillment a few decades early in virtuo, so that everyone gets a chance to participate in opening up the solar system.

Moreover, we will set the stage for players learn the cause-effect chain of events that lead to drastically different futures. We hope this will let humanity collectively build a better future. I believe that having mechanics of this caliber will not only be beneficial for the human race, but it will also create very compelling and attractive gameplay.

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How is this different from Kerbal Space Program or Star Citizen? What will the game be like?

We’re building a pause-able RTS, tasking the player with managing multiple missions, mining operations and colonies. We’re also focusing on resource extraction and player competition. Kerbal has a career mode that models some of these aspects, but not in a way which is analogous to Master of Orion, or any of the newer space 4X which follow that mold – like Endless Space, Stardrive, etc. We’re breaking from that cookie cutter design though by having real orbital mechanics, and by focusing on the rich depth of our own solar system.

The awesomeness of Masters of Orion 2, 18 years later!

Star Citizen is earth shattering, they are operating at a budget beyond $50 million dollars from crowdfunding alone. They are building a star fighter simulator and it looks awesome! However, it takes place in the far future, and focuses on the first person experience. Totally different gameplay entirely. I look forward to playing it!

The game we might resemble the most conceptually is the game Race to Mars; however, visually we want the game to look and feel like Sid Meier’s Civilization, but with multiple planets. Whereas Civilization Beyond Earth had some of the concepts we’ll be demonstrating, mostly it’s an entirely different approach to depicting our future. We want the future to feel bright, and close, we want the echelons of our real history to be felt in the weight of game decisions.

As this blog is becoming entirely too long, I’ll have to push the design announcements ahead into another post. I will however, leave you with a compilation of images that I collected to try and personify the grand histrionics that we’re trying to condense into the narrative arc of gameplay. The past being fixed and linear, but with multiple futures being shaped by decisions made today.

The visual narrative of our baby steps into the grander Cosmos, and the history that has shaped us. (View it left to right, up to down)

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