ast year, Dale Skran of the National Space Society proposed a literature review documenting every paper on space settlement on record. I had absolutely no idea what the implications were, but the project sounded challenging and immediately piqued my interest. Dale was up-front about the open-ended nature of the project; we didn’t know if there would be 10, 20, or 200 papers. The goal of this project is to provide documentation and analysis on the current academic literature regarding space settlement to provide to Congressional staffers during National Space Society events like March Storm. Space settlement and the technology supporting human habitation in space has a long and well-established history in conferences all over the world, with specific conference tracks and entire conferences dedicated to the topic. However, the question remained on the academic perspective.
There were quite a few high-level space settlement papers I found without extensive digging, and some that I had prior knowledge of (for example, Gerard O’Neill’s Physics Today paper The colonization of space). Writing relevant summaries and organizing the papers was fairly straightforward. The project was approached ten papers at a time, which often meant collecting and reading roughly two to three dozen, sorting out papers that weren’t applicable or that focused on topics already covered, then figuring out how to write them into the overall paper in a way that made sense and was approachable to many different audiences.
The paper is currently structured into nine major sections. It begins with an introduction, in which expectations are set and the premise of the paper is explained. The second section explains the methods I used to gather and review papers, as well as discussion about the wide range of peer-reviewed journals I pulled papers from. Section three is the first grouping of papers— included are overview papers that talk through the foundational aspects of space settlement, the challenges involved in the effort, and some analogous experiments performed on Earth.