As we move from short-duration stays in space to long-duration expeditions to permanent settlement, human factors become more important. In the early days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, NASA was more concerned with providing basic nutrition than making food palatable. The food supplied to astronauts aboard ISS is much improved, but no one would mistake it for gourmet or home cooking.

As space travel becomes more routine, space cuisine will no doubt become more elaborate and more closely resemble the meals humans are used to on Earth. In this short film, a French animator gives his take on what space settlers might like to see.

We recently posted some observations from the second annual 100 Year Starship Symposium, which took place in Houston last month. Since that time, several people have asked us for our thoughts on how the 100 Year Starship Initiative ought to proceed.

We’ve been reluctant to offer any advice, due to the sheer enormity of the task which DARPA laid out for the initiative. Developing the technology to build and launch a starship in 100 years is an unprecedented challenge, which greatly exceeds any previous engineering project in both scope and duration. There are no precedents for the management of such a project.

After some reflection, however, one thing seems obvious to us. It is highly unlikely that the first starship will be built by NASA, DARPA, the 100 Year Starship Initiative, or any other Earth-bound institution.

The people who design and build the starship will almost certainly be living in space, with access to resources greatly exceeding those available to us on Earth and technologies beyond our current understanding.

Therefore, the most important thing the 100 Year Starship Initiative can do is to support near-term steps that will enable large numbers of people to move out into space, on a permanent basis.

The DARPA-funded 100 Year Starship Initiative is holding a Public Symposium in Houston, Texas on September 13-15, 2012.

On a somewhat related note, there’s new data suggesting that exoplanet Gliese 581g may be the best candidate for a habitable planet so far. This brings the number of potential habitable planets discovered by scientists up to five, according to a recent press release by the Planet Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico.

The discovery of habitable planets beyond our solar system presents NASA with a once-in-an-organizational-lifetime opportunity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Space Studies Institute has announced The Great Enterprise Initiative, a research and development project to advance the permanent human settlement of space.

Details were announced April 13 by SSI president Gary Hudson speaking at the Space Access 2012 conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Great Enterprise Initiative includes the develop of two laboratory facilities aimed at advancing critical technology and science for long-term human residence in space.

One of the laboratories will be terrestrially based. E-Lab’s mission will be to prove out the closed-cycle environmental systems necessary for long-term space habitats. The focus will not be on developing individual systems but integrating a full-scale “system of systems” to support life for years on end? E-Lab will probably located at Mojave Air and Space Port, although the final location will be dependent on donor interests.

The other laboratory will be ina space, coorbital with (but not physically attached to) the International Space Station. G-Lab will explore the unanswered question of what level of gravity is necessary for long-term health and biological development. Currently, the only data points are from Earth (1 g) and orbital missions (0 g). Apollo missions to the Moon were too short to provide meaningful data. The shape of the curves between those two data points is currently pure speculation. G-Lab will be orbiting centrifuge facility designed to fill in some of the missing intermediate data points. This information is crucial for the design of future space habitats as well as long-duration deep-space exploration missions.

G-Lab might have a permanent crew of scientists, like ISS, or it might be human tended. Details will on the results diet future design studies and the success of fundraising efforts. Development schedule also depends on the success of SSI fundraising. In the best case, G-Lab could be in orbit by 2017

For more details, see the Space Studies Institute website.