O'Neill cylinders

at one time, you could buy these things on the Web. Probably still can,
I just haven't looked recently.

"Combs, Mike" wrote:

>
> From: the_doctor@... [mailto:the_doctor@...]
>
> At the science museum in Phoenix Arizona, they sell these
> sealed glass globes with some sort of shrimp and some simple
> plant in them. As long as you give them just enough light,
> and ignore them, they are supposed to chug along
> indefinately. NASA was supposed to have had something to do
> with them...
>
> Which sort of serves as a counter-argument to those who say that
> O'Neill habitats are clearly nonsense because the smallest, simplest
> self-sustaining ecology we know of is called planet Earth, and
> obviously anything smaller can't be made to work. Regards,
>
> Mike Combs
[Click here!]

>

Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an
accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.

I think we should:

1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020
goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failure
rate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels will need
to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.

2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroid
are
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about 500
times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand space
colonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.

3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need their
colony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearby stars.

Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.