Lunascaping and Zubrin

> I'm very skeptical about Avalon-type domes because they would require copious
> amounts of water for shielding, and water will always be a scarce resource in
> the Moon. (Unless you create an artificial atmosphere of pure oxygen using

It's been a few months since I read _The Millennial Project_, but given that
approach I'm not sure why water would be scarce. The main thrust is Asgard,
Savage's answer to Island One, which requires mining a comet or chondrite --
thus my line about "a tame comet". If you can bring metric buttloads of water
to L5, why not the Moon? I guess landing it safely would add a premium.
Stupid gravity wells.

BTW I looked at Zubrin's _Entering Space_ in the bookstore today. Had some
interesting stuff -- I'm now more confident of an Orion Drive being able to
hit tenth-lightspeed (esp. as he's not a big Orion fan.) He dismisses
O'Neill's ideas cavalierly, though; I didn't read carefully, but it seemed
like he pulled rebuttal cost figures out of his butt, whereas his own ideas
got detailed calculation.

Seemed odd that he had a brief "wild card" section on robotics, biotech,
nanotech, and picotech, but not AI proper. Didn't mention Savage at all, and
savaged the inferior concept of Dyson Sphere (solid shell) without mentioning
Dyson's actual vision (the swarm.)

I got a "negative attitude" impression from my skimming, but this might just
be from my favored ideas getting savaged or ignored, plus his bitterness about
the lack of space research. Which I can understand, but it's not like we're
actually stagnating yet; it's just that the public research dollars are going
to biology and nano and the private ones to biology, nano and computers.

But the stuff on rockets and spacedrