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Raumfahrt - Mars Society gains foothold in AI, robotics and biotechnology to clear a path to space

13.08.2024

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NASA engineer Christine Gregg inspects an experimental construction robot. (NASA Photo / Dominic Hart)

The Mars Society says it’s making progress on launching a startup incubator in the Seattle area, with artificial intelligence and biotech as its first targets. Its long-term goal? To make a profit, yes, but also to support the development of technologies needed to sustain settlements on the Red Planet.

“A successful Mars colony will need to be highly innovative, and it will have the chance to be highly innovative — and because of those facts, it will make inventions that will meet its own needs but also be licensable on Earth,” Mars Society President Robert Zubrin said last week at the nonprofit group’s annual conference at the University of Washington.

“Those inventions — as it were, IP as exports from Mars — will be one of the main economic supports of the Mars city-state,” Zubrin said. “So, people sometimes ask me, ‘Well, if you think that a Mars inventors colony could actually be profitable, why not create it here on Earth first?'”

That’s the idea behind the Mars Technology Institute. James Burk, the Mars Society’s Seattle-based executive director, said the institute would be modeled on the tech industry’s Y Combinator, a California-based startup accelerator that provides seed money and guidance for promising ventures in return for a share of their equity.

Burk said he’s been talking government officials and representatives of other organizations in the Seattle area — including Bellevue College — about setting up a home base for the institute. Those talks could bear fruit in the months ahead.

In the meantime, the Mars Society is moving ahead with initiatives in AI, biotech for food production, and robotics. In addition to those target areas, Zubrin would also like to get involved in advanced nuclear fission and fusion technologies — another tech frontier that the Pacific Northwest is known for. “But the entry point for getting involved with those [technologies] is high, and so we chose to defer that,” he said.

Here’s a status report on the Mars Society’s startup efforts:

Athena uses AI to get smart about space

Work already has begun on the Mars Society’s first startup, even before the Mars Technology Institute has a physical HQ.

The venture, which is drawing upon $150,000 in crowdsourced funds plus volunteer labor, aims to create an AI-powered expert system for space engineering projects, code-named Athena. Burk noted that in Greek mythology, Athena was the “goddess of wisdom, not the goddess of knowledge.”

“What’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom? You know, you can go on ChatGPT right now and get a ton of knowledge right now, right?” Burk said. “But is it wisdom? We want to have a system that’s trained in the space domain, so it’s almost like a consultant for you.”

Burk pointed to Varda Space Systems as the kind of company that might use Athena. Varda has been working on a space-based manufacturing system that processes materials in orbit to produce pharmaceuticals, with the finished products shipped back down to Earth.

“They spent millions of dollars on R&D to try to get to building their spacecraft that manufactured ritonovir [an antiviral drug] in orbit for the first time,” Burk said. “If they had our system, we think they could have cut their research budget maybe in half.”

Athena’s chief product officer is Charles Finkelstein, a veteran tech executive with experience at leading tech companies including Microsoft and Salesforce. Finkelstein said Athena is in “super-super-beta” mode right now, but the system should be sufficiently mature to show off to potential investors by the end of the year.

Athena is being built on Microsoft’s Azure AI cloud platform. It fits into a category known as LLM + RAG — that is, a large language model that uses retrieval-augmented generation to optimize the return of relevant results. Athena would combine search-engine tools with curated expertise in space engineering.

Finkelstein said the AI agent could be tuned to reflect different perspectives on the right technological approach to a problem. “Ask it anything you want, and you get the answer in multiple personalities,” he said.

A biotech prize for turning chemicals into food

On the biotechnology front, the Mars Society plans to offer an incentive prize for methods that use microbes to convert simple chemicals, such as methane or methanol, into food.

Zubrin said such food production methods could be 100 to 1,000 times more efficient than conventional agriculture. That level of efficiency would be particularly valuable on Mars, which can’t match the levels of sunlight and nutrients that are available on Earth. Zubrin envisions a system that could produce methane or methanol from the carbon dioxide and water that’s available on Mars, and then turn it into something like Vegemite.

“It turned out that the idea actually is good — so much so that there are a couple of companies in China that are working on doing exactly that,” Zubrin said. “The problem with that is that if we want to get investment to do it our way, it makes it hard to get an investor unless you have something really unique.”

The Mars Society’s prize would reward teams that come up with ways to improve the efficiency of the process, or the tastiness and nutritional value of the resulting product. (The microbial methanol-to-protein conversion process is currently being used to produce fish food rather than food for humans.)

“We’re going to be announcing this contest, and there will be awards,” Zubrin said. “People are encouraged to do experimental work to validate their claims. The winners will be chosen before our next international conference, which will probably take place here in Seattle as well. If the process is attractive, we will offer to patent it at our expense, and give the inventor a piece of equity in the company that is produced by commercializing that patent.”

The XPRIZE Foundation specializes in this kind of prize program, but the Mars Society has done prizes as well, albeit on a smaller scale. In 2020, for example, the society conducted a Mars City State Design Competition that awarded $10,000 to the top contestant.

Robots to serve humans on Earth or Mars

The Mars Society hasn’t yet identified a specific project in robotics, but Burk has some ideas about the sorts of projects that could address the needs of future communities the Red Planet. The applications of interest include:

  • Robotic AI field assistants that could provide real-time data processing and analysis, and enhance the decision-making capabilities of human explorers.
  • Construction robots that could autonomously assemble infrastructure on Mars, including habitats, life support systems and landing pads.
  • 3D printing technologies that enable rapid production and recycling of materials on Mars, reducing reliance on Earth-based supply chains.
  • Debris removal robots that can identify, collect and dispose of debris.
  • Robotic life support systems that can ensure reliable air, water and food production on Mars, plus robots to maintain and repair such systems.
  • Swarm robotic systems that can achieve complex tasks, such as planetary exploration and resource extraction.
Raumfahrt - Mars Society gains foothold in AI, robotics and biotechnology to clear a path to space
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