Effective use of natural sunlight in a habitat.

From: Dave Handwerk

> Now don't just say the $0.5M+++ per person per year is
> imaginary and that it's really free. Because if you
> took that electricity and beamed it down and sold it
> you could have the money and the food could be grown
> with direct sunlight, not for free but for only a
> small fraction more of what the original habitat would
> cost.

I think you come to the same conclusion as did the team of researchers
who subjected space settlement to the most in-depth analysis done to
date. The last time this issue came up on this maillist, I cited this
section of the NASA-Ames-Stanford study: "Effect of Environmental
Parameters on Habitat Structural Weight and Cost".
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/spaceres/II-1.ht
ml

They compared artificial vs. natural illumination, and seemed to
conclude that the latter would have only about 20% the cost of the
former. Joe points to improvements in artificial lighting technologies
since that study, and says that this analysis leave some of his
questions unanswered and therefore he is skeptical of their conclusions.

Regards,

Mike Combs