Reducing the Cost of Space Exploration

We can use materials that already exist on the Moon and Mars in an innovative approach to reduce the need (and thus the expense) to bring everything from Earth.

There is every indication that exploring the Solar System and expanding humanity's permanent presence to the Moon and Mars will provide significant benefits to America. Over the past three decades, America's space program has more than paid back its cost in a number of ways, both tangible and intangible. Even though it will continue to be an expensive undertaking, a far higher price would be borne by our nation in avoiding such a mission. However, the importance, the enormity, and the inevitability of the program require immediate focus on ways to lower its cost without reducing its scope or increasing its risk. What can we do to lower the price tag of this ambitious exploration program while still accepting its challenge?

We can process natural resources on the Moon and Mars into products we need at an outpost, thus avoiding the need to bring them from Earth. These resources can provide us with oxygen and nitrogen to breathe and water to drink. We can produce propellants for our spacecraft. Carbon dioxide (CO2) can be extracted from the lunar soil, or regolith, to support plant growth for food. We will learn to fabricate bricks and panels from local materials and use them for constructing habitats, workshops, and storage buildings. We will extract metals from local rocks and soil to make beams, wires, and perhaps even solar power cells. In short, many of the essential materials needed for life on the new frontier can be produced from local resources.

This program is ready to move from the concept stage into research and development. Indigenous Space Materials Utilization (ISMU --formerly called In-Situ Resource Utilization) can provide a reduction in cost and can increase our capabilities significantly as we develop and expand a lunar or Mars outpost. Our goal for the ISMU program is to free these outposts from total reliance on the Earth as soon as possible, thereby rapidly shifting the nature of our space transported cargo away from bulk materials, such as propellants and building materials, to additional people and complex equipment.