Good links and resources

(Note: the following is one of various posts that were copied here from the Moonwards.com forum for the sake of preserving the early days of the project. It was originally posted there on Feb 3rd, 2016.)

I am finally going to list a few of the things i've encountered lately:

Integrated Space Plan - One big graphic documenting all space projects and plans and how they fit into the long-term goal of colonizing the solar system. All the entries are linked to an information page on that topic, which contain further links to many resources specific to that. (I have thought about doing graphics like this myself and this is a great example.) Fav link: A real lunar crane design from NASA Langley

High Frontier game - I got an email from the developers of this a while ago. It is a game about solar system colonization that is realistic and educational. I hadn't looked at it in a while and it is coming along nicely. It isn't a collaborative framework like Moonwards is trying to be, and the game is goal-oriented in a way i'm not interested in for the interactive content i hope will later be part of Moonwards. It serves a different purpose, and seems on track to do so well. This is the demo video linked to in that email, which i enjoyed.

Mining and Manufacturing on the Moon - now only available on the Wayback Machine. Shucks. It has a bunch of great little nuggets in it, presented in a digestible overview format. Some of the links are broken, though.

Lunar In Situ Materials-Based Surface Structure Technology Development Efforts at NASAMSFC - a ton of experimentation with possible construction techniques has been done at Marshall SFC over the years, and this is a great summary. Favorite line: 'several hundred meters of 0.010-in. to 0.030-in. diameter glass fiber, shown in Figure 10, have been successfully
pulled from a bath of molten JSC-I, demonstrating the ability to manufacture glass fibers.'
So that is some good stuff. I find it hard for my head to not start spinning when i get into research. In no time i have 20 tabs and a dozen documents open, and a week later i can't find half of them again. I'm really trying more now to file important links and docs for easy access.

Lunar crane pic from the video above: