ASTR 12
Space Pioneering - Dreams, Math, and Steel on the Existential Boundary Winter 2023

This is not the current course catalog

Over the Earth’s five and a half billion year history, only within the last century have its evolved conscious inhabitants acquired the tentative means to travel across the Solar System. At the same moment, in the estimate of Oxford scientist – philosopher Toby Ord The Precipice, the total probability of existential catastrophe, including the risk of cometary impacts, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear war over the next one hundred years is as large as 1 in 6. Spacefaring commerce, already honed to astronomical observation, global communication, navigation, and weather-climate monitoring, could serve as a primary defense against life extinction. This course will consider the prospects for a spacefaring civilization, with an elementary, but physics-driven exposition of astronautics, celestial mechanics, lunar resources, space manufacturing, global warming mitigation, and the human settlement of Mars and other space environments – including the eventual possibility of interstellar flight. Students will be invited to apply quantitative reasoning to their critical exploration of global trends in resource consumption and human opportunities toward an open future, as potentially enabled by space technology, commerce, and culture. Elementary mathematical exposition and applications will emphasize conceptual/analog thinking, relying upon “back-of-the-envelope” scaling methods and graphical interpretation. Course grades will be primarily based on class attendance and individual projects. Although brief quantitative papers will be encouraged, students may choose to make an artistic, philosophical, or socially discursive response with their project. Class lectures of 6 to 8 hours per week will constitute the core instructional material, along with small group tutorials and student presentations of up to 3 hours per week. Weekly outside-of-class work including reading, research, or other creative activity can be expected to take approximately 10 hours