What to expect from the competition?

Customer: The Foundation Society

The Foundation Society is an organization founded for the specific purpose of establishing settlements of its members in space.

The Foundation Society first gained recognition for its successful lobbying efforts with the governments of spacefaring nations to establish property rights in space. The system it caused to be enacted is based on the Homesteading laws of the American frontier: a corporation or even a person can claim an orbital location, an asteroid smaller than 10 miles in diameter, or a plot of land up to 10 miles by 10 miles in size, so long as it does not interfere with any other active claim. The claim remains valid so long as the claiming entity actively uses its claimed property; claims not in active use for four Earth years revert to unclaimed status and are available for another entity to claim.

The Society began more direct pursuit of its goal in the mid-20-aughts, when it led several grass-roots space advocacy organizations in fostering development of commercial infrastructure in Earth orbit. It first researched profit potential for launch vehicles providing lower costs per pound to orbit. Then the Society assured that new launch vehicles would have customers, by providing venture capital for companies developing new products that used the space environment or required launch services. The Foundation Society funded lobbying in the U.S. Congress that resulted in favorable tax and equity-protection laws for companies investing large percentages of their assets in perceived high-risk ventures with long-range return. Then, it further assured a strong customer base for commercial launch services, with long-range commitments for government-sponsored scientific and exploratory space missions, and removed the U.S. government from the businesses of launch vehicle operation and space hardware fabrication. The results of these efforts encouraged American corporate interest in commercial development of launch vehicles and space infrastructure, which in turn inspired competitive interest in other parts of the world.

The Society outlined a master plan in the early-to-mid-2010's for establishing nine Space Settlements: in Earth orbit, on Earth's moon, in Mars orbit, on the Martian surface, and in the asteroid belt. It amassed members and wealth to assure sufficient resources to begin implementing the plan as soon as economic reality permitted. The Foundation Society defined the primary condition for initiating this plan as a reduction of LEO launch costs to $1000 per pound.

In 2014, it became clear that global warming is a natural and inevitable solar- and geology-dependent process. The Foundation Society offered to mitigate solar effects with construction of a solar shield at the Earth-Sun L1 libration point. A United Nations Trade Study concluded that solar shield construction costs would be less than the adverse global economic impact of returning to the geological norm of a glacier-free Earth. As a result, the Society voted to waive the initial condition and begin implementation of the space settlement master plan, due to lucrative arrangements made with the United Nations to reduce the threat of devastating global warming on Earth. A complex deal involved venture capitalists who financed the project, with promise of profitable reimbursement from United Nations members if the project worked, or partial reimbursement from the assets of individual Foundation Society members if it failed. In return, the Foundation Society built a huge (Texas-size) solar shield at the Earth-Sun L1 libration point; when completed in 2033, it reduced insolation on the Earth by 0.5% and eliminated any future threat of global warming. The plan included construction of the Foundation Society's first space settlement, Alexandriat, as a manufacturing base, which it now operates as its own.

Construction of Alexandriat began in orbit around the Earth-Moon L5 libration point in 2018. Within five years, enough of it was completed to enable a thousand residents to move in, and then to begin construction of the solar shield. The settlement was finished and provided homes for its full population of 10,000 people by the end of 2028.

The advances in space transportation and construction techniques inspired by the urgency of the solar shield project caused some predictable related benefits.

On the fringes of Alexandriat's primary mission, some Foundation Society members developed products that can be used for other applications in space. Some satellite components can be built and installed in space less expensively than if they were designed, analyzed, and tested to withstand the rigors of launch. Relatively fragile components (e.g., antennas, lenses, sensors, and solar panels) are particularly amenable to in-space manufacture.

In addition to meeting its primary mission, however, Alexandriat and the people living there are changing humans' relationship to space. In part due to the solar shield, space is coming to be regarded as a source of assets essential to quality of life. People living in space are figuring out how to make things in microgravity and perfect vacuum that were difficult or impossible to make on Earth's surface. The most profitable of these newly feasible products appear to be nanobots, microscopic robots programmed to perform tasks at the molecular level. Although envisioned for decades, they were impractical on a large scale until an Alexandriat lab figured out how to grow them in space. Nanobot designs and uses are not the universal fabrication technique envisioned by some late-20th-century science fiction writers. They originally were put to work modifying molecules to form an airtight seal on interior surfaces of superadobe structures; place solar cell materials on SPS array surfaces, add filtering materials to windows of spacecraft,nd assemble the interiors of circuit components. With experience, more uses are being developed. Nanobots are emerging as a major export category, spurring increased production of space-based manufacturing facilities and vehicles to get them to dirtside customers.

Although the Foundation Society has developed sufficient financial reserves to invest in expensive projects like Space Settlements, the organization's goal is to build as many as possible, and therefore to develop an efficient construction infrastructure. To this end, it expects that lunar and other extraterrestrial materials will be used extensively in construction of its settlements.

Your Company: Northdonning Heedwell

Northdonning Heedwell is one of the four major aerospace contractors remaining in the United States. The company has been involved in every major U.S. government space project since the Apollo program in the 1960's and has contributed in some way to every major commercial space venture during that time. The company in its present form resulted from a merger between Northdonning Aviation and Heedwell Grummietta in 2006.

