Space Habitation and Life Support Commons^™

Man On Mars: How Can International Space Law Limit The Environmental Consequences Of The Coming Rush For Resources In Space, Elizabeth Anne Henderson

Michigan Journal of International Law

The body of international law governing space has stood at a standstill for decades. The five central treaties regulating this area of law are not only vague, but they have also become a hindrance to the global community’s ability to address the rapidly intensifying second space race. The treaties do not adequately state who space belongs to, who is entitled to take advantage of the natural resources of celestial bodies, or what protections are afforded to celestial environments in the face of impending mining and resource extraction projects. This impasse within international law has not stopped entrepreneurs and corporations from …

Repurposing The United Nations Trusteeship Council To Govern The Establishment Of Outer Space Settlements, Andrew Wulf

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Current existing international law and treaties on outer space do not address or regulate private actors’ property claims or human settlements in outer space. American companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, as well as countries like the United States, Russia, and China, are seeking to create colonies on the Moon and Mars. However, there is no international legal authority to allow or regulate this. In order to legitimize and control this impending outgrowth of human settlements, this paper proposes that the U.N. Trusteeship Council be repurposed to govern non-state actors’ claims of outer space property.

First, this paper explains …

Humanity’S Journey To The Red Planet, Robinson Raphael

Student Works

Being the fourth planet in our solar system, Mars is half the size of Earth and constitutes a gravity near 0.38 g. Like its fellow terrestrial planets, it has a central core, rocky mantle, and solid crust. Coupled with a thin atmosphere, its surface features are reminiscent of both the Earth and Moon. Given adequate accessibility, Mars has been a hub for scientific exploration. With past and present robotic missions, they have gradually provided information about the Martian environment to help aid future human exploration. For humanity’s first manned mission to the Martian crater, Aram Chaos, a crew of six …

Nasa Mars Greenhouse, Alexa Escalona, Thomas Lee Hodsden Iii, Zoe Ault Rivas, Grace Genszler, Morgan Mcgonagle, David Dick, Christopher Yu, Peter Mahoney Jr.

ENGS 89/90 Reports

NASA conducts an annual BIG (Breakthrough, Innovative, Game-Changing) Idea Challenge for university-level students across the country. This ENGS 90 Group competed and was chosen as one of the five finalists with a low-cost, low-risk design of an inflatable greenhouse which can support a human mission to Mars. This greenhouse features a hydroponic growing system to grow eight different food crops to meet the nutritional requirements of a four-person crew.

Conceptual Design Of A Reusable Mars Aircraft, Bryce L. Horvath

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This study assumes that the launch vehicles and precision Mars entry descent and landing systems, required for eventual crewed missions to the surface, have been developed, motivating the rapid build-up of a fixed surface base to enable extended human stays. During the time interval between the first successful placement of a heavy (between 20 and 80 metric ton) payload and completion of the baseline human-rated Mars outpost, it will be possible to utilize this large payload delivery capability to accelerate robotic exploration of the surface from the fixed base location.

One element of such an expanded robotic exploration program will …

Access Mars: Assessing Cave Capabilities Establishing Specific Solutions: Final Report, Abdul Mohsen Al Husseini, Luis Alvarez Sanchez, Konstantinos Antonakopoulos, Jeffrey (Johannes) Apeldoorn, Kenneth Lowell Ashford Jr., Kutay Deniz Atabay, Sara Langston, Et Al.

Publications

The human race has evolved, grown and expanded through the exploration of Earth. After initial steps on the Moon, our next challenge is to explore the solar system. Mars shows potential for both scientific discovery and future human settlement, and so is a prime candidate for the next leap of human exploration. Such a bold endeavor will be a driver for an unprecedented worldwide cooperative effort and the catalyst for a new era of international, intercultural and interdisciplinary human relations. Scientific and technological progress will also accelerate as mankind is ushered into a new era of space exploration.

Currently proposed …

Expert Systems For Automated Maintenance Of A Mars Oxygen Production System, Ming-Tsang Ho

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A prototype expert system has been developed for maintaining autonomous operation of a Mars oxygen production system. Normal operation conditions and failure modes according to certain desired criteria are tested and identified. Several schemes for failure detection and isolation using forward chaining, backward chaining, knowledge-based and rule-based are devised to perform several housekeeping functions. These functions include self-health checkout, an emergency shut down program, fault detection and conventional control activities. An effort has been made to derive the dynamic model of the system using Bond-Graph technique in order to develop the model-based failure detection and isolation scheme by estimation method. …