Pete Worden at SFC 14

10/21/05 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

The Space Frontier Foundations annual conference is this weekend in Los Angeles. The keynote speaker this morning is Pete Worden and he is discussing commercial lunar opportunities. Some of his notional concepts are:

Government builds infrastructure well

The moon is a good place to do dangerous things

He asserts that there are two models for building lunar infrastructure: the use of private property to insentivize private companies to build it and the GPS model where the government just builds the entire thing.

Lunar infrastructure needs include:

Communications

Positioning, Navigation, Timing (PNT) (i.e. GPS)

Situational Awareness (maps)

Power systems

A first step is some established standards. The standards around navigation and weights and measures in the 17th century are a good example. (Ed. but there is an issue to be discussed around innovation vs standardization). He is currently suggesting that a good short term example is for all of the various proposed lunar probes should use the same comms standards (good luck getting the Chinese to agree on that one!).

The discussions now turns to private lunar activities that may not be exactly profit driven such as lunar observatories. He discusses a mercury liquid mirror telescope on the moon for very very deep field sky surveys.

Now he has moved on to using the moon as a place to do nanotech development in order to quarantine and asuage fears about gray goo scenarios.

Now he's discussing using the moon as a quarantine point for Mars exploration in order to ensure that either either Earth or Martian live doesn't contaminate and exterminate the other.

Heh. “Lunar Real Estate Prospectus”. He keeps mentioning the role of private property rights on the moon and is now discussing the areas on the moon that are valuable enough to warant the desire.