[HN Gopher] DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures
___________________________________________________________________
DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures
Author : jfantl
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-02-26 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sam.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (sam.gov)
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Cool idea, very ambitious, is there any prior research or
| feasible testing setup that would support getting from 0 to 1
| with this?
| gessha wrote:
| I believe this is a program to prototype technology that has
| already been tried/theorized on Earth and needs an evaluation
| in Space.
|
| The program director has a background in planetary science [1]
| and I assume they will evaluate proposals.
|
| [1] https://www.darpa.mil/about/people/michael-nayak
| beefnugs wrote:
| Yeah this seems crazy to just throw out into the public. How do
| they decide what and when is worth funding? Does there have to
| be some kind of shining light of progress... or is it just
| moonshot after moonshot of blind hope?
| laughingcurve wrote:
| DARPA is the one agency that gets shit done and demands
| results. They are not working on blind hope
| asoneth wrote:
| DARPA Program Managers have a lot of leeway to write these
| sorts of requests.
|
| PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from
| an academic, industry, military, or government research lab.
| DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years
| to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success,
| and a small number revolutionize their field.
|
| (Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)
| woleium wrote:
| Sounds like someone bought into the Dyson tree meme revival that
| was floating round the internet a month so ago!
| Apofis wrote:
| That would be in interesting direction for our tech to go,
| everything grown organically including space structures.
| 4o20vhdl296nsb wrote:
| Hopefully it won't be considered "woke" to manufacture things
| organically as opposed to using steel and concrete and plastic.
| MurkyLabs wrote:
| considering organic meat substitutes are, they're going to
| have to spin it pretty hard for some people to NOT think it's
| 'woke'
| fnordlord wrote:
| even harder if it wakes up.
| ge96 wrote:
| Cylon basestar here we come
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Some examples of structures that could be biologically
| manufactured and assembled, but that may be infeasible to produce
| traditionally, include tethers for a space elevator, grid-nets
| for orbital debris remediation, kilometer-scale interferometers
| for radio science, new self-assembled wings of a commercial space
| station for hosting additional payloads, or on-demand production
| of patch materials to adhere and repair micrometeorite damage.
| nullbyte wrote:
| This is how Zerg starts
| cheschire wrote:
| Or the Edenists from The Night's Dawn trilogy, with their
| voidhawk ships.
| hirenj wrote:
| First question I have is what kind of nutrient base conditions
| can we expect to start from? Should it be like Earth, or
| somewhere a bit more resource constrained (and how would it be
| constrained)?
|
| I'd like to imagine solar reactors mimicking primordial goo to
| synthesise the essentials for these materials.
| gene-h wrote:
| Anything you want and can launch into space. The program goal
| is being able to grow large structures. The intent seems to be
| using biology as a means to more efficiently transform launched
| mass into big structures.
| cududa wrote:
| "A key unknown in creating such bio-mechanical structures in
| space is how the structure would be assembled. Feedstock must
| be provided (and relocated if necessary) to the growing edge,
| or to the area from which biological materials are being
| extruded. If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are required
| (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when
| growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required
| to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure,
| temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system
| design."
|
| Lots of nuanced details around your question in the doc! EDIT:
| I stupidly copy and pasted my local link to the PDF -- it
| appears this listing has been removed since posted. Here's
| another link to it https://govtribe.com/file/government-
| file/darpa-sn-25-51-dot...
|
| Seems they're interested in precisely the question you pose,
| but coming at it from a few different directions
| chr1 wrote:
| Somewhat similar and probably easier to achieve would be trees
| floating in open ocean, and some kind of plant capable to bring
| nutrients up from the large depth.
|
| Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert, with most of
| life concentrated in the places where upwelling occurs. This kind
| of floating trees would add enough biomass to compensate for all
| of the human produced CO2 and even more.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| > Floating trees in the open ocean.
|
| The more refined version of this are intentionally created
| algal blooms, ala the red tide. Then you would somehow capture
| the CO2 dissolved in ocean water that the algae concentrates.
|
| In this way you'd use the ocean itself as your carbon capture
| "filter" and "clean the filter".
|
| The issue is that since there just isn't enough nutrients for
| life, and adding fertilizers costs more carbon than it
| sequesters. The deep ocean usually gets its nitrogen from life
| dying above, decaying downwards then getting pushed upwards
| again. I don't know of any deep ocean reserves of nitrogen that
| just needs brought to the surface.
| chr1 wrote:
| Nitrogen is easy, it can be captured from air, iron is the
| main thing missing in surface water that must be brought up
| by upwelling.
|
| But having real trees above the water is much more useful
| than simple carbon capture, they would serve as wavebreakers
| for seasteading settlements too.
| soared wrote:
| I don't think trees and live on saltwater
| chr1 wrote:
| Plants don't live in open space either, and yet the submitted
| page wants to research possibilities.
|
| Using some genes from mangroves it should be possible to
| develop a plant that would grow in open sea.
| closewith wrote:
| Unlikely to be any unintended consequences to foresting the
| ocean, too. Plain sailing.
|
| People really will pretend to believe any old nonsense rather
| than accept we have to cut fossil fuel use.
| dingnuts wrote:
| if you think industrialized society should give up oil
| without alternatives then you should be honest and say that
| you believe we that the industrial revolution was a mistake
| and that we should by-and-large go back to an agrarian
| society where most people subsistence farm.
