A friend recently asked me “what do we mean by civilian space development”.Such a question made me understand that, maybe, we were not clear enough about the title of our congress, the Civilian Space Development. Following such understanding, I tried to draw a better rationale, aware that what we wrote was not that self-explanatory as we thought.

It was observed that NASA is a civilian agency, not a military one. And that the commercial space effort is civilian process, not a military one.

Well, when we talk about “civilian” space development, we are not simply suggesting a non military concept of space development. We are rather talking about enabling and bootstrapping the human space settlement, going over the age of space exploration.

In fact, we don’t need to discuss the military or non military setup of the space development. We know that military, as well as all of the other human activities, will expand to space, whatever we like it or not.

But that is definitely not the point: the point is humanity being limited to astronautical space exploration or to be free to expand civilization and settle in space.

While we are opening our preliminary discussion for the 3^rd SRI World Congress, a number of questions and concerns are being expressed by the main space columnists, about what could be the philosophic setup of the space policy defined by the new US Administration, should it be confirmed the next December 14th.Though Joe Biden didn’t yet say very much about space policy, the most accredited plans foresee cuts to the budget of NASA’s manned space flight programs, in order to give more fuel to the observation of Earth, climate change, and environmental issues.

We are not against raising the budget to Earth observation programs, which are much needed in the current climatic and environmental situation. Besides Earth observation, space agencies should also begin considering the use of space technologies to mitigate the effects of the climate change and the environmental issues, i.e. active space strategies targeted to control the Earth climate.

However, the most important point to be duly focused is that the same priority granted to environmental space programs should be given to bootstrapping the geo-lunar space region settlement and industrialization. Space development is the primary strategy against the awful multi-crisis that is striking our globalized civilization: pandemics, economic, climatic-environmental, resource conflicts, migrations, unemployment.