What’s next for NASA, now that Curiosity (photo) has touched down on Mars? For a sneak peek into what the space agency has in store, here are proposals for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, which gives out awards of $100,000 and $500,000 for ideas that have the potential to “transform future aerospace missions”. Here are ten of the most fantastic projects that NASA hopes will be inspiring people long after Curiosity has finished exploring Mars.
One of the barriers to building a lunar settlement is that you can’t exactly hire a construction crew or buy cement in space. Flying materials and people to the moon is expensive, which is why Behrokh Khoshnevis, professor of industrial engineering at the University of Southern California, is developing automated construction technology (photo) that can build habitats layer by layer, using a paste made of heated-up lunar soil. If his simulation at NASA’s Desert Research and Technology Studies facility in Arizona is successful, human beings could be on their way to living on the moon.
Compared with Venus, Mars is a paradise. The second planet from the sun sports a toasty average temperature of 450°C and an extremely thick atmosphere filled with corrosive gases. Not only do Geoffrey Landis and his team at the NASA Glenn Research Center have to develop components that can function in extreme heat, they also need to find a way to move them around the planet. Their idea: a sail (photo) that would take advantage of Venus’ winds, which, despite their low speeds, develop significant force, thanks to the fact that the atmospheric pressure there is fifty times stronger than on Earth.
Space is pretty darn big. If we’re going to explore more of it, we’re going to need something more efficient than liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. That’s where magneto-inertial fusion comes in. Sound complicated? It is. Researcher John Slough is figuring out how to heat and compress magnetized plasma to fusion conditions, which would heat propellant through a magnetized nozzle. All you need to know is that it will make rockets go fast, cutting down trips to Mars from eighteen months to around days days.
Working in space is not only disorienting, it’s also unhealthy. That’s because muscles atrophy in zero gravity— mainly because your body thinks you don’t need them. According to NASA, muscles that fight gravity, like your calves, can lose up to twenty percent of their mass in space. The Variable Vector Countermeasure Suit hopes to use gyroscopes and accelerometers to track the position and orientation of different body parts and add “viscous resistance” to mimic the sensation of gravity and keep astronauts’ muscles from withering away.
If you live near an airport, you’re probably glad that supersonic commercial jets aren’t the norm. The problem is that what’s aerodynamic for subsonic flight isn’t necessarily aerodynamic for supersonic flight, which is why you end up with such loud sonic booms. Gecheng Zha of the University of Miami found a potential solution: create a subsonic aircraft that can rotate ninety degrees during flight to turn into a supersonic one, ensuring that it’s always as quiet and efficient as possible.
If there is extraterrestrial life in our solar system, there’s a good chance it’s somewhere in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The problem? Those oceans measure three times the volume of what we have on Earth and are hidden under an ice crust thousands of meters deep. Researchers at Virginia Tech hope to explore it using a melt-probe, which they describe as “basically a heavy, heated torpedo”, to penetrate the ice and release a free-swimming glider that would navigate the oceans and somehow send information back to Earth.
If part of the bulky, complex life-support system on the International Space Station breaks down, there’s always a relatively easy (if expensive) way to fix it: send up a spacecraft with spare parts from Earth. Crew members on a long journey to Mars wouldn’t have that option. Water Walls is meant to be a simpler, more reliable life-support system inspired by nature. It replaces complicated active mechanical systems with passive “cells” that transfer fluids by forward osmosis, removing CO2, revitalizing oxygen, recycling urine, processing solid waste and growing algae just in case the astronauts run out of food.
At an average speed of a hundred feet per hour, Curiosity isn’t going to win any NASCAR races. In the future, NASA could cover more ground by deploying something like the Super Ball Bot, based on the principle of tensegrity developed by Buckminster Fuller. These robots, made entirely out of interlocking rods and cables, could be dropped off by a spacecraft and then make their way across a planet like mechanical tumbleweeds. No rigid connections means they would be tough and flexible, although scientists are still working on a way to control them from Earth.
A single M-type asteroid could contain billions of dollars worth of iron, nickel and platinum-group metals. That might explain why NASA gave Marc Cohen, one of the few researchers in the field of “space architecture”, $100,000 to figure out how to mine one. Ideally, an observatory in orbit around Venus would identify valuable M-type asteroids. Crews would then fly out from Earth’s orbit in commercial transports to deploy the robotic asteroid prospector, which would use solar energy to power its pneumatic drill and high-heat processing equipment.
Earth’s orbit is filled with debris which often collides with other debris to create— you guessed it— even more debris. The problem with all this space junk is that it forms belts that are off-limits to new satellites. So how do we clean up our orbit? Daniel Gregory of Raytheon BBN Technologies is working on a way to fire focused pulses of atmospheric gases directly into the path of debris. That would create enough drag to slow the material down until it drops out of orbit and burns away harmlessly in our atmosphere.
Rico says all cool projects; now we just have to figure out how to fund them...
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