Sustainable exploration in space benefits humanity sustainable exploration in space – Open Access Government

You may need things for life support. Life support is not so much of a driver for this because were increasingly moving towards very efficient life support systems and the cost of resupply compared with, for example, propellent in terms of the total mass taken to a place is quite small. Oxygen, for example, is used in propellant and life-support, so theres a synergy between these things. You can also use local materials to create structures or radiation shielding, thermal shielding or a landing pad, for example.

At ESA, we look at what can be created locally and how this can be done. The most obvious example is to harvest water and from this, create hydrogen and oxygen, which are useful and are rocket fuel. We find water ice at the poles of the Moon. We also find it on Mars. This could be universally applicable around the Solar System by water.

We also look at how to extract useful things from the rocks and minerals found. The surface of the Moon is covered in ground-up powder, powdered rock, Regolith, generated by billions of years of impact onto the surface. This relic, like all minerals, is made up of oxygen combined chemically with different metals. We look at processes taken from terrestrial industries and use those to learn how to take oxygen out of lunar materials, which leaves us with oxygen and metal alloys that can be used to do a 3D print to create materials in the future. Oxygen extraction is something were getting pretty good at; however, metal production is something that will happen in the future to make decent quality alloys.

The Package for Resource Observation and in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Commercial exploitation and Transportation (PROSPECT) assesses and accesses potential resources on the Moon and aims to prepare technologies that could be used, in the future, to extract these resources. This will drill beneath the surface at the lunar poles. It will extract water ice, then analyse the chemistry of that to help us work out the abundance, distribution, origins, how that water evolves in the poles and how it might be used responsibly in the future.

A key thing to understand is how to use local materials, where are the opportunities and what will it take to use them? How can we do that responsibly? How can we work in the most efficient way possible using the materials that we have, using recycled, for example? Also, how can local materials be used, extracted and processed to respect the environment? The idea is that there are related lessons to bring back to Earth.

Building vehicles to get into space is expensive, theyre extremely complex and must work. Failure is not an option if people are sitting on the top of a rocket or youve got a billion or multi-billion-euro spacecraft. This sits on tonnes of highly explosive material to explode. Doing this in a controlled and careful way that delivers what you need in the way you need, is complex and dangerous. The development of vehicles, new buildings and rocket engines are costly undertakings.

We now see a drive towards reusability, of course, SpaceX has driven that conceptually and in Europe, were looking at reusable concepts. Thats one way of bringing down the cost of access, so globally, we see the cost of getting to space reducing. As that happens, we see more and more people using and accessing space. Space will become an increasing part of our economic sphere, and its already an integral part of many aspects of our lives. That utilisation of space will expand over the coming years. In exploration, we endeavour to take humanitys next economic sphere and expand that beyond our near-Earth environments, outwards into the Solar System. In the long-term, that will have enormous benefits for humanity.

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Sustainable exploration in space benefits humanity sustainable exploration in space - Open Access Government