Project Sealion (The Expanse)

Project Sealion is a proposed operation, which is planned to occur between the years 3500 and 4000. The plan revolves around colonizing the Oort Cloud, the largest almost uninhabited and unclaimed space in the Sol system. In order to tap the vast amount of ices such as water, methane, ethane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide. The project was named after a sea lion, it was named that because sea lions live in cold waters and water is one of the main resources of the Oort Cloud. The project was proposed by Martha McMurphy and Moira Craigs in 3081, but ignored. It was later proposed again by Roland Parker, Nez Themisto and Klara Oswalt in 3398.

The operation
Project Sealion is planed to start with the construction of hundreds, probably thousands of Sealion-class colony ships, these are actually just O’Neill cylinders with a ring that nearly touches the cylinder at the end. Such a colony ship has a radius of 500 m and a length of 6 km. When the ships are launched they will fly directly to the Oort cloud and when they arrive at a comet they will place people on the comet’s surface. These people will try to melt some of the ice and bring it away. This will create a hole and at this time the cylinder will shed the extra machinery on the back and place the cylinder inside the hole, after which the ice is placed back on top and a tunnel is dug for the harbor. The back of the ship would normally be harvested for resources for the machines on the cylinder. If the cylinder is too long it could also possibly split into 3 smaller ones: one that is 1.5 km long, one that is 2.5 km long and one that is 2 km long. Though the ship could also possibly shed one of the cylinders and keep the other 2 together, even if the middle one was removed as the cylinders were designed to all attach to each other. This will happen with thousands of ships, an exact number has not yet been agreed upon, but it is somewhere between the 350 (minimum according to Nez Themisto) and 1 million (maximum according to Martha McMurphy and Moira Craigs).