If you had a matter economy based on free-licensed design, what would you do with it? Why does this apply to space settlements? Are there practical projects? Who would need them? Why is free-design the right way to go? This final installment in the free matter economy series will attempt to answer these questions by taking a brief tour of the kinds of roadblocks that lead to the concept of applying free software methods to space.

“[Astronaut] Anna Fisher got the job of helping design a [space]suit for women. This had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with safety. A poor fit is unacceptable, because it would make it impossible to move. As a small person, Fisher found the unisex stock sizes simply unworkable. ‘Women are not smaller men’, she reminded the astronaut office, which apparently had to be reminded, ‘Women are built differently’. For a while NASA thought it would be more economical to select a large candidate who would fit the suit, rather than adjust the suit to fit a smaller woman, but tall women are also built differently, another lesson NASA had to learn.”—Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space [1]

Suppose that you do create a free-design community and a vendor economy to support it. What will you do with it? The idea covers many different aspects of life, but the part I’m interested in is the development of space. Why is it so essential to have a free-design bazaar to make space colonization work?

In part II of this series [2], I explored the importance of design freedom to the self-sufficiency that made past colonizations and migrations possible, following the example of the wagon trains in early 19th century America. The motivating necessity is the need for total field-repairability on the frontier. There’s not going to be a lot of warranty service calls to Mars!

Explorers and pioneers understand the importance of knowing their equipment, and in the extreme case of space settlement, there is no reasonable way to achieve this except through total disclosure of the design, means of testing, and engineering limits of the equipment used.

In fact, this is no more than NASA demanded of its contractors when it built the equipment to go to the Moon in the 1960s, so there should be no great shock in realizing that colonists will need the same power. But NASA represents a monopsony, a single-buyer market, where the buyer was deep-pocketed enough to pay those contractors everything they needed. Space settlers, especially if we are to imagine anything like a free frontier, will not be so top-down organized, nor so wealthy, and will have to manage their collective buying power differently.

Explorers and pioneers understand the importance of knowing their equipment, and in the extreme case of space settlement, there is no reasonable way to achieve this except through total disclosure of the design, means of testing, and engineering limits of the equipment used

There is also a very high premium on mass transportation for anything that must be launched from the Earth, so there will be a substantial demand for fashioning needed equipment from materials on site. Pioneers will have relatively little need to purchase equipment itself, focusing instead on the tools to begin the long bootstrapping process of building their own habitats and civilization out of little more than the dirt and sunlight they find in situ. Any economy that subsists from charging fees for centrally-manufactured copies of a secret or patented design is going to have problems with this model of living off of the land. This makes it difficult to rely on investment from terrestrial manufacturing industries which see little profit motive in serving the needs of colonists.

Personal technologies on the frontier

At the 2000 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Tucson, Arizona [3], I attended a small brainstorming session focused on what conference organizer and Tucson L5 member Tom Jaquish called “personal technologies for space” [4]. There were only half a dozen people in that meeting, but I was lucky enough to be one of them, and I still regard that meeting as a decision point. It became obvious to me that space pioneers need something that astronauts don’t: scaled down, personalized, fully-disclosed, and modifiable technology that is adapted for their fundamental needs of freedom and independence.

ISDC 2000 was held in Tucson, Arizona, the birthplace of the L5 Society. (Image credits: b/g - Geoff Stearns/CC-By, c/w from lower left - Chris Patriarca/CC-By, Aaron Jacobs/CC-By-SA, NASA/Public Domain)

The independence is not entirely a matter of choice. Like the wagon train migrants of the 1830s, the space settlers of the 2030s will be far from physical help (though radio contact and the beginnings of an interplanetary internet will be available for most settlers [5]). That means that they will be forced, by necessity, to do much fabrication and maintenance on site, using the available materials. The space community officially calls this “In Situ Resource Utilization” (ISRU) [6], or informally, “living off of the land”.

It is the most fundamental part of Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct concept [7], a basic tenant of the Mars Society which he founded, and at least an important part of the so-called NASA Reference Mission that he influenced. It is also fundamental to all realistic colonization and settlement plans, right back to the works of Gerard O’Neill, who first proposed mining the Moon to build giant space colonies at the Earth-Moon’s “L5” point [8]—incidentally motivating the creation of the L5 Society (one of the two space advocacy groups that merged to become the modern National Space Society).

This independence will require freedom and knowledge of precisely the kinds that are guaranteed by copyleft culture: settlers must be able to freely use technology, modify it to their needs, and share both their knowledge and their innovations with other settlers [9]. The frontier will require high levels of both cooperation and self-sufficiency.

This independence will require freedom and knowledge of precisely the kinds that are guaranteed by _copyleft culture_

This frontier-libertarian vision is at odds with corporate proprietary intellectual property culture. Settlers will be assuming their own risks, but in order to do so, they need total disclosure on the equipment they will be using—and that can only happen in an environment dominated by open standards and free-licensed, open-source hardware (and software).

With deep enough pockets, like Apollo-era NASA, you could simply bully the manufacturers into tending to your every whim. But this is not a very likely situation for independent colonists—they are much more likely to get shafted by corporate policies that are short-sighted here on Earth and potentially deadly in space. An omission in a manual, a microcontroller that can’t be reprogrammed, or a mechanism that can’t be repaired by a user could consign a colonist to death. If we let corporate suppliers run the show in space, it will only be a matter of time before the intellectual property system kills somebody.

A Bernal sphere, one of several giant space colony designs explored in O’Neill’s The High Frontier[8] (Image credit: NASA/Public Domain, painting by Don Davis)

The realization that this danger exists is not new. It has long been one of many reasons why those favoring a government-run program fear the commercialization of space by a new wave of corporate developers. There’s a real fear that “greedy capitalists” could fill the new frontier with modern analogs to the “robber barons” and “company towns” of the 1880s. Science fiction movies like Alien and Outland have explored this dystopic corporate future, and even Heinlein’s 1949 juvenile novel, Red Planet proposed the idea that Martian colonists would have to rebel against “absentee landlords” on Earth. However, the space movement has not been very forthcoming with ideas for how to combat this problem, especially if the large government agency is not the driving force behind it.