The Colorado School of Mines's Center for Space Resources (CSR) is located in the General Research Labs building, but the center’s director, Dr. Abbud-Madrid, said its best to “think about the Center for Space Resources as CSM in space.” The CSR is a multidisciplinary research center focused on tackling the challenges facing space exploration today and in the future.Mines has had a history with the space program, starting with the study of Apollo moon rocks. For a short time, there was even a Center of Space Mining. However, there was no concerted effort to establish a space research center until 1996, when the Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space (CCACS) was created as a part of the NASA Commercial Space Centers program. The center studied high temperature reactions and combustion in microgravity, lasting for about 10 years.
The true Center for Space Resources was created in 2006 in response to what Dr. Abbud-Madrid described as “a major shift in NASA policy.” In January of 2004, President Bush gave NASA goals of replacing the aging space shuttle, returning to the Moon, and sending the first manned missions to Mars. These goals involve everything from the development of new technologies to finding, mining, and utilizing planetary resources. As Dr. Abbud-Madrid said, “That’s exactly what Mines is good at.” Thus, the CCACS was reworked into the contemporary CSR to be a multidisciplinary center for the development of new technologies to meet the challenges faced by the new era of space exploration.
Recent budget announcements made by President Obama, including the cancellation of the shuttle replacement and Lunar and Martian expedition projects, appeared to spell out an end for an American space program. However, Dr. Abbud-Madrid felt otherwise, “It’s actually a great opportunity for us and for universities and for researchers, because now the money, instead of being channeled to build the rocket, will be used to develop technology.” This opens the door to corporations to attempt to develop their own space transportation and could lead to better and more efficient systems than would have been produced by NASA directly. So, despite fears that US spaceflight was dying out, Dr. Abbud-Madrid was hopeful. “When [the budget report] came out and I read it, I said, ‘This is great.’”
Since the CSR is a multidisciplinary research group, there are a lot of different projects all being worked on at any time. CSR members are studying how to characterize and excavate soil, developing sensors, studying new materials and how to manufacture them in space, finding ways to manage the dust that plagues planetary research, and developing a new fire suppression system. Recently, there have been some very significant developments in a couple of the projects. Dr. Abbud-Madrid noted that, “We developed the first prototype of a lunar excavator… that will work on the moon.” The group of seniors working on that project will head to the Kennedy Space Center at the end of the semester with a new version of the excavator.
Another great development has been in Dr. Abbud-Madrid’s research into spacecraft fire suppression. “We were actually given the go-ahead by NASA to develop the fire extinguisher that’s going to be on the new spacecraft from now on.” And it will most likely be adopted in the future by other corporations for their spacecraft as well. The system being developed at the CSR is a portable unit that disperses water in a very fine mist. Dr. Abbud-Madrid explained the benefits, “Water is great, because water mist - as opposed to sprinklers - is very fine droplets, like a cloud. So that thing gets to the fire, absorbs all the heat, vaporizes very quickly, and doesn’t leave all the destruction that you have after using [sprinklers].” And with spacecraft dehumidifying systems, the water that is used to suppress the fire is actually recycled, and the extinguisher can be refilled and reused as well.
Down in the lab where the fire suppression system was being tested, two of the students working on the project spoke on the difficulties of testing a system that is to be used in a space environment. Ben Webster, a Junior, majoring in Engineering Physics, spoke about the laborious nature of setting up the experiments, “Your normal vacuum system, you clean out, and you clean with alcohol, and you bake it down to get all the fluids out. But with this guy, we’re literally throwing a waterfall into it every test… I spend several hours in there with a vacuum and a heat gun just sitting inside drying it.” Not only is setting up for a test difficult, but being able to send information from inside the vacuum chamber to a computer was also difficult. Joe Stevanak, a Senior Engineering Physics major stated, “When you try to get it down to vacuum pressures, just a few molecules can make a difference. Any of the feedthroughs [from the vacuum chamber to outside] have to be electrically and specially isolated so that you don’t have any leakage of gas.”
The Center for Space Resources is on the forefront of space research and is producing the technology that will continue to keep the United States, and the rest of the world, headed out of Earth’s atmosphere and into the cosmos.
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