A U.S. Space Program for Space Settlement

Imagine a space program based on a vision of settlement, rather than exploration. A vision of billions of people living in hundreds of thousands of orbital colonies serenely orbiting Earth, the planets and our Sun. The current vision is about putting small numbers of people very far away entirely at government expense. Space settlement is about putting very large numbers of people in space primarily at their own expense, and making sure it’s nice enough that they stay and raise the kids. While the current exploration vision is expected to cost about $100 billion up to the first visit to the Moon, the settlement vision is many orders of magnitude more expensive, making government funding impossible. But government can play crucial role. Specifically, perhaps we could use something close to the current NASA budget to stimulate much larger private investments. In this vision, government funds are devoted to prizes, test facilities and technology development, along with NASA’s traditional science and aeronautic activities. Operations are left to the private sector. Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill and others showed that orbital space colonies were physically possible. Dr. O’Neill’s analysis suggested that lunar mines could supply the materials, the Sun could provide the energy, and that our technology had nearly reached the point where we could build orbital cities. These cities could be placed anywhere in the solar system, although beyond Mars nuclear power might need to replace solar energy. Others have shown that asteroids may be superior to the Moon for materials and that construction of orbital colonies is considerably easier than developing comparable Martian or Lunar colonies. O’Neill speculated that we would be well on the way to building orbital colonies by now. We aren’t. At the moment we don’t even have a plan to settle the solar system. This paper is intended to be a first step. The focus is on building the first orbital colony, then using the infrastructure developed along the way to turn the crank over and over, building new land for Life’s expansion. To build the first colony, we lean heavily, although not exclusively, on prizes. Prizes have several excellent properties: