I wonder if the ideas that Prof. O'Neill and the L5 Society had be
implented and start on the timeline they wanted (i.e. colonies at the
L5 point by 1995 hense the society solgan "L5 by '95")? Could it even
be done? Would have been disirable?

I personally feel that might not have gone as well as O'Neill and the
L5 (of course not: history NEVER follows anyone's plans). The
creation of colonies in space during the Cold War would have made a
new front in outer space. And war would be fought over who controled
GEO, as it where all the SPS, and therefore the electicial power
supplies, are located.

(CROSSPOST SSI_LIST, HOWTOBUILDASPACEHABITAT)

O'Neill assumed that the shuttle would work as advertised and that a
follow-on heavy lift booster would be developed. Neither assumption
held. Without adequate transportation space exploitation is
prohibitively expensive. This is the main problem with Bush's space
policy, no significant effort to improve Earth to orbit transportation.
It's a little like building a really nice airport connected to a
nearby city by a 200 mile dirt track.

On Jan 31, 2004, at 11:11 AM, babbler36 wrote:

> I wonder if the ideas that Prof. O'Neill and the L5 Society had be
> implented and start on the timeline they wanted (i.e. colonies at the
> L5 point by 1995 hense the society solgan "L5 by '95")? Could it even
> be done? Would have been disirable?
>

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~150 times the surface area of the Earth in
usable real estate. See http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/
for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.

> From: Al Globus [mailto:aglobus@...]

> It's a little like building a really nice airport connected to a
> nearby city by a 200 mile dirt track.

It's possible that Bush has realised that NASA is a bunch of clowns when it comes to developing vehicles, and that the task might best be left to X-prize winners and their successors. Or he might realise that after the screw-up they have made of the last *dozen* chances to develop a cheap launcher, a mars mission is more likely to gain support from congress.

A big problem though is that '200 mile' is not an accurate measurement, and there is quite a lot of variation of opinion in how far away that airport actually is. If you want to build a cheap road then for obvious reasons you want it as short as possible. And there are a few VTOL TSTO designs that promise 100mile orbit and figures approaching $100/lb. As near as I can tell the numbers add up. That is to say they have enough deltaV and don't appear to require horribly complex maintenance.

A fictional, though very detailed, account of the development of such a vehicle can be found here at http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/SpecialTopics/RocketCom/titlePage.html I suspect there is a small amount of technical BS here (certainly enough journalistic BS) but if there is I can't find it using publicly available information.

Of course many would look at that and say, "Oh you don't want to do that! You want something that'll take 30 tons to 300 miles and land like and take off and land like an aeroplane..." The latter is slightly more difficult to develop, and therefore will take much longer.

So how about it? How long does the road need to be?

ANTIcarrot.