NASA Plans To Use Solar System’s Resources To Facilitate Space Travel

Space travel is on NASA's radar, and as the American Space Agency prepares for missions like journey to Mars, it is working on concepts that go beyond the development of spacecraft and propulsion systems needed for the first level, the travel part itself. Called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), the technology will focus on how to create a sustainable model to support life using the resources available on an alien planet.

The system will be akin to how early Europeans settled in America by gathering supplies in the newly discovered land itself, and went on to create a whole new civilization with the available resources. According to NASA, the dusty soils and body atmosphere of Mars, for instance, will be used to create everything needed to eventually sustain life, right from creating building materials for shelters to making rocket fuel for a journey back to Earth.

"It was an incredible accomplishment when we went to the moon. We stayed for a couple of days and took some rocks home. We explored," said Bob Cabana, Director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "But, now we want to be pioneers. As pioneers, we will create a sustained human presence in an ever more extreme environment."

During the first half of its time as an organization, NASA's focus was on making quick trips to space for a period spanning hours, and since then the agency has progressed leaps and bounds in terms of space travel. The year 2000 heralded a new era for NASA, when it established a permanent presence in low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS), carving the path for astronauts to live and work in space for relatively long duration.

Now, NASA has set its eye on Mars, a Goliath mission, which aims to not only pioneer human travel to Mars but eventually create a colony of sustained human presence in an extreme environment. A journey whose first step will start with identifying key areas by prospecting for essential resources like surface water, and then eventually going on to mining the resources, growing crops in space, developing an effective plan to utilize waste, and of course creating a model to support life itself. The aim is to ultimately become Earth independent by using the resources available in the solar system, i.e. on other planets like Mars.