Island A

I concur with the need to design for significant teleoperation. Whether
humans could be entirely absent from an orbital workshop is an open issue.
I suspect that for any significantly complicated thing that we wish to do
in the near future, humans will be required to some extent. Should the
orbital workshop be continuously crewed, or should it be occasionally
human-tended when there is a need to do especially complicated tasks.
Unknown.

Ron Menich

Mitchell James
ssi_list@...
04/20/01 10:29
AM
Please respond
to ssi_list

>>>>>Rotation seems to me to be a nice-to-have rather than a minimal
requirement
>for an initial orbital workshop.>>>>
>
> The idea of keeping a large number of workers in zero-g for months
or years at
>a time, seems a bit dubious to me. When they get back to Earth and
suddenly find
>that their bones are brittle due to de-mineralisation, are we likely
to get
>sued?

Why the assumption that workers are required for this operation?
Couldn't be same thing be done by semi telerobotic operation with
only a common support structure and minimal sheilding. Every machine
and process used for the construction shack will be specially designed
so why not design for zero human presence?

Mitchell James
mejames@...
http://www.InnerTransit.net (Email distribution for multilevel
organizations)
http://www.InnerTransit.org (Homebase for collaborative engineering)