Property Rights Proposal]

I have also followed the high frontier link highlighted by Mike. A
lot of the high frontier stuff on the web and in books is now
outdated. I would like to ask Mike - and anyone else, if now is a
good time for the re-promotion of Gerry O'Neills ideas?? Should his
ideas be updated/modified. This was a question that got askedat the last Princeton conference. Some of that discussion can be found in the conference proceedings, available at SSI (http://ssi.org). They saw very little need to change the broad outlines of the plan. Use of in-situ resources not only still makes lots of sense, but has become a much more mainstream idea than in O'Neill's day. Most significantly to me, they saw no reason to shift emphasis to bases built on planetary surfaces, and away from rotating, artificial structures in orbit. All of the old arguments that O'Neill made for the advantages of an orbital location over a planetary one still seem to hold, even if many seem to have forgotten them. There is still agreement that mass-drivers will be a useful technology, and it was even suggested that the reverse, a device to convert energy of motion into electricity, decelerating the payload, was also needed. There was a comment that with our much greater knowledge of NEAs, it might turn out to be more economical to send our ore refineries and fabrication centers to a NEA and build an orbital habitat there instead of using lunar resources to build one in HEO. Personally, I think it could go either way. One major advantage of the moon is short travel times. And if significant improvements in telepresence are on their way, this could push us quite strongly in the direction of the moon. I always think the high frontier idea has
never really got anywhere because of it's extreme ambition - let's
face it the original idea of island one is on a massive scale
requiring huge amounts of money. O'Neill made later attempts to craft scenarios where space resources were used to build SPS first, and large Earthlike habitats only came along much later in the program. This reduced the initial investment from an Apollo-sized one to an Alaskan Oil Pipeline one, which he felt brought the program within the capabilities of private industry. One problem with scaling High Frontier down is that use of space resources only really makes sense above a certain very large scale of production. It's a very big tool needed for a very big task.