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Asgardia, Proposed Space-Based Nation Accepting Citizenship Applications — Leaders of a proposed space nation called Asgardia discussed the project at a news conference in Paris on Oct. 12, 2016. The team discussed the possibility of one day building a space station, like the one shown in this artist's rendition, which they released to media outlets.
**Credit: James Vaughan**

PARIS ─ A proposed space nation called Asgardia is now accepting applications for future citizens.

Leaders of the Asgardia project discussed the prospective space nation at a news conference in Paris Wednesday (Oct. 12). The leaders aim to launch Asgardia's first satellite in 2017 and say they would like to eventually have aspace station where some, but not all, of its planned 150 million (mostly Earth-dwelling) nationals would live and work.

Asgardia, named after the Norse gods' home of Asgard, will be a democracy with an emphasis on the freedom of the individual to develop space technologies, according to Igor Ashurbeyli, Asgardia project team leader and founder. People can now apply to be selected as one of the first 100,000 citizens through the nation’s website, asgardia.space. At the time of publication, the number of applicants has reached more than 84,000, according to the website. While Asgardia is not officially a nation (yet), prospective citizens must fulfil the legal requirements for Asgardia's United Nations application — for example, they must be from nations that allow multiple citizenships. [Incredible Technology: How to Build a Space Station Colony]

Asgardia would be a nation in space, in low-Earth orbit, or beyond, the project leaders said. The Asgardia project team said they think they need at least tens of thousands of citizens before they formally apply to the U.N. for recognition (although there are 14 countries in the world with fewer than 100,000 citizens).

**This illustration of a futuristic-looking satellite orbiting the Earth is on the website for the Asgardia project, a mission to create a space-based country.**
**Credit: James Vaughan**

But, not all Asgardians need to live in space, just as citizens of an Earth-bound nation may live outside that country's borders. And Asgardians could claim to be citizens of the new state for the time being, even if Asgardia is not formally recognized by the U.N., Ashurbeiyli told Space.com, through an interpreter following the Oct. 12 news conference. The team said they also want to crowdsource Asgardia's flag design and insignia.

The prospective nation is being established to "serve humanity" and for "peace in space," according to Ashurbeyli. A scientist by training, Ashurbeyli founded what is now a holding company, Socium Holding, which, according to the Asgardia website, has "more than 10,000 employees across 30 companies worldwide." According to his own website, the companies under Scoium Holding are "operating in many diverse sectors within the fields of science, technology and the social sphere."

"If you look at a nation’s population, statistically, 2 percent of the population are creative and productive and progressive, so we hope that looking at the population of Earth, 7.5 billion, we are hoping that 150 million would be those creative progressive people [who become Asgardians]," Ashurbeyli told Space.com.

He said that during citizenship selection, preference will be given to those applicants who develop and invest in space technologies. Ashurbeyli described Asgardia as a state not distracted by things like infrastructure, such as roads and hospitals. He called Asgardia "… a mirror reflection of Earth in space, but without the borders, boundaries, religious constraints and without the state lines; a digital mirror reflection without all those drawbacks. We prefer dialogue with people and companies, not states…[Asgardia] facilitates and inside that envelope they can create.”

Ram Jakhu, the director of McGill University’s Institute of Air and Space Law in Montreal, is the Asgardia project team legal expert. Jakhu told Space.com via Skype on Oct.12 that with the selected citizens, a government and an inhabited spacecraft to call territory, Asgardia would eventually fulfill three of the four elements the U.N. needs to consider a nation as a state. The fourth is recognition by U.N. member states.

During the same Skype call, Jakhu told Space.com that "if [Asgardia] does good things," then he doesn't think gaining recognition by existing U.N. member states will be a problem.

"The [Asgardia] vision is very, very clear: This nation will do things to help protect the Earth and, secondly, it will be for exclusively peaceful purposes and also allowing access to developing countries that don't have that [space access]. So, if that is done, recognition will not be a major problem. If these four elements [territory, people, government and recognition] are achieved it become a state and can apply for its membership of the United Nations."

No fees are required for the citizenship applications and new citizens will not be expected to contribute to the cost of the first satellite, to be called Asgardia, which the program team plans to launch in late 2017. Ashurbeyli would not provide any details about the satellite or what its function will be, but said it was "100 percent funded."

Ashurbeyli said Asgardia's first satellite would be launched from one of the spacefaring nations, but the launching state (the country that will pay for the launch) would be a country with an emerging economy that is not a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty. The project team views partnering with a developing country as a way to get countries involved that have not previously had access to space.

