Should Space Habitats be tied to SPS?

We should drop colonization and keep SPS.

We need to find new, economically justifiable reasons for being in space in
the first place. SPS is one such idea. Other ideas are orbital antenna
farms, space tourism, efficiency gains via usage of extraterrestial
resources (e.g., orbital transfer vehicles propelled by something that has
not been lifted from Earth), etc.

Colonization will follow later, after the space economy has grown. Right
now the entire value of the space economy is between $50 and $100 billion
per year. Perhaps when that reaches $1 trillion per year we can start
thinking about colonization. But I don't think that there will be major
ongoing investments in colonization, neither from governmental nor private
sectors, until it is shown that tremendous amounts of money can be made in
space. Or, to put it another way, the only "colonies" that I can foresee
being created in the near future would be those narrowly focused on some
money-making venture (e.g., a mining 'colony' company town, or quarters for
the SPS construction facility crew, or quarters for the space hotel staff).

We should drop the phrases "Island One" and "Island Three" from our
vocabulary. They're too far out into the future to be believable. SPS
is much more believable: it is a narrowly-focused, nearer-term venture
with economic potential.

The Zubrinites can't promise near-term $, whereas we can. That should be
our selling point. The Mars folks have a seemingly much more romantic
place to go (Mars) than we do (orbiting colonies), or at least that's how I
think the public perceives it. We won't win the romance game. But
practicality can be our selling point.

Ron Menich

Mitchell James
ssi_list@...
07/26/01 05:29
PM
Please respond
to ssi_list

For a long time we have tied the development of Space Habitats to
Solar Power Satelites (SPS) under the assumption that at some point
in the future that earth surface energy cost will justify the cost
of developing SPS and therefore Space Habitats. I don't belive that
this will be true for the next hundred years. Several recent articles
have pointed out that there are alternative that are much easier
to get financing for than a SPS will ever be. Wind power seems poised
to become a major player. is an
interesting report that I found online after reading a "Science News"
article "Power Harvests". This web site also contains an interesting
set of maps showing current projects
and the amount of wind power available per state.
Pebble Bed nuclear reactors look like a low cost, relatively safe
approach for generating electricity below 2 cents / Kwh. I have
seen several articles on this technology. The one in front of me
is from the August issue of Popular Science.

What this means to me is that there are non SPS approaches to electric
generation that will delay the need for SPS for many many years.
I believe that we need to decouple Space Habitats from SPSs and
market the goal of Space Colonization independent of any possible
financial reason for a habitat's existence.

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