Maintaining very small ecosystems

In a message dated 5/30/01 9:31:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time, mikecombs@...
writes:

<< I think it's marvelous that the chambers are hypobaric. O'Neill assumes
atmospheres with twice the oxygen percentage at half the pressure. Savage
and Zubrin recommend atmospheres with even lower pressures. But we have no
data on how plants grow at lower pressures, and these kind of experiments
are what we need to answer these questions.

Regards,

Mike Combs
>>

Why bother with these partial pressure experiments? If we can get the cost of
space transportation down so we can lift half a bar into orbit, why not wait
a little while longer so we can lift the whole bar? Anyway the idea was to
create an Earthlike environment, a half bar environment with twice as much
oxygen is not Earthlike, no place on Earth has conditions like this.

Tom Kalbfus