Maintaining very small ecosystems

In a message dated 5/30/01 6:51:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time, rmenich@...
writes:

<< 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
>>
If you can get half a bar from extraterrestrial sources, you can get the full
bar, the cost of sending the necessary mining and processing equipment is the
same, you just have to run it twice as long, the biggest expense is getting
enough of the necessary equipment to build the space colony out of local
material, whether its 1/2 a bar or one full bar of nitrogen, thats still alot
of nitrogen, and the difference between those two amounts is not even an
order of magnitude. I don't think the amount of nitrogen will be the biggest
expense in contructing the colony, it won't be the limiting factor in how
many people will go into space.

Tom Kalbfus