Maintaining very small ecosystems

You wrote,
"Why bother with these partial pressure experiments? "

Nitrogen is the biggest component of the Earth's atmosphere. Nitrogen is
scarce on the Moon. This group often discusses use of Lunar resources.
There is a feeling that cost will be minimized by minimizing the amount of
material shipped up from Earth and maximizing the amount of Lunar material
used. Hence, folk are interested in scenarios that don't require a lot of
nitrogen, because that might involve shipping nitrogen up from Earth.

Ron Menich

ThomasKalbfus
02:27 PM
Please
respond to
ssi_list

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