October 19, 2020

Mars Society 2020 Virtual Convention

UPDATE - My talks are now available on the Videos page. But if you want to just see the most recent ones, click below.

Paraterraforming Hebes ChasmaTerraforming a whole planet and transferring an ecosystem is a very high technical and scientific wall.  This is a practical intermediate approach that allows ecosystems to be selected, managed and refined in a canyon the size of Lake Erie on the Mars equator. This talk is roughly equal parts biology and architecture. PDF of Presentation
Starship Logistics PortsUsing Starship components and simple frameworks, it is a fairly simple, scalable, modular path to build "self-feeding" deep space settlements from LEO to the asteroid belt using common components.  These can be scaled from ten to 10,000 people.PDF of Presentation

Due to the current pandemic, the Mars Society conference was held virtually this year. It was also free. Consequently, a conference that peaked at 2000 people and had dropped to under 800 in recent years reached 10,000 people. Further, Elon Musk's talk Friday evening was picked up in some part by various YouTube and media channels, which have shown it collectively over 100 thousand times.

As usual, it takes the team a few weeks to get all the videos edited and loaded. The slides of my two talks this year are now on the Videos page of this site. One is on paraterraforming in practical terms, with equal parts biology and architecture addressed. The second talk on Spaceports addresses the problem of where to safely harbor SpaceX starship vehicles in orbit or deep space. It gets into cyclers, asteroid colonies, LEO refueling hubs, and other vehicles built on a very affordable, scalable system.

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