Space Settlement FA

Responding to Mike Comb's Space Settlement FAQ
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/spacsetl.htm>

I just had a few comments. I noticed a certain
bias against nuclear development in space which
was not explained. To me, it's as simple as this. If the environmentalists shriek and come perilously close to blocking the launch of a Saturn probe over a small, thermionic generator, what are they going to do when you proposed launching a full-blown nuclear power plant on a rocket? The imagery of Challenger is still very vivid in everyone's mind. I hear it argued that the nuclear fuel rods would not be hot prior to first power-up, but could we convince environmentalists of that? If nuclear material were mined from ET resources, and the nuclear engines built in space, I can't see a legitimate cause for objection. But by the time we could do that, we'd already be well intoa High Frontier era. I'm more interested in figuring out how we can get there from here. I saw discussion concerning
the benefits of solar power out to a great distance
from the sun but much of the construction materials
for large space based habitats past Mars and the
asteroid belt would likely have to be imported
from the inner solar system. Not at all. There are many asteroids which orbit well outside of the belt. There are Jupiter's Trojans and Apollos. There are Kuiper objects. Given the desiccation of bodies in the inner solar system, and our dependence on hydrogen and other volatiles, there may sooner be a market for importing materials from the outer solar system to the inner than vice-versa. The vast majority of
mass in low gravity wells is in the form of cometary
material well past Pluto. In this region nuclear
rockets and nuclear fission/fusion hybrid reactors
could turn this vast desert of ice into a garden. I don't see much point in struggling with the problem of how to build habitats beyond Pluto before we've even built our first one in HEO. The problems concerning populations doubling
every forty years are acknowledged to only be delayed
by moving into the nearby solar system. In reality
it does not directly benefit Earth population pressures
at all [the indirect benefits may be large however]. Agreed. There has never been any serious talk of large masses
of people moving to space in order to relieve the Earth
of population pressures. The numbers of people you
would need to move are simply staggering. If by "serious talk" you mean informed scientific speculation, you're certainly correct. But many laymen continue to talk in those kind of terms. (There's a guy on one of the space newsgroups who wants to depopulate Earth and turn it into a big park.) Talk about reducing Earth's population via space settlement may have been more prevalent in the 1970s than today. Maybe I'm beating a dead horse. But since people still ask questions about this topic, it seemed appropriate to include it in a FAQ. Moon, Mars, and/or asteroid infrastructure will
need to be erected before large space based
habitats can be erected from materials originating
from space. Certainly either lunar development or asteroid development (and possibly even both), would precede large space habitats. But I could see space habitats coming about prior to any serious kind of economic development of Mars. Although the Moon and Mars have low
gravity, a sleeper car on a circular track can
perform artificial gravity the same as a spinning
platform, at a greatly reduced cost. Perhaps, but why compare this with orbital habitats? Do you plan to built 10,000 person permanent settlements on sleeper cars on circular tracks?

Regards,

Mike Combs