Introducing Tom Hanson – Mars Society Correspondent

2019/09/20 Cornerstone for NewMars Updates

Since participating in the 2011 Reboot of Lufteam in Yahoo Groups, I’ve been invited into the posting community at NewMars.Com/forums.

Because settlement of Mars was one of Marshall Savage’s objectives for the Millennial Project, I am hoping activity on the NewMars forum will (occasionally) be of interest to readers here.

The NewMars forum started as a function of the Mars Society in (about) 2001, and it has been operating since then, with occasional interruptions due to outside forces, such as equipment failure and attacks by hackers.

I am currently supporting two initiatives which may be of interest to the LUF community:

  1. My Hacienda
  2. Asteroid Miner’s Navigation App

My Hacienda is a topic evolving from the “creation” of a (mythical) Sagan City (2018). It envisions 2750 plots of one square kilometer each laid out around a location on Mars arbitrarily chosen by a member named “Louis” in 2018. The intention of the topic is to bring together 2750 people who will accept responsibility for Division of Labor and Open Market trading to build a virtual community able to deliver comfortable living at the level of first tier cultures on Earth in 2019. The environment is considered to exist after the initial hard scrabble colonization phase, which is explored in great detail elsewhere on NewMars forum.

The Asteroid Miner’s Navigation App undertaking arises from the presence in the NewMars community several veterans of the American space program from the 1960’s forward. The expertise of these veterans is a perishable resource, and I am hoping to capture that expertise for posterity, by capturing it in software that can be run on a smart device to plan a trip between celestial objects, the way first tier citizens on Earth today can plan a trip between cities using GPS.

Update 2019/10/16: SpaceNut is the Administrator of the NewMars forum.

Recently, SpaceNut found a NASA web site that appears to perform many of the services described in the paragraph above, about the Asteroid Miner’s Navigation App. The site is offered for academic research, particularly by researchers thinking about a possible mission.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/engin … ature.html

(th)