Making space habs possible

> From: sraj
> That's just the point, why are we not able to implement them?
> Why is U.S. not leading the charge into space?

At the risk of sounding like a broken reccord...

I blame NASA and the money they spend convincing the world that space travel
has to be expensive - implying that they're not the biggest wasters of
public funds since the dawn of time. Go to the nasaspaceflight.com forums
and ask about low cost to orbit. The highly qualified NASA employees (or
board members who claim to be succh) will start calling you stupid very
quickly.

There's also the parts of the US military that has convinced itself that
space technology only has military applications. Weather satellites? GPS?
Telescopes? Clarke Orbit? Rockets? "Well sure these thigs can benefit
civilians - but they're mostly there so we can guide our troops and
munitions! So we can't allow any lesser nations to get our hands on them!" I
hold up the recent fuss over North Korea's rocket as a prime example of this
mindset. It was identical in every respect to any other satellite launch
vehicle of any other nation - but everyone assumed it was a ICBM.

> We excel in the sciences dealing with the non-living part.
> And most of our sciences dealing with the living part, view
> the living part as if it were non-living. There is a huge
> knowledge gap in our sciences!

The classical definition of life was written a long time ago. Based upon
modern advances in genetics, nanotechnology, and speculation about
xenobiology, and arterficial life, and the descovery of a bewildering
variety of extremophiles - how would you define 'living'? I thik you'll find
on a small enough scale, *everything* is dead. It's actually not that bad an
approach to take.

John