|
| you can have that belief, that everyone should give up what
| oil gives us and live in a pre-modern way that most people
| would, today, consider poverty, because the alternative is (I
| assume you believe) extinction.
|
| But you should be honest about it.
| closewith wrote:
| These schemes are only ever a smokescreen to avoid
| alternatives, which is something you should be honest with
| yourself about.
| chr1 wrote:
| A few years ago an oil selling dictator, used his oil
| money to attack and occupy my friends country, killed my
| friend, and forced all the population to flee without
| ability to take anything with them.
|
| So if you think that i like the situation where everyone
| supports dictatorships like Azerbaijan by buying their
| oil, you are very wrong.
|
| But what we want and what is going to happen is often
| very different. Cutting fossil fuel use will not happen
| until there are better alternatives. And at that point
| most likely there will be enough CO2 in atmosphere to
| trigger melting of permafrost which will produce its own
| CO2. So "these schemes" will be needed one way or
| another.
|
| That said my main interest here is seasteading, and
| increasing ocean biomass. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is
| merely a curios side effect.
| debacle wrote:
| Step 1 would be to see if a nonporous wood holds up to the vacuum
| of space with enough durability. The biggest issue would be
| reclaiming moisture from the wood as it dried rather than losing
| it to space. Things like corals or molluscs would be too heavy
| (though that idea spawned a wonderful series of 16 bit side
| scrolling video games).
|
| Without some sort of easy orbital exit/entry, it's unlikely that
| being "in space" will be a feasible permanent option.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We're doing step one. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-
| first-wooden-satell...
| ckemere wrote:
| When reading these program announcements, it's important to keep
| in mind that the (unofficial?) mandate for a DARPA program
| officer is to fund proposals that lie in the boundaries of
| [Doesn't at face violate laws of physics, P(Success) = 0.2]. A
| program where the vast majority of aims were clearly successfully
| delivered would be a program that should have been funded by
| other government agencies.
|
| Of course, with R&D currently on the chopping block, we'll see if
| the same people that complain about NSF/NIH start coming for
| DARPA also...
| laughingcurve wrote:
| If they come for DARPA then we are all in deep shit because
| that means things are far worse than we could have imagined.
| caycep wrote:
| like even more far-worse than the current far-worse?
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| In the words of Han Solo "I don't know I can _imagine_ quite
| a bit."
| ballooney wrote:
| Things already are that bad, you're standing an inch beyond
| where the previous wave washed up to and saying "well if it
| gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in
| deep shit' while all around people are shouting at you about
| the existence of a concept called 'the tide'. This is
| happening right now. fight back.
| jeisc wrote:
| Couldn't a self replicating structure grow out of control like
| vines and weeds?
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Space goats.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| I am wracking my brain to come up with a "coats to coats"
| joke that makes sense here.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Someone at DARPA read Night's Dawn
| feverzsj wrote:
| I don't want a bloody meat spaceship. They should try
| crystallization.
| rl3 wrote:
| I've got bad news for you: _radiotrophic fungi_ is already a
| thing.
|
| https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/life-in-the-extreme-radia...
|
| https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/31420...
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| 404 Page Not Found
| CringingStump wrote:
| Protomolecule comes to mind.
| miohtama wrote:
| Let's try to find something that doesn't use humans as raw
| material
| kolinko wrote:
| 404. Mirror?
| L_226 wrote:
| I almost wrote a short story about colonising Mars by firing
| radioisotope bullets with genetically engineered fungi coatings
| into the surface. These would metabolise the radiation and use
| the minerals in the crust to grow into large habitat volumes
| thick enough to retain atmosphere and insulate against radiation
| and thermal losses. Maybe it can be real one day!
| Havoc wrote:
| This is how the Zerg from starcraft get created :p
| ryandamm wrote:
| I saw this at a DSO* presentation ("Darpa's Darpa") back in
| ~2018. Hope they've gotten some early traction, that was some of
| the least wild crap that was being presented.
|
| My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi
| enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do
| hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube.
| ("Uh, no?" was our response.)
|
| * Defense Sciences Organization:
| https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso
| binary132 wrote:
| It doesn't sound so crazy to grow fibrous vines and wood in a
| habitat, dry them and reclaim the water, and then use them in
| construction. Growing them in place in space sounds a little
| crazy.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| That is how you end up with gray goo
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
| nonelog wrote:
| > [...] biological self-assembly properties of tunable materials
| (e.g. hydrogels [...]
|
| FYI, hydrogels were part of the "recent vaccine" components.
| ButOneDuck wrote:
| Looking at the comments, most people are approaching this as
| 'grow, like trees'.
|
| We're literally talking moonshot projects here and nowhere does
| the brief mention specifically trees, or aerobic
| respiration/processes, there is plenty of room for using Chitin,
| Spider silk, keratin or a combination of biopolymers to form
| resilient composite structures.
|
| There's already been videos of people using these as doping
| agents or additives for bulletproof armor, to middling success.
| The synthesis via yeast or e.coli for most of these are partially
| solved problems, its more texturing them or using bio-mechanical
| processing to form thread or ply or load bearing panels that
| seems to be the major hurdle. Also, being able to reliably source
| component and materials from near vacuum or whatever asteroid
| that happens to wander by that makes this a much more difficult
| problem to even define.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-26 23:00 UTC)