TL;DR - Splitting this into subsections, may tackle each of them in finer details in further writings, but I wanted to take inventory of what’s being applied in the space industry and how web3 projects can take advantage of that. Also, this is a particular passion of mine, as I see no solarpunk future on Earth that does not depend in part on a lunarpunk future away from Earth.

"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct."

— Carl Sagan (the GOAT of lunarpunks)

The name of the game right now is industrially scaling super heavy-lift launch vehicles (SHLVs). After all, we can’t accomplish much if we can’t escape Earth at the nominal industrial scale. Currently, the project to watch is the first orbital launch of SpaceX’s Starship:

On the ground, there’s a few things to explore. For one, we have MoonDAO launching a Youtuber and a DAO member into space. To be fully candid, I did not expect the momentum from ConstitutionDAO to continue past its failure to win the Sotheby’s bid. If you were there in the discord after the event, well, it wasn’t pretty. I didn’t expect to see such an enthusiastic project to be started, and since its inception, MoonDAO has evolved quite a bit. This is important, because up until this point, spaceflight has been mostly limited to governments and private ventures, and both have to deal with the difficulty of high stakes. In my humble opinion, the more that the global public has access to spaceflight, the less scary it will be to invest resources and explore the final frontier. The combination of cutting edge launch vehicles with citizen astronautics means a change in the public perception of what humanity is capable of. This becomes a more aspirational culture that can handle a far more robust multiplanetary civilization, and as a second-order consequence, we gain more of a chance of conserving the planet that has borne us to this point in history.

The other facet to chasing a goal in space is the fact that its all applied engineering at the end of the day. We can go back several decades and read about someone not only imagining the impossible, but also formulating the technical specifications. The question of the present is getting the will and the resources to make these ideas real, and the only way it’s been done is through central planning. Fortunately, there’s been a fairly healthy overhaul of institutions like NASA, which if we’re being honest, had issues since they pivoted into the space shuttle program. Luckily, we have a framework of delegating the congressional budget to the companies that can shoulder the risk themselves. Satellites are great infrastructure, but consider the risks of ballistic events in LEO (by accident or sheer lunacy) and the political nature of allocating resources to high-stakes ventures like space. It’s just not enough or the right kind of success. If we want to develop as a spacefaring or solarpunk civilization, it makes way too much sense to cooperate and strive to push past the limits we have here on Earth.

One of the major reasons I say this is because we need minerals to fully upgrade our economy to the point that it is self-sustaining with minimal environmental impact. It’s a lot easier to plan out the logistics of allocating minerals from asteroids than it is to choose between civilization-ending austerity or environmental outcomes like this:

Nature loves paths of least resistance, and we should as well in the spirit of nominal sustainable growth.

There are currently tens of thousands of space debris in orbit. With satellite constellations like Starlink, the number of objects in orbit is increasing at an accelerated rate. There’s also an increasing demand for megastructures that don’t easily coexist with space debris. Smaller satellites perform evasive maneuvers all the time, but a skyhook may not have that luxury.

For anyone that wants an entertaining read, I highly recommend Seveneves. As a quick summary, the majority of the novel concerns the operational challenges of living on the International Space Station permanently, but also the major leaps we might take in the immediate future to become a full-fledged spacefaring economy (like bringing asteroids into Earth orbit).

Luckily, we have authors like Stephenson and Weir who fixate on the hard reality in realistic scifi. We also have the benefit of real scientists like Christopher Mason examining the health effects, and Ariel Ekblaw designing the architecture & robotic assembly. There’s a lot of contemporary insights that manifest from practical experience, and now we have a very solid vision for what we need to launch and construct in LEO. For example, we need artificial gravity to sustain multigenerational life in space. However, we’ve sort of tunnel-visioned ourselves into big, ambitious moonshots. In the hypothetical emergency in Seveneves, we don’t have a surplus of resources (kind of like what we might have in reality) and there’s a need for artificial gravity at minimal cost with high risk tolerance. The quick & dirty solution is tethering two craft and spinning them at a set distance, using inertia to maintain some semblance of a life-supporting environment. This has problems of its own, but we need it, and LEO is the closest testing environment.

