Space Habs

Funding is everything when it comes to any sort of endeavor in space.
I'm sure that long before we attempt to build an orbiting habitat, we'll
have to find the funding to build an earth-bound habitat for, first,
five people (sounds like Biosphere III?), then fifty, and then 500. My
reasoning here is that we need to test out the life support technology
in a safe environment where a malfunction or miscalculation can be
tolerated, studied and corrected. We also need to prove out the group
dynamics of such a "village". It may be that there are sociological
constraints on the minimum size of a habitat for a given population that
are entirely independent of engineering considerations.
>From what I've been able to glean from the various reports, articles and
books about the Biosphere II project, there are a lot of lessons there
about what not to do when trying to establish a long-term enclosed
environment for a group of people. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to
be a willingness on the part of (any) government or private group to
invest $250 million or so to revisit that sort of experiment and build
on the lessons learned.
I think I'll have to see an announcement that a Biosphere III is in the
works before I get my hopes up for the possibility of a real space
habitat in the foreseeable future. I don't mean to sound pessimistic,
because I really do think that we're going to inhabit space some day.
It's just that I see a working earth-bound habitat as a necessary first
step.
Chris