Critical time

Given that NASA is supplying the bulk of the coverage as free media & that
Dan Goldin's NASA ranks Mars, Mars, Mars, Europa & Mars as the five leading
targets for space exploration, what's the big surprise?

I think the challenge of selling an O'Neill vision would be rather more
difficult than Mars (or the Lunar alternative), though. At the risk of
getting lynched, nothing dates faster than futurism; & the massive
construction vision of the classical O'Neill colony is so much a part of the
postApollo bigger is brighter school that returning to the concept in 2000
as we did seemed strangely quaint. There's so much construction &
transportation required for even a small colony to be established - & no way
for the colony to achieve even nominal self sufficiency in the short term -
that with current & nearterm technologies, the concept simply isn't a viable
alternative.

I have no objection to politicising space per se... the trouble arises when
the politics gets seriously at odds with the reality. The Mars or Bust
labrynthodonts have crossed that frontier a few times already; but without
massively reducing the space construction involved in a conventional
O'Neill, it's difficult to see how anyone could possibly sell it as anything
but long term sf.

(Tunnelling colonies from inside existing NEOs as an adjunct to spacemining
beats the transportation & self sufficiency traps by leveraging equipment
mass into in situ construction; but still requires a mature space culture in
advance of any current manned missions to Mars or the Moon to be
workable...)

All the best,
Robert Clements Robert.Clements@...
endeavour2 project http://www.geocities.com/robtclements/endeavour2.html>