I’m not going to go into depth concerning Lagrange points, but the main point: if we want to be spacefaring, then we need shipyards, and if we want multiple shipyards to minimize catastrophic failure, then they’ll be situated at the more stable Lagrange points, more accessible than any asteroid, planet, or moon.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I would love to see an Earth-based mass driver. It’s very appealing to the solarpunk ethos, which I think many would agree with. Rocket launches into space have all sorts of issues:

• the sound is destructively loud

• the fuel adds to manmade greenhouse emissions

• there’s pollutants of multiple kinds

• they’re effectively controlled bombs, which means they also are accidental explosions occasionally

• they’re intercontinental ballistic missiles by definition, so flight paths are restrictive

• they will always be the most expensive form of upmass

• there’s a physical limit to the payload & propellant mass fraction

Mass drivers, once operational, are much more scalable (and cheaper) for upmass. The main limitation is that they’re suboptimal in atmospheres like Earth’s, still require additional burns, and they’re less versatile as fixed structures. None of these disqualify us from building mass drivers on the Moon. The best thing about this technology is that it is much more electrified, so we gain more of an ability to divert surplus solar energy into motion without wasting mass on propellant.

The other main project that can be nominally operational on the Moon is telescopy. On Earth we had a massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, it fell into disrepair, was decommissioned, and in 2020, it collapsed.

Fortunately, we can rebuild the same class of telescope on the Moon with even better specs.

I often think about the extraordinary feat of generating an image of a black hole. In that paper, there was mention of needing to consider atmospheric flux:

All derivations in Section 2.2 assumed that light travels from the source to a telescope through a vacuum. However, in reality, differing atmospheres above each telescope site cause there to be large deviations in the relative propagation time [124]. In particular, for short radio wavelengths, fluctuations dominated by turbulence in the atmosphere's water vapor cause erratic changes in the path length light must travel to each telescope [92].

It’s important to note that this method of imagery involves interferometry, a computational technique for gaining resolution from faraway sources of data, however resolution for telescopes depends on the size of the lens or dish:

Although a single telescope this large is unrealizable, by simultaneously collecting data from an array of telescopes, called an interferometer, it is possible to overcome the single-dish diffraction limit and create a virtual telescope as large as the maximum distance between telescopes in the array [124]. When these telescopes are distributed globally, this technique is referred to as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).

Not only can we deploy single telescopes with very good specs, but we can also deploy arrays of telescopes that increase our capabilities even further. These observational and logistical installations are why going back to the Moon is so essential to human civilization.

Of course we have to discuss Mars. Apart from the scientific insight of examining past bodies of water (and potentially fossil records that change how we view life as a cosmic event), Mars is where the next planetary civilization will manifest, if we get the chance. This is a widely explored subject, the richest man on Earth is invested in achieving it, and it’s getting discussed by laypersons at the kitchen table. Not much needs to be discussed in an informal piece such as this. But you should definitely go watch The Martian.

Titan, a moon of Saturn, is the only body, other than Earth, with a liquid surface. The most notable facet of its surface composition is the significant amounts of liquid methane & ethane. It is important to note that unlike most bodies, Titan affords some protection from cosmic radiation, which can damage genetics and electronics alike. Like Mars, there’s a small possibility that life may have existed at some point. As far as humanity is concerned, we seem to like carbon a lot. Having easy access to hydrocarbons means a whole new economy of fabrication and fuel production. With regards to Luna and Titan, we also need to consider the relatively smaller gravity wells (Luna is 17% the gravity of Earth, while Titan is 14%). In the case of Titan, because it has this dense atmosphere, there’s also a new class of possibilities for hacking the launch constraints via buoyancy. While we may not be capable of building a megastructure like a space elevator on Earth, the question remains whether it could be done on Titan with en situ resources. If it is, that increases the scale of logistics by orders of magnitude. Hypothetically, one might be able to leverage capillary action with the right kind of slurry to pipeline hydrocarbons close to orbit with minimal intervention from a traditional launch system. I am confident that by the time humans can qualify as a Type I civilization, there will be commercial activity on Titan.

