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THE INTERPLANETARY INITIATIVE

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The human impulse to know what lies beyond our horizons is one of our most primal urges. For millennia, that urge has driven us to travel to unreachable places and to build impossible things. It has fueled dreams and told stories of triumph and tragedy. To imagine, to strive, to discover is fundamental to our humanity. From antiquity to present day, people who have looked to the night sky have felt this urge. It has inspired humans to create great works of art, build observatory

monuments to the heavens, and to develop instruments that transcend our human limitations. Today, our celestial horizon is no longer bound by the night sky. Our astronauts live and work in space, our probes have passed the outer limits of our solar system, and our telescopes can penetrate billions of light years into our cosmic past. In this, space’s power to inspire us is eternal. It will never cease to reveal horizons still beyond our reach.

ADVANCING SOCIETY THROUGH EXPLORATION

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On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous “We choose to go to the Moon…” speech to a crowd of 35,000 people at Rice University in Houston. In it, he outlined a vision for outer space as a realm of peace and kinship where human achievement would benefit all. Nearly seven years later, the Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, and Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon, uttering those immortal words, “…one giant leap for mankind.” The pace at which we were able to accomplish this unimaginable feat was nothing short of incredible; today the word “moonshot” has come to mean any aspiration that is so wildly out of reach as to seem impossible. How were we able to motivate and harness so much human capital? How can we reignite this spirit once again?

Today, space remains the domain of the elite, a realm for heroes. To renew our national commitment to exploration, to return to the Moon, to reach Mars, we must make space more accessible, more possible. Our new Sputnik moment need not be the technological achievements of our perceived

adversaries but rather a recognition of our mutual fragility as citizens of this small blue planet. We can forge an alternative future around a shared vision of outer space as a limitless place for all humans. We can reach and colonize Mars together. We can jointly develop technologies that can bring us one step closer to a future where all humans can dwell and thrive in space. Our cooperation can serve as a way forward to resolve our differences here on Earth and provide a blueprint for a commonality of purpose that eludes us in our terrestrial endeavors. To do that, we must create the future of humans in space.

This undertaking is no easy task. First, we must transform the complete disciplinary landscape to create positive and practical actions that generate support for the endeavor, create a viable path to space through full modernization and socialization of technology, and build a framework for the organization of an extraterrestrial society. Second, we must maximize the creative potential of our workforce by building a radical new model for education that frees students from the “tyranny of

THE FUTURE OF HUMANS IN SPACE

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content” and gives them the tools and the agency to answer questions we have yet to imagine. Finally, we must humanize space, familiarize it, and make it feel more possible. Space will play an integral

role in humanity’s future in terms of both research and resources. Therefore, everyone should be able to imagine themselves, or their children, living and working in space.

Craig Hardgrove, principal Investigator of the LunaH-Map mission, the first planetary science mission designed, built and operated by ASU.

“WE BELIEVE THAT HUMANITY’S FUTURE IN SPACE IS INEVITABLE. TO GET THERE, WE MUST

CREATE A CRITICAL MASS OF PEOPLE WHO ARE

ATTRACTED TO THE UNKNOWN, SEEK OUT UNSOLVED

PROBLEMS, AND ARE WILLING AND ABLE TO FIND

SOLUTIONS. THE MISSION OF THE INTERPLANETARY

INITIATIVE IS TO BUILD THE FUTURE OF HUMANS IN SPACE AND THUS,

TO CREATE A BOLDER AND BETTER SOCIETY.”

—Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Director and Professor, School of Earth & Space Exploration

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To build a future for humans in space, the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University has launched the Interplanetary Initiative, a pan-university effort to create the conditions that will pave the way for the future of humans in space. Uniquely qualified to lead this endeavor, SESE has redefined the methodology and practice of cosmic exploration through a transdisciplinary academic program that fuses traditional sciences like geology and astrophysics with exciting new fields like exploration systems, astrobiology, and exoplanetary science. Through this revolutionary program, ASU has set the stage for this new and exciting era of exploration of the Earth, of the universe, and of the future.

At its heart, the Interplanetary Initiative is a revolutionary model for ideation, iteration, research, and education. Humankind is compelled to explore space. We are just taking our first small steps. At ASU, we seek to be the thought leaders on the societal, educational, and technical aspects of communities extra terra. Creation of our space future has mainly been the domain of engineers,

scientists, public officials, and fiction writers. To make this future real, we need to pursue the questions of our space future across the whole landscape of human inquiry. We seek to create a culture and process that redefines the mission team where all segments of society – not just faculty, but students, members of the community, the private sector, and legislators – are working together to learn how to answer new questions. We need to have the tools to pursue the questions that lie outside of traditional disciplines, more so now than ever. We need to be able to create teams of engineers, sociologists, and psychologists, policy-makers, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, AND students.

