New Mars Forums

On the topic of ITAR, it looks like non-military spacecraft systems will be taken off the munitions list (fingers crossed):

https://www.federalregister.gov/article … -president

CERN has an open hardware license that in principle is similar to the GPL - it's a bit of an tenuous stretch to use software (GPL) or artistic (CC) licenses for hardware projects. However even having said that, I am personally more comfortable with using GPLv3+ instead, as it is a much better understood and legally tested license, provides the necessary copyright, design, and patent releases, allows commercial use of manufactured hardware, is widely used in the open-hardware community, etc.

But part of why I'm starting a foundation is so that it can retain the legal standing necessary to enforce the copyright, patent, and design claims which give the license legal weight, and to allow us to switch licenses or cross-license in the future without having to get the permission of every contributor. So to an extent the choice right now doesn't matter too much.

It's really not my decision, but almost certainly they'd be worked on concurrently. It's an open-source / crowd-sourced project, so people contribute what they can to whatever portion of whichever project interests them. Maybe gardening is their hobby so they get involved in the greenhouse project, or maybe they are an architect and want to take a stab at designing Martian living spaces. In either case the work they do would be applicable to either the M-4 or M-100 mission profile.

Another way to think about it is that the vast majority of the work required is not specific to a particular mission, although there will be a few people who concern themselves with making sure the parts assemble within the mass and space budgets of the M-4 or M-100 baseline profile.

This is an open-hardware project. We are not designing an actual mission, but rather a hypothetical mission profile. That baseline profile is then customized by industry or government to suit their own purposes, allowing specific missions to be launched at low cost since only the mission-specific tweaks need to be made, and with economies of scale due to shared components.

And honestly, I don't see the Compendium being constrained to the mission profiles I described. Rather I would like to eventually see open-hardware designs for O'Neil colonies, domed cities on the Moon, asteroid prospecting missions, etc. It's just that I believe the M-4 and M-100 missions are much easier to explain and rally people behind.

M-4 is “send 4 human beings and their science equipment to the surface of Mars, and return them safely home.” M-100 is “establish permanent, self-sufficient human habitation on another world.” I think these two reference projects are simple enough to be easily explained and understood by the general populous, yet compelling enough to attract wide-spread public participation, and general enough to be used in practice as a basis for a variety of actual mission profiles.

I will set none as I am not dictator of this project. However I hope to work with anyone here who is interested in creating a manifesto both explaining the rationale of the project and providing a baseline set of requirements with justifications. None of it will be set in stone, however, as I hope that we will follow the bottom-up development by consensus mechanism that has worked so well in the open source software world.

We're off topic, but I would love to hear more about what you're working on. I too am working on other projects focused on the economics of space development in cislunar space and NEOs.

Ah, you're making assumptions about what kind of software. Most of the software written will be simulation & validation work, not flight software. And of the software that actually sees use in the mission, most of the original stuff would have to do with the various gadgets and environmental controls, greenhouse automation, the rover, science lab, Mars habitation module, etc. It's not at all obvious any of that would fall under ITAR regulations.

But even so, some small parts of it might be. In those cases there may end up having to be some compartmentalization, such as having those parts be contributed by non-U.S. persons and not fully integrated with the rest of the project, or otherwise exploiting some legal loophole to maintain compliance. This is similar to how PGP was developed in the 90's, when cryptography was on the U.S. munitions list. There might also be ways to avoid such classification such as the recently created executive branch waiver.

But really, we'd have to be very successful to get far enough that ITAR is a serious problem. Until then, it's not worth worrying about. ITAR is killing American competitiveness, and this is getting recognized at the political level. By the time we encroach on ITAR territory, the situation with non-military applications will probably be very different. But even if it isn't, there are ways we can deal with that.

(reserved)

Ok, you intrigued me. But where does the water come from?

No, it means that none of the instruments on MSL are capable of definitively identifying the presence of the type of microorganisms that we might expect to be in Gale crater if there is life on Mars. If there is life near the surface of Mars, MSL will very likely pick up chemical signatures of it. But in this hypothetical situation, the data would be inconclusive until we get a sample back or send an even more capable rover.

EDIT: Just so that no one gets their hopes up, this landing won't be like MER. MSL will be landing on the far side of Mars, so we will get little more than a confirmation from Mars Odyssey that it has landed and reported home. The mast deployment won't be for a few days, so don't expect any pictures until the end of the week.

7 minutes of terror, followed by a week of check-out boredom.

@louis, I don't think you're wrong per se, just extraordinarily optimistic. Those extrapolations are mostly reasonable for a mature lunar economy many decades down the road, but it is completely unrealistic to assume that a first product would get even within the order of magnitude of full-market penetration.

Is there any way you can reasonably work the numbers to get it down to a century or less (0.2c)? Any longer than that and it is possible that regular technological progress would allow a later generation to leave after you and get there first (using, say antimatter propulsion).

Well, SpaceX sending anything other than the Red Dragon demonstrator to Mars in less than eight years is pretty unlikely, but 2045 is pretty far out too. NASA could certainly send humans there in the 2020's if there was enough of a shake-up, so I don't see why SpaceX couldn't do the same with enough resources. NASA footing the bill would be nice, but not at all necessary. Keep in mind that many of the people who pioneered the latest generation of space tech now work for SpaceX. As long as there's money coming in the door, there's nothing they can't do as good or better and faster.

Yes.

Pretty much And when the former colonies on Earth figured that out, they created the Moon Treaty to close those loopholes.. and no one of consequence ratified it.

Precisely. The OST in this regard is a proscriptive document--it only makes firm claims about what can't be done in space (militarization, nuclear weapons, national claims of sovereignty, etc.). It makes limited prescriptive claims about what must be done in the case of emergency landings on foreign territory, rendering emergency assistance in space, discovery of mutual threats, and other similar concerns.

Claims that the OST disallows whole categories of economic activity are based on Article I, which has the “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries” language and, I think, conflation with the language and purpose of the Moon Treaty which was not ratified by any major space player. The text of the OST makes clear that the “for the benefit...” language is meant to be proscriptive of large countries bullying smaller countries in space, to mandate tolerance of space programs in developing countries, and to offer a vague mandate for collaboration on scientific endeavors. That's it. Heck, it's not very long, so I'll just quote it in its entirety:

The very existence of the Moon Treaty and its lack of ratification by major players shows intent that this limited (and currently, official) interpretation of the OST is what the signatory governments had in mind at the time of its ratification. And that's ignoring the copious information available about the negotiations accompanying the drafting of the OST which make clear that its purpose was demilitarizing space and ensuring the safety of astro/cosmonauts--not to place restrictions on private enterprise, use, or claims of property, which is why the Moon Treaty was later drafted (and failed).