Space, Our New Frontier

This site hopes to encourage dialogue and interest in the exploitation of space, motivated by the rapid advance of AI and robotics, and the resulting commercial activity. It aims to elicit feedback from specialists as well as the general public .

AI has become the game changer for space developments for several reasons:

• Potentially greatly reduced equipment design and testing time, and reduced equipment costs.
• Elimination of the risk and enormous cost involved with manned missions.
• Mining, exploration and Earth return demand intelligent responses to unforeseen events – these activities become impossibly expensive if human‑crewed.
• The importance of an efficient way of monitoring and reducing the possibility of unwanted impact of natural and manmade debris.

The site maintainers believe it would be wise to consider a planned and mannered approach to the use of space, taking into account the successes and failures of development on Earth. An overly idealistic framework would be better than none. AI has risks we don’t yet fully understand, and the nature of space could accelerate those risks.

Components of a Possible Accord

• Principles of resource sharing
• Agreed limits to militarisation
• Lunar land rights
• Mining rights (lunar and asteroidal)
• Orbit allocations and cleanup
• Impact prediction and deflection

Technical Glossary

The aim of this glossary is to describe and support some of the statements made in the main body. It is hoped that readers will be prepared to comment, and if necessary, suggest revisions or additions. The glossary is intended to be purely factual.

Communication

Communication in space is by radio and by light beams. Radio is suitable for lower‑bandwidth and broadcast transmissions, such as from LEO/HEO (Low to High Earth Orbit) to Earth. Laser beams are capable of very high bandwidth anywhere in our solar system. All space communication involves long delays – from seconds for the Moon to hours for the outer planets and some asteroids.

Temperature

The space environment can involve large fluctuations in temperature. Equipment needs resilience or special protection measures.

Composition of Space Matter

The Moon, Mars and possibly Mercury have compositions similar to that of the Earth. This is not true for the other planets, or for asteroids, which have varying compositions.

Return to Earth

Sending material back from an asteroid involves escaping the body’s gravity, and changing the orbit of the material so that it travels in a new orbit around the Sun and planets which intersects that of the Earth to enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The magnitude of the vector change of the orbital velocity required to send material to Earth is termed ΔV and can be significantly less than 100 m/s, making it possible to use a catapult to return material from an asteroid.

Power

Many regions in space offer abundant and predictable solar power, as well as cooling. In outer parts of the solar system nuclear power might be needed.

Radiation

Space has regions and times of high radiation, making manned missions impossible.

This text is preliminary and we warmly invite your feedback. Please send comments or suggestions to feedback@spaceaccord.org.