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What will it take to get us back to the moon?


September 15, 2014

The next thing humans send to the moon might very well come out of Kickstarter, rather than a national space agency, writes Jekan Thanga, assistant professor at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, for the popular technology and culture website Boing Boing.

Thanga's article is a response to "The Man Who Sold the Moon," a science fiction novella by Cory Doctorow featured in "Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future," a new anthology of optimistic, technically-grounded visions of the future published on Sept. 9 by ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination and William Morrow/HarperCollins.

In his response, Thanga discusses the real-world context for Doctorow's story, which focuses on a group of makerspace hardware hackers who attempt to send an autonomous 3-D printing robot to the moon to print building materials for future generations of space explorers to build a base or colony. The characters use the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, rather than traditional government space agency grants, to fund their space launch and the construction of the robot.

Thanga's article profiles real-world developments, including 3-D printers that could use materials that naturally exist on the lunar surface to build tools and widgets on the moon, rather than having to continually deliver materials from Earth; research into centrifuges that will enable manufacturing in low gravity environments; ASU's Asteroid Origins Satellite project, which uses a novel technological solution to tackle the problem of producing artificial gravity in space; and near-future plans to use a 3D printer to create plastic components for the International Space Station.

To read the full article, visit Boing Boing. To learn more about Project Hieroglyph and the anthology "Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future," visit http://hieroglyph.asu.edu.

Article source: Boing Boing

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