Keeping your habitat on the track

Tom Tucker wrote:
> What many people don't realize is that garbage, if made of recyclable
> materials, may be very valuable to space colonists, especially if the
costs
> of obtaining more of whatever is still around $10,000/KG.

However, as Ian said, space colonies will never be a reality if it costs
$10,000/KG to transport your materials to the right place. In other words,
they'll only be a reality if built with materials gathered from the Moon and
the asteroids, a case where the transportation cost will be probably
something around, let say, $0.50/Kg.

Maybe we are talking about two different animals. If you're talking about
relatively small habitats completely built with materials transported from
Earth to LEO, as ISS, then I completely agree that *everything* would have
to be recycled till the last drop, since the cost of recycling something, no
matter how expensive is the process, will certainly be less expensive than
the $10,000/KG transportation cost. But if you're talking about huge
habitats many hundreds or thousands of meters long and weighting millions of
tons, then certainly they were built with lunar and asteroidal materials
transported at a few pennies per pound; in *this* scenario (the one that I
was referring to), there will be many recycling processes that will be far
more expensive than simply getting rid of your garbage, and this last option
will be the chosen one.

> Cheers,

Cheers,

> Tom

Lucio