The Interplanetary Initiative will pursue this through a process of ideation, implementation, and iteration. Because we are conceiving of a new structure in addition to new topics, the initiative will undergo continual improvement. There is no division between “building” and “running”. We will instead set in place a process for managing continued change.

THE INTERPLANETARY INITIATIVE

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The Interplanetary Initiative’s process for ideation and iteration constructs and refines the foundation of the future of humans in space. Our process convenes space law and policy experts, scientists, engineers, the media, artists, writers, psychologists, philosophers, and experts in international relations and culture in small stakeholder meetings and an annual convening. Here, stakeholders develop key foundational ideas for the initiative, articulate research questions, identify expertise, assemble

teams, plan classroom research integrations, and ideate products. The impact of the intellectual products of this iterative process span from the classroom to the laboratory, from the public to the frontiers of space.

The annual Interplanetary Convention seeks to be the major convening in the field, akin to the Aspen Ideas Festival, that will gather thought leaders from every discipline to deliberate on our collective future in space.

IDEATION AND ITERATION

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Research has demonstrated that students who learn through exploration not only retain more information, but also are better innovators. Traditional methods of instruction focus on content delivery to the exclusion of real world experience. Consequently, students graduate unprepared to tackle important research questions. Learning the process of discovery becomes an on-the-job process if it happens at all. This “tyranny of content” forgets that discovery and learning are different words that mean the same thing. To defeat it, we must equip students with the tools and the ability to approach and make progress on solutions to important questions on their own. Rather than rediscovering the already known, students need to learn to ask good questions whose answers cannot be found in the back of a textbook.

To that end, the Interplanetary Initiative will refine and scale an innovative model for undergraduate education, built on scientific method, that will use exploration as a methodological approach to learning. This model will produce a critical mass of people who are attracted to the unknown, learn how to ask good questions, are willing to pursue answers with fractional steps of progress, and know how to be leaders and build teams. Early pilots of

this model have been highly successful – in some cases leading to actual research products. The Interplanetary Initiative will scale its pilot programs using a stakeholder-developed guide for research in the classroom that will enumerate many methods of inquiry education, discuss their use in different class styles and sizes, and present an on-ramp for easy initial adoption.

The Interplanetary Initiative’s integrated learning model aims to include exploration in the classroom over a spectrum of scales—from question-based learning in large classes to team-based engineering in both capstone and freshman classes. All students should experience what it is like to build something. Each year of the undergraduate program will include exploration learning. The mindset of information-based decision-making, tolerance of ambiguity and the many steps required to reach new knowledge can be included in the largest classes. Exploration will no longer be limited to the few fortunate students who work directly with faculty on their research, but instead will be incorporated into the standard education. In later iterations, exploratory education can be adapted for K-12 outreach and in-classroom pedagogy.

INTEGRATING RESEARCH AND LEARNING

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Just as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ames Research Center propel our nation’s space program, the Interplanetary Initiative will depend on physical laboratories and makerspaces to bring us into a new era of space exploration. These spaces will bring teams together for work,

provide a dedicated shared space for hardware development, enhanced research opportunities for students outside of the classroom, and a center for discussing and spreading the methods of integrated inquiry and learning.

For most of us, space exploration is only the stuff of dreams. Those who are chosen to work on space missions are an elite few. Even fewer actually travel to space. Commercial space flight may be on our distant horizon, but even that will be cost prohibitive for most. In order to humanize space, we must develop new ways to lower the barrier to entry for average citizens. In that spirit, the Interplanetary Space Center will be the nexus of public outreach efforts for the Interplanetary Initiative and will feature learning spaces that will serve not just undergraduate and graduate students, but K-12 learners and the public as well. As a factory for mission-ready space instruments, the ISC aims to develop exploratory systems and instruments that are both sophisticated enough to be operational assets for spaces agencies and private space firms, but also affordable enough that they will be accessible to citizen-scientists, hobbyists, and the general public.

INTERPLANETARY SPACE CENTER

“THE CONTEMPLATION OF CELESTIAL THINGS WILL MAKE A MAN BOTH SPEAK AND THINK MORE SUBLIMELY AND

MAGNIFICENTLY WHEN HE DESCENDS TO HUMAN AFFAIRS.”

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 30 BCE

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CUBESAT FACTORYBuilding on the School of Earth and Space Exploration’s successful CubeSat program, the CubeSat Factory will advance the rapidly growing movement to democratize space through small-size, low-cost space vehicles that will effectively open the door to space for scientists of all backgrounds whether they are early-career researchers, undergraduate students, citizen-scientists, hobbyists or young people. An alliance with Jet Propulsion Laboratory is already pushing this initiative forward, and we have interest from Los Alamos National Labs for more shared research in this area.

