The National Space Society recently announced its
advocacy position for nanotechnology. The Molecular
Manufacturing Shortcut Group within NSS has studied and
advocated the development and use of nanotechnology under
the leadership of MMSG president Tom McKendree and board
members Margaret Jordan, Duncan Forbes, and Steve
Williams. Long-time space activist Tihamer Toth-Fejel
played a key role in making the NSS nanotechnology
position paper happen, along with many online
participants. Our thanks to them and to NSS Executive
Chairman Glenn Reynolds for bringing NSS on board as a
strong advocate for nanotechnology. The NSS press release
and excerpts from the position paper follow:
WASHINGTON, November 14 - The National Space Society
(NSS), the world's premier space development advocacy
organization, and the Foresight Institute, the world's
premier organization dealing with information on
nanotechnology and advocacy of nanotechnology research,
are pleased to announce the release of the NSS position
paper on space and molecular nanotechnology.
This is the first public position paper looking at the
implications of nanotechnology for a specific field of
activity - the development and settlement of space. It is
also the first applications paper published by an
organization other than those directly involved in
nanotechnology. This publication marks the advent of
public interest groups looking at the implications of
nanotechnology for short-term, medium-term, and long-term
planning.
The report includes a set of recommendations for action
regarding what to do about nanotechnology. NSS is pleased
to note this because it demonstrates that NSS, of all the
space development organizations, has the most
comprehensive and forward-looking understanding of the
impact of space on the future, and of future technologies
on space. Foresight Institute welcomes this because in
its opinion all organizations looking at long-term
implications and long-term planning will soon need to
take nanotechnology into account, even in short-term
recommendations. NSS is leading the way in this endeavor.
The National Space Society believes that developing
molecular nanotechnology will advance the exploration and
settlement of space. Present manufacturing capability
limits the performance, reliability, and affordability of
space systems, but the bottom-up approach of molecular
nanotechnology has the potential to produce space
hardware with tremendous improvement in performance and
reliability at substantially lower cost. Since the
settlement of space is not a near-term endeavour, it
would be a grave mistake to consider only the short-term
applications of molecular nanotechnology to space, though
there may be a few. For example, improved scanning probes
similar to Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM) could
give researchers a powerful, general technique for
characterizing the atomic structure of molecular objects.
Applied to engineered materials, improved probe
microscopy could be valuable in discovering and designing
stronger materials, faster and smaller electronics, and
exotic chemicals with unique properties. These
incremental improvements would offer the possibility of
small improvements in capability across the broad
spectrum of space activities, ensuring mission
completion, prolonging spacecraft life, and fostering the
safety of human crews.
As nanosystems used in research are constructed and
commercialized, they will move from gathering basic
science knowledge in laboratories to collecting data in
engineering applications. The first applications would be
those in which the relatively high cost and limited
capabilities of these first-generation devices will still
provide significant improvements in overall system
capability to justify the costs. Since sensors and
actuators could be significantly reduced in size and
mass, planetary probes and other space-based applications
would probably one of the first beneficiaries of these
nanosystems.
In the medium term, the nanosystem devices would be
involved in the manufacturing process. Products might
include bulk structures such as spacecraft components
made of a diamond-titanium composite. The theoretical
strength-to-density ratio of matter is about 75 times
that currently achieved by aerospace aluminum alloys. The
bottom-up approach promises to virtually eliminate
defects, enabling the fabrication of stronger materials
that could improve reliability and increase payload
capacity. The overall effect would be that success rates
for a wide variety of space missions would increase at
lowered cost.
Since the settlement of space is a long-term enterprise,
the long-term benefits of molecular nanotechnology are
the most relevant, as they are considerable, especially
the ability to bootstrap production via self-replicating
universal assemblers. This capability would probably
lower manufacturing costs by many magnitudes, down to the
order of US$1 per kilogram. It would become possible to
build tapered tethers from geosynchronous orbit to the
ground, and to build human-rated SSTO vehicles with a dry
mass around 60 kilograms. Such capabilities should make
possible inexpensive access to space. Mature nanosystems
might make possible affordable and robust closed
environment life-support systems that could take
advantage of in-situ resources, such as asteroidal metals
and cometary organics. Such a capability would
potentially enable many people to affordably live in
space. Tiny computers, sensors and actuators, trivially
cheap on a per-unit basis, may allow things like smart
walls to automatically repair micrometeorite damage,
unobtrusive space suits, and terraforming tools. By
providing instrumentation that allows the development of
medical knowledge at the molecular level, advanced
nanosystems might enable in vivo repair of cellular
damage, mitigating the dangers of ionizing cosmic
radiation.
There is a fear that spending money on molecular
nanotechnology will reduce the amount of money spent on
space development, since research funding is sometimes
perceived as a zero-sum game.
First, decision theory and experience show that achieving
large projects of significant technological complexity
(e.g., the settlement of space) require a diversification
of effort. It is especially important to have a
diversified portfolio of approaches so that unforeseen
dead-ends can be circumvented without delay. In this
case, space development can benefit significantly by
investing a limited amount of effort in low-cost,
high-payoff avenues such as molecular nanotechnology.
Second, the amount of money needed at this stage of
molecular nanotechnology development is very small
compared to the average NASA space project.
In conclusion, the National Space Society believes that
since the settlement of space is a long-range project
that will benefit the entire human race, the serious
development of long-range technologies such as molecular
nanotechnology must be supported.
From Foresight
Update 20, a newsletter on nanotechnology
published by the Foresight Institute, PO Box 61058, Palo
Alto, CA 94306, USA; foresight@foresight.org.