Last week I attended the 12th annual Earth & Space 2010
conference. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
sponsors the biennial meeting to bring together experts from a
variety of disciplines to discuss exploration, engineering,
construction, and operations in challenging environments both on
Earth and throughout the solar system. Civil engineering holds
the key to solving many of the challenges needed to create
sustainable outposts in hostile environments including providing
power, mitigating low gravity and dust, protecting against
radiation, using local resources, exploring the subsurface, and
much more. The meeting was held at the Sheraton Waikiki hotel,
which offered breathtaking views of the ocean, as shown from the
window in the meeting facility here. Tracks in the conference
dealt with lunar and martian regolith materials, sustainable
development, intelligent sensors, aerospace vehicle control,
offshore wind turbines, fluid dynamics and heat transfer,
structural health monitoring, disaster mi