SESE’s CubeSat program is already funded for several small satellites, including the shoebox-sized Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper or “LunaH-Map”, which was selected by NASA to orbit the Moon and map water content in its south pole. Current

CubeSat projects leverage clean rooms and high bay facilities for research and development, and a powerful downlink dish that sits atop the Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4 on ASU’s Tempe Campus for mission control, but facilities are at capacity. To ramp up development and production of CubeSat technology, the CubeSat Factory will build a comprehensive science, engineering, and design team, add more clean and high bay facilities, and a Hackable Education Lab that will provide a reconfigurable space for instrument and equipment tests. These improvements will empower the CubeSat Factory to create new space instruments, new science measurements, new mission paradigms, and expanded ability to control missions. The new satellite technologies it produces will be scalable and more affordable, thereby making space more accessible and paving the way for the future of humans in space.

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FIVE SENSES IN SPACE: THE HOLODECK FOR EVERYONENASA education experts say that one of the most-asked questions about space is: What is it like to be there? When imagining Mars, people ask: Does the night sky look the same? What colors would I see? How bright would daytime be? Would I feel the wind? What would it smell like? What would a rocks or soil feel like if I picked it up? What would I hear? For the average human, the ability to experience this first-hand will remain out-of-reach for at least a lifetime. Virtual reality technology is on the verge of letting us “be” anywhere, though it is still limited to asynchronous and mainly visual immersion, but humans are multisensory beings. To truly satisfy our curiosity we need to engage all five senses.

Working in conjunction with the CubeSat Factory, the Five Senses In Space Lab will create a small, space-flight-ready suite of instruments to act as our proxy, exploring the Earth and the solar system, gathering the same information that a human

would—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—as if they were actually there. To accomplish this, the Five Senses Lab will build upon already existing technologies like LIDAR, acoustic recorders, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s eNose device to develop the technologies we will use to collect and transmit Five Sense data to Earth.

Back at home, Five Senses data will render a highly immersive and collaborative virtual environment called the Holodeck for Everyone. Via the holodeck, astronauts can train for Mars missions in the environment where the missions will take place, and students and the public can experience what it would be like to walk on the Moon. Five Senses technology will combine research and education to expose and prepare more of society for humankind in space. Participatory exploration – something that used to mean regular blog posts or Skypes from schoolroom to explorer – will be real for the first time. Everyone can be virtually transported to the frontier of exploration.

Former NASA Director Michael Griffin once wrote, “If NASA were to disappear tomorrow, if we never put up another Hubble Space Telescope, never put another human being in space, people in this country would be profoundly distraught…yet I think most would be unable to say why.” Those of us who explore know why. The animus is intuitive and emotional. It is an essential part of what it means to be human. The builders of ancient cathedrals understood this, in Director Griffin’s estimation. Few of them lived to see their works completed

and yet still they toiled to build monuments that persist today. Griffin concludes: “It is my contention that the products of our space program are today’s cathedrals.” In this spirit, the Interplanetary Initiative endeavors to create the artifacts that will enable the future of humans in space. The unrealized achievements they make possible, the new worlds to which they bring us will be the monuments that we leave to posterity.

There are more giant leaps that await us. Let’s take them together.

A MONUMENT TO HUMANITY

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Bill KavanSenior Director of Development

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences480-965-7546 | Bill.Kavan@asu.edu

Linda RaishAssociate Director of Development

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences480-390-6264 | Linda.Raish@asu.edu

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

THE INTERPLANETARY INITIATIVE:ADVANCING SOCIETY THROUGH EXPLORATION

• Naming of the School of Earth and Space Exploration $50,000,000

• The Five Senses in Space: The Holodeck for Everyone $25,000,000 program costs

• Named Grad & Undergraduate Exploration Teams $20,000,000 ($600,000 annually)

• Named Exploration Professors (5 total) $10,000,000 ($2M per chair)

• Shared hardware development lab, “CubeSat Factory” $10,000,000

• Shared multi-purpose test & learn space, “Ed-Hack Lab” $5,000,000

• Named Research Mission Team Endowed Fund $4,500,000 ($150,000 annually)

• Name Post-doctoral Fellowship $3,000,000 ($100,000 annually)

• K-12 and Community Outreach Endowment $3,000,000 ($100,000 annually)

• Named Visiting Professor $1,500,000 ($50,000 annually)

• Named Graduate Student Fellowships $1,000,000 ($35,000 annually)

• International Convening Fund $500,000 annually

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GiveTo.ASU.edu Images courtesy of NASA/Hubble Space Telescope