The Outer Space Treaty (OST) is an international agreement made during the Cold War in 1967, and assumes all activity in space will be led by a nation-state. Ashurbeiylj said he views the OST as restrictive, with its state actors-led approach. Ashurbeyli wants private individuals and companies to be able to act in space without direct government involvement. The OST also says that no nation-state can own territory in outer space and signatories are obliged to follow this. Partnering with a non-signatory nation would avoid such legal complications with regard to exploiting space resources, he said. Non-OST signatory African countries ─ Ethiopia and Kenya, in particular ─ are seen as potential candidates for the satellite's launching state.

The Asgardia project team also has plans for satellites that would protect the Earth from asteroids and space debris. Asgardia project team member, Joseph Pelton, who is the director emeritus of the Space & Advanced Communications Research Institute at George Washington University, told Space.com after the news conference that the defense of the Earth would require different spacecraft.

For asteroid defense, Pelton envisages a flotilla of spacecraft that would be launched to meet the huge space rock years before it reached Earth and would fire lasers at the object’s surface. The laser fire would vaporize parts of the surface and the resulting jets of vapor would create enough force to slowly push the asteroid in another direction, avoiding Earth. Pelton expects Asgardia to work with Earth-based nation states to fund such a defense system.

For a defense against coronal mass ejections (powerful bursts of charged particles from the sun that can damage satellites or power grids), Pelton told Space.com: "I am working with Jim Green who is head of planetary sciences at NASA and we think it might be possible to deploy a system at L1, a million and a half kilometers [930,000 miles] out, that would have one to two Tesla magnetic fields that would be like an artificial Van Allen belt." Tesla is the unit of measurement for the strength of a magnetic field (not only the name of a car company), and the L1 orbit lies between the Earth and the moon. The Van Allen belts are a collection of charged particles, gathered in place by Earth’s magnetic field, which deflect harmful particles from the sun.

Pelton went on to describe a Bigelow Aerospace inflatable space stationpositioned at L1, that uses solar power to create the magnetic force field to mitigate the impact of the coronal mass ejections. For these defense projects and other space technology developments, Ashurbeyli said he foresees crowdfunding as one potential source of investment capital.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Sending Humans to Mars: 8 Steps to Red Planet Colonization — **Mars as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in August 2003.**
**Credit: NASA, J. Bell (Cornell U.) and M. Wolff (SSI)**

After the red dust settles from President Barack Obama's reiteration of his ambitious goal to have humans reach Mars in the next two to three decades, the next question becomes: What will it take to get there?

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time," Obama wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com yesterday (Oct. 11).

NASA has laid out detailed plans for the journey to Mars. It's feasible to get there by the 2030s — if that deadline is stretched out to the last year of the decade, said John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions]

Other experts say Obama's stated timeline is not bold enough.

"We are far closer today to sending humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later," said Robert Zubrin, president of nonprofit organization The Mars Society and the author of "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet," (Free Press, 2011). The next president should announce an ambitious goal to get to Mars by the end of the second term, or by 2024, Zubrin said. Otherwise, the momentum for the mission could be lost, and space exploration could be delayed further, he added. [SpaceX to Mars: Awe-Inspiring Video Shows Vision for Red Planet Exploration]

Either way, before astronauts start packing their spacesuits and intergalactic playlists, scientists have to sort out a few problems.

Step 1: Build American technology to get astronauts to space

Currently, the United States relies on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to the International Space Station. That is set to change, as private spaceflight companies have taken on the challenge of building a system to launch humans and cargo spaceward: Elon Musk's SpaceX is working on the Dragon robotic launch vehicles, while Boeing is building its CST-100, Logsdon said. Musk has also said that SpaceX's robotic launch vehicle could head off to Mars as soon as 2018. (A launch vehicle is a rocket-powered vehicle designed to send spacecraft or satellites into space.)

Step 2: Build bigger spacecraft

A Mars voyage requires a spacecraft that can carry multiple people, along with all the supplies for a three-year round-trip, including potential cargo items, said Bret Drake, an engineering specialist with Los Angeles-based Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit organization that researches launch vehicles, satellite systems, ground control systems and space technology for the federal government.

"To sustain a crew all the way to Mars means being able to launch rather heavy payloads, because you have to have the fuel and supplies for the round-trip," added Logsdon. "And there's no 7-Eleven on Mars where you can stock up to come home," he told Live Science.

One alternative is to create a giant spacecraft; another is to develop multiple smaller modules that can be launched separately into orbit and then assembled in space, Logsdon said. (Some of these modules could hold people while others could hold supplies, for instance).

Either way, the basic technology is there, Zubrin said. "It has to be larger than any we've built before," he said. Even so, "there isn't new science here."

Currently, Lockheed Martin is developing a four-person spacecraft called the Orion, which will sit atop the heavy-lift launch system, called the Space Launch System (SLS), that NASA is developing to take people into deep space. Orion already completed one successful test flight on Dec. 5, 2014, and is set to take a trip around the moon in 2018.

Step 3: Build bigger rockets

Launching a bigger spacecraft into deep space requires bigger rockets on any launch vehicles used. NASA plans to conduct a second test of what will be the world's largest rocket, which will be part of the SLS, sometime in 2021, according to NASA. SpaceX is also developing the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is designed to launch heavier payloads, including people, into space.

Step 4: Stick the landing

After people enter Mars' orbit, they need to land on the Red Planet. With past missions, friction, thermal effects and parachutes could provide the deceleration needed to land. But a parachute won't have enough stopping power for such heavy crafts.

However, scientists are making progress on that front.

For instance, SpaceX has shown that high-speed crafts can decelerate using supersonic retropropulsion, which involves firing engines while landing, Drake said. "We now have a feasible technical solution for how to get large vehicles to the surface of Mars," Drake said.

Step 5: Figure out long-term habitation on a space station

Astronauts have logged many weeks and months on the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating the feasibility of long-term habitation systems, such as those that provide safe water, process waste, and filter air in space. Similar systems could be used for a stay on Mars, experts say.

The difference, however, is that the ISS is in low Earth orbit, just a few hours' trip to the home planet. If anything breaks, Earth can still come to the rescue. That won't be possible on Mars, which is at least a six- to nine-month journey, even when the planets are at their closest point to each other.

"One key advancement for the life-support system is increasing the reliability of the systems," Drake said. "For Mars missions, there are no quick-abort modes back to Earth, nor ground-up resupply if systems fail. So the life-support systems need to be reliable, and maintainable by the crew, for long periods of time — many years," Drake said.

Step 6: Avoid deadly cosmic radiation

Astronauts going on a Mars mission will need protection from two forms of radiation: solar proton events (or solar flares) and galactic cosmic radiation.

The first "can be mitigated by proper vehicle design, along with a dedicated storm shelter, such as a water wall made from the life-support system water supply," Drake said. (This would involve literally lining the walls with the water used for drinking and showering.)

Shielding people from galactic cosmic radiation is trickier. In free space, cosmic radiation levels are extremely high. However, the Mars ScienceLaboratory, which landed on the Martian surface aboard the rover Curiosity, has measured cosmic radiation levels and showed that radiation exposure at the surface of the red planet is similar to levels seen aboard the ISS, Drake said. Because the ISS is located in low Earth orbit, it is below the two doughnut-shaped radiation belts called Earth's Van Allen belts, which block from Earth many of the charged particles spewed from the sun, as well as from cosmic rays, Logsdon said.

One strategy may be to make the trip through free space very quickly, minimizing the exposure to the area with the highest radiation, Drake said.

"It's safer to be on the surface of Mars than free space," Drake said.

Step 7: Get to the moon

Before making the three-year round-trip to Mars, many of these long-term space systems will be tested in cislunar orbit, according to NASA's timeline of the journey to Mars. Sometime between 2018 and 2030, NASA plans to send crewed missions on spacewalks in the region of space near the moon. Some of these missions could last a year, in preparation for the epic voyage to Mars.

The plans also include a trip to redirect and sample material from an asteroid.

This will provide an opportunity to test out all of the elements of the Mars mission, while not being too far from Earth in case something goes wrong, Logsdon said.

Step 8: Build housing on Mars

Once people have taken the effort to get to Mars, they won't just turn around. The outbound voyage would take six to nine months, but explorers can't return until Mars and Earth are in good alignment relative to the sun, which could take 14 months, Logsdon said. (The return trip will be much shorter if the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the sun, rather than on opposite sides.)

In a way, Mars pioneers would be similar to "the explorers of the 16th century that went on ships across the ocean and were gone from their home country for a long time," Logsdon said.

Given that, it makes sense to make some kind of permanent structure, Logsdon said.

"You need, on the Martian surface, some sort of habitat," Logdson said. "You're not going to live inside a spacesuit all the time. Though it seems far-fetched, the movie "The Martian" showed a relatively realistic depiction of a potential Mars living setup, he added.

Original article on Live Science.

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