Planetary Chauvanism, and Zubrin-ites

From: "Josh Kane"
To: "spacesettlers@egroups.com"
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 11:07 PM
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Planetary Chauvanism, and Zubrin-ites

[snikt]
> Well, the thing is, it would probably be prohibitively expensive to
> build space colonies a la Gerard K. O'Neill. My idea is to mine the
> asteroids and, after they have been hollowed out, make space colonies.

It would probably take *centuries* to hollow out a asteroid just by mining
it. A single small asteroid has more "mineable" mass than all the ores
extracted in History on Earth. Also, the matter extracted from a single
asteroid of, say, a kilometer long, could be used to produce dozens of
Island One-sized O'Neilian colonies. Besides, while some asteroids are
metallic and may have mechanical strength to allow spinning for artificial
gravity, most of them are crumby carbonaceous potatoes that would
disintegrate if spun a little faster. So, I can't see how asteroid colonies
in general can be more viable than O'Neilian ones in terms of time, money
and even civil engineering.

On the other hand, I would agree that O'Neilian colonies would come after
the profitable establishment of asteroid mining, and they would be probably
built in orbit of asteroids (or docked to them) using asteroidal materials.
In fact, I think that the first O'Neilian colony will be a mining city,
possibly integrated with some kind of mining processing industry or
something.

[snikt]
Lucio Coelho