The High Frontier

> I have a copy of that book. The main hitch was that the Shuttle
never
> turned out to be the wonder machine that it was promised in the
> 1970's. Perhaps someday another vehicle will take the place of the
> shuttle in the plan outlined in that book.

Yes, it does make one fairly cringe when reading O'Neill saying that
getting started would only require around 40 flights a year, and thus
should only tie up one of the Shuttles in the fleet. But all he was
doing was taking NASA at their word. It may seem kind of naive in
the crystal clarity of hindsight, but we have to remember that at that
time, NASA was best known for one thing: Saying they would put a man
on the moon before the decade was out, and then doing it. Now we
associate NASA more with the phrases "budget overruns" and "schedule
delays".

I think you're right in saying we're just going to have to wait until
a vehicle comes along which is in reality what the Shuttle was to be
in concept.

> If the putch against Gorbachev had suceeded, then there
> would probably be Soviet Astronauts on Mars today,

That's kind of hard for me to see. It would have been an effort for
them to have gotten cosmonauts to the moon by today.

> transportation-wise we are not much
> different from 1977. We still drive around in cars, fly in subsonic
> jets, and space travel still happens only on television for most of
> us.

True. Zubrin has made some interesting points in this regard. He
contends that if we leave out computers and communication,
technological advancement has slowed dramatically.

Last year had me looking back at the old 1970's show Space: 1999.
This year Avery Brooks said, "Where are the flying cars? I was
promised flying cars!". Next year will have me looking back at 2001:
A Space Odyssey. It makes you sigh with disappointment.

> Even our millionaires and billionaires don't go into orbit on a
> holiday. If ever Bill Gates of somebody like him goes into space
and
> pays for it out of his own pocket we will have made progress.

I'm by no means saying the deal can't fall through, but this
situation may change soon.

> I sometimes wonder if Cheap Access to Space is as easy as
> all that. Some people claim that all we have to do is put the right
> spare rocket engines together with the right frame and fuel tanks
and
> we would have a going proposition, but if it was easy as that,
> wouldn't we have CATS already?

It's probably not going to be a technology fix. The "A Rocket a Day
Keeps the High Prices Away" paper asserts that its all a matter of
economies of scale. Space is expensive simply because we don't do
enough of it.

> The Moon is not the
> only place to obtain materials for building space colonies, near-
> Earth asteroids are more accessible and eaisier to obtain.

As well as providing a wider variety of materials. Asteroids
certainly have their advantages, but the moon has other advantages of
its own. Most relate to its proximity, such as frequent launch
windows, short travel times, and real-time communications. The
latter may be significant if telepresence advances enough to be
helpful.

I think we will use both sources of raw materials.

> Also an
> asteroid is a more compact source of mass than is a hollow space
> colony. One problem with a cylidrical space colony is its tendancy
to
> change its axis of rotation from spinnig sideways to flipping end
> over end due to mass imbalances.

O'Neill didn't seem to feel that this would be a problem, and I don't
think he could be accused of being ignorant of the physics of motion.

> We can arrest this tendency by
> coupling the space colony to a massive asteroid that is spinning at
> the same rate as the Colony. Since the Asteroid is more massive
than
> the colony and the colony is attached to one of its poles, the spin
> of the colony will remain sideways rather than flipping end over
> end.

To me, the advantages of attaching a habitat to an asteroid would
have more to do with easy availability of resources than any concerns
about the axis of spin. In fact, I trot this scenario out whenever a
Mars advocate tells me than an advantage of a Mars settlement over an
orbital one is that the orbital settlement would have no locally
available resources.