Space Settlement the Easy Way

At ISDC 2015 I gave a talk entitled Space Settlement the Easy Way, by myself and Stephen Covey. The slides are now available athttp://space.alglobus.net/presentations/Easy.pdf which will eventually be replaced by a paper. The central idea is to build settlements close to Earth, make them small, and use tourism income to gradually build up hotel sizes until they are big enough to be settlements. This size is much smaller than previously thought because an extensive literature review finds that human rotation tolerance is much greater than believed by the space settlement community.

The talk takes advantage of the results of the two papers (see below) that suggest that orbital settlements can be hundreds of times less massive than we have thought and that equatorial (0 inclination, thats important) LEO below about 500 km is an excellent location for early space settlements. It appears that radiation shielding, 90+% of the mass of typical settlement designs, is probably unnecessary in equatorial LEO making launch from Earth very competitive with asteroidal or lunar materials. This result is supported by calculations using OLTARIS, NASAs web front end to very sophisticated space radiation codes.

The papers (preprints):

Space Settlement Population Rotation Tolerance, Al Globus and Theodore Hallhttp://space.alglobus.net/papers/RotationPaper.pdf

Orbital Space Settlement Radiation Shielding, Al Globus and Joe Strouthttp://space.alglobus.net/papers/RadiationPaper.pdf

Ad Astra!
http://space.alglobus.net/presentations/Easy.pdf
which will eventually be replaced by a paper. The central idea is to build settlements close to Earth, make them small, and use tourism income to gradually build up hotel sizes until they are big enough to be settlements. This size is much smaller than previously thought because an extensive literature review finds that human rotation tolerance is much greater than believed by the space settlement community.
The talk takes advantage of the results of the two papers (see below) that suggest that orbital settlements can be hundreds of times less massive than we have thought and that equatorial (0 inclination, thats important) LEO below about 500 km is an excellent location for early space settlements. It appears that radiation shielding, 90+% of the mass of typical settlement designs, is probably unnecessary in equatorial LEO making launch from Earth very competitive with asteroidal or lunar materials. This result is supported by calculations using OLTARIS, NASAs web front end to very sophisticated space radiation codes.
The papers (preprints):
Space Settlement Population Rotation Tolerance, Al Globus and Theodore Hall
http://space.alglobus.net/papers/RotationPaper.pdf
Orbital Space Settlement Radiation Shielding, Al Globus and Joe Strout
http://space.alglobus.net/papers/RadiationPaper.pdf
Ad Astra!