ISP: The Ultimate Plan to Launch Humanity to the Stars

How will we bring humanity out of the solar system and towards the stars? It’s going to take a huge leap forward in terms of how we explore space. Long before the 100 Year Starship Project and Icarus Interstellar, there was the Integrated Space Plan (ISP) showing the path to moon, Mars and beyond. First conceived by Ron Jones in the late 1980s, it’s just been revamped for 2015 on the back of a successful Kickstarter project.

The 2015 version is sleeker and has some changes from the first four editions, produced from 1989 (viewable here) and the last in 1997 (viewable here). One of the biggest challenges, Jones told Discovery News, was translating the complicated diagrams of the older versions into something more  easily digestable by the public. But now that it’s ready he’s looking for visionary contributors to give their ideas about how to move humanity further into space.

“We are encouraging those interested from around the planet to visit our web site and give us their feedback and ideas about human expansion into space. We’re just trying to create the vision the world can look at  and contribute its two cents’ worth,” said Jones, whose peripatetic career with companies such as Martin Marietta, Rockwell, Boeing and even Buzz Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation has seen him working on Congressional advisory committees, space shuttle development, air traffic management and more.

“One of the big challenges since the moon landing has been where do we go next: Mars, back to the moon, visit an asteroid?  Do we develop a long term infrastructure on the moon? Use the moon as a stepping stone to get to Mars? Go directly to Mars? NASA can’t make up its mind, and we’ve been caught in low earth orbit in the space station now for many, many years.”

Jones, who followed the space program from childhood, was a young adult when he began working with Martin Marietta to develop the Air Force  space shuttle launch facility in Vandenberg, Calif. The facility never was used for shuttles — Challenger’s explosion in 1986 put an end to that — but it got Jones thinking about how the shuttle fits into humanity’s vision to explore space.

In 1987, Jones (who lived in Los Angeles at the time) was hired by Rockwell International to work on the replacement for Challenger.  It was in this time frame that he created the Integrated Space Plan.  With a draft product in hand, he began talking to science fiction writers and leading scientists in the area about “far-out concepts” such as anti-matter propulsion, momentum transfer and evolvable architectures. Thus was created the first version of the Integrated Space Plan, showing the steps to create a Mars base and then move further out into space, even human migration to nearby sun-type stars in the next century.

The ISP was last updated in 1997 to support a Congressional hearing into the future of NASA, but the complexity of the diagram (and the software to update it) discouraged Jones from changing it again until more recently. The newest version has several changes, such as more details about commercial opportunities for private sector companies — “Those opportunities didn’t exist back then”, Jones says — and NASA’s latest design reference missions for going to the moon and Mars.

Jones acknowledges he couldn’t predict everything back in the 80s. The shuttle turned out to be much more expensive to operate than expected. NASA didn’t advance propulsion as many thought they would. Newer tech such as the Internet, smartphones and 3-D printing has begun to influence space policy while risk aversion changed how bold the missions became.

The newest version was produced by Integrated Space Analytics, a spin-off of the venture capital firm Space Finance Group that aims to help the private sector find their niches in space. (Jones is a founding member of ISA). In the coming year, Jones and ISA will be developing a comprehensive database of information to give details on all the elements of the Integrated Space Plan.

Read more at Discovery News