Before the merger, Northdonning Aviation was the world's most prolific supplier of fighter aircraft for the U.S. Air Force and foreign allies. Heedwell Grummietta had a wide variety of product lines in various industries, although it was most recognized in the aerospace industry for being a major producer of expendable launch vehicles (ELV), and for building one-of-a-kind scientific satellites. The company had a modest subcontract for Space Shuttle operations, and built two modules for the International Space Station. The merged Northdonning Heedwell retained these areas of expertise, and added capability for production automation with acquisition of Alliance Electronics in 2012.

After the merger, the company infused some of its experience with efficient military aircraft operations into the space sector of its business, and a search for new product areas quickly turned up candidate projects. Within months, company management made a commitment to invest in commercial development of a new launch vehicle, a two-stage-to-orbit design that would reduce launch costs to $1000 per pound, long considered a maximum launch cost for profitable commercial operations. Within four years, Northdonning Heedwell based a prototype Space Tug at the International Space Station, and initiated a profitable business moving existing vehicles and satellites to and from orbits as high as GEO. A direct result of this service was a change in design philosophy by satellite operators: they came to prefer designs that are serviced and maintained in orbit, rather than being replaced at the end of design lifetimes.

Like other aerospace firms, the company participated in and benefited greatly from the Foundation Society's construction of the Alexandriat space settlement and its solar shield. Northdonning Heedwell's early investment in developing a new launch vehicle design enabled it to go into production in 2016, and the first of the new vehicles flew late in 2021. During the latter phases of Alexandriat construction, the company's fleet of Percheron vehicles literally became the "workhorse" transportation system for equipment launched from Earth to the three full-service LEO spaceports that grew from the original International Space Station. A derived design, the Palomino, carried most of the passengers who became Alexandriat residents. The company's small fleet of space tugs grew, too; Northdonning Heedwell became the leading supplier of transfer vehicles capable of travel between the LEO spaceports, the Earth-Moon L5 libration point, and lunar orbit.

The Alliance Automation Division is the recognized leader in development of automated systems for space applications. It supplied robots to construct and maintain the first Solar Power Satellite (which began operations in 2021), automated systems for several on-orbit materials processing applications, and automated zero-gravity factories for various small high-profit products. This Division also has a fine reputation with the Foundation Society, having supplied robots that automated much of the lunar operation for Alexandriat construction materials, and other robots that maintain the exteriors of the settlement.

Although prior Competition proposals were generally very impressive documents, the RFPs are always challenging and there is room for improvement. Based on proposals produced in prior years, we offer the following suggestions to the competing teams:

• The Competition Co-Founders are familiar with space settlement designs you can find on the Internet, especially those associated with the 1970's NASA studies. It is expected that you will develop a new and original design in response to the RFP. Competition organizers and judges do recognize, however, that it is inefficient design practice to "reinvent the wheel", so judicious use of existing technologies and ideas is expected. Per standard industry and scientific policy, it is necessary to attribute (document the source of) any design concept not developed specifically for this RFP. Be sure to reference websites, books, magazines, and even your team's own prior work used as sources for this proposal. For example, designs from a prior Competition proposal MUST reference the prior proposal as a source of the concept. WARNING: if the judges see the same design drawing and/or descriptive text in more than one proposal, any proposals that includce the duplicated information will be penalized if they do not attribute the source(s) of the ideas.
• Pay attention to the technologies accepted for the Competition, as described in the materials posted on our website and provided in this package. For example, fusion electrical power is specifically disallowed. Space elevators are not included in the technology descriptions because materials that could enable them to be built do not exist (note: carbon nanotubes show promise, but a 2009 conference on Space Elevators confirmed they are not yet the answer). The Competition Co-Founders personally know many of the people on the cutting edge of these and other technologies, and are familiar with their work. Do not believe everything you see on the Internet. Innovation and creativity are, however, encouraged--within the Laws of Physics.
  Follow instructions carefully! Most proposals did not meet the "minimum requirements" defined in the RFP to include specific tables and illustrations.

• Follow instructions carefully! Most proposals did not meet the "minimum requirements" defined in the RFP to include specific tables and illustrations.
• Follow instructions carefully! If you post illustrations in a website, you must allocate space in your proposal page count to show copies of those illustrations. A general expectation is that every proposal sub-section (e.g., 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3) that references illustrations in the website will include an illustration of the required size. Deviations from this rule are penalized in the scoring.
• Follow instructions carefully! Teams often try to squeeze more information into the page allowance by narrowing margins, reducing font size, or even including fold-out pages. Even tiny compression of font size (e.g., to 95%) is readily apparent to Judges who have seen hundreds of properly-formatted proposals. These deviations from the requirements are penalized in the scoring.
• Artwork is very important to show your designs, and not only for the Judges. We sense that teams which include more and better illustrations produce proposals with more internal consistency between proposal sections; artwork enables your team members to share the vision of the design and understand how their pieces fit into it. Be sure especially to show orientation of floors and decks with respect to settlement rotation--be careful not to show any representation that the judges may interpret as showing floors or decks oriented improperly.
• Generalizations do not score well; specific descriptions earn points. Show the Judges that you understand what the RFP requests and you know how to provide what the customer needs.

Finally, the Competition organizers and Judges recognize that it is impossible to thoroughly address every RFP point in only 40 pages. Much of your team's success will depend on your ability to conserve pagecount by succinctly and cleverly compressing data into the allowed format. All of your competitors are facing exactly the same challenge. The successful teams will be those that persevere through the frustration of a very difficult task.