For obvious reasons, we’re going to need to mine asteroids. Here’s a list of the most exceptional asteroids in our system. If anyone has watched the show The Expanse, they’ll notice that the largest asteroids make easy candidates for hypothetical space stations (Ceres, Pallas, etc)

Assumedly, these larger asteroids may remain where they are, becoming shipyards and/or mining sites far beyond Earth’s heliocentric orbit. They may even qualify as the inevitable class of interstellar spacecraft. However, the size and mass means these bodies are costliest attempt at achieving attitude and impulse control.

At this point I’m going to raise the subject of Near-Earth Objects (NEO). Obviously, we know that asteroids have collided with Earth & Luna, but space is much bigger than we appreciate, and even if these events weren’t rare, there is an active observation and framework for these potentially hazardous objects (PHO).

The point is, if we become a Type-II civilization, we will require the economic prerequisites of asteroid mining. Since I’m assuming you, the reader, are reading this as a web3 native, it stands to reason that we will need decentralized governance over these solar resources, as well as a universally accepted set of rules for limiting and guiding our consumption of these resources for the sake of our extraterrestrial economy.

Venus is a tricky planet, because its atmosphere is so hostile. That being said, Venus has proven to already be an asset as just a gravity well for slingshot assists. And since the geoengineering of Venus has been a subject for so long, we have a pretty solid idea of how to make it another site of human civilization:

Unlike Titan, there is no hydrogen on Venus, and in all likelihood would require a comet collision and the aforementioned shade (long enough to cool the atmosphere) to maintain some amount of water on the surface. In the meantime, there is a cohesive idea of how to utilize non-native hydrogen to buoy craft well above the surface.

In my humble opinion, Venus and Titan are both underestimated by the general public as key locations in the solar system that will ensure that humanity becomes a Type-I civilization.

The definition of a Type-II definition:

A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star—for example, by means of the successful completion of a Dyson sphere or Matrioshka brain—with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec.[8] Lemarchand defined civilizations of this type as being capable of using and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy use would then be comparable to the luminosity of the Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts).[9]

The aforementioned Dyson sphere is named after the physicist/astronomer Freeman Dyson, who defined this civilization in order to examine what we needed to observe telescopically to ascertain the existence of an advanced spacefaring civilization.

What Dyson did consider was the unlikelihood that an advanced civilization would begin with a complete Dyson sphere. As volcanic ash, a massive amount of small particles, obscures sunlight on Earth enough to lower global temperatures and kill biomass, so too can a Dyson megastructure begin as a massive number of small vessels, slowly capturing the entirety of our Sun’s energy. When I consider the Parker Solar Probe, I see it as a proof of concept for the precursor of what will become the biggest hyperstructure that humanity might ever construct. Although it’s not described as such, I wonder if the best approach would be defining a “Dyson circuit”, or in other words, the trajectory of any spacecraft that decreases its orbital perihelion, collects solar energy (e.g. transferring EM work into a flywheel), and utilizes that energy throughout the rest of its heliocentric orbit and additional workloads (probably digital and telecommunicated).

As I see it, the best opportunity that the global public has of reaching this stage is through web3 coordination, and the best examples of web3 coordination that has any sincere intention of pursuing this humanitarian goal are MoonDAO & Spacechain. As implied in my previous article, this goal might be optimized through a general DAO as a foundation for more esoteric, niche spinoffs.

https://mirror.xyz/m-j-r.eth/HlrUKtiFl7_LMDDIuJOrM_De0r7gNwn8jESlkm_7mzc

I will be exploring that solarpunk playbook in further writing, but in the case of maximizing our chances of survival as a species, we need the lunarpunk playbook to avoid catastrophe in space. It does not seem unlikely if, should we abdicate our responsibility as DAO contributors in the pursuit of multiplanetary civilization, that an inevitable conflict erupts between nation-states, planet-states, and other private entities in a zero-sum exclusionary competition. We, the global public, have all the resources and technical specifications to pursue the nominal trajectory of multiplanetary civilization, and we also have the will and the ethos to cooperate with governmental & private space agencies in their exploration of public goods in space. Now is the time for the coordinated expanse.