helloallworlds
#31. The High Frontier
Here are this week's 3 links worth exploring:
- Gerard K. O'Neill was a physicist at Princeton who started with the question:
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable: the best site is 'somewhere else entirely'.
What followed was a detailed step-by-step plan to kickstart humanity's expansion into the Solar System - starting in cislunar space - by using the resources of the Moon and asteroids to build enormous space habitats and new industries and opportunities. The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O'Neill is a fantastic documentary about the man and his ideas:
https://tubitv.com/movies/100000873/the-high-frontier-the-untold-story-of-gerard-k-o-neill
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"Have you tried turning the computer off and on again?". Not going to cut it if the computer is in space! Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The focus is writing space-proof code that can be run and tested again and again, and does the same thing every time:
https://kottke.org/23/06/how-nasa-writes-space-proof-code -
Where is the Earth exactly located with respect to the Sun? Let's use Python to find out! SPICE is an observation geometry system for space science missions developed by NASA, comprising a library and toolkit. Though SPICE itself is not written in Python, SPICE can be used with the Pythonic wrapper spiceypy to start computing Earth's location and velocity:
https://youtu.be/Rq1IeBX44_M?si=Fo_bAbHdwgRq-fht
Quote of the Week: "Free space settlements do not have to be gargantuan, far away, trillion-dollar endeavours. There is an easier way ... as long as the settlement is in Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO)." — Tom Marotta and Al Globus, The High Frontier: An Easier Way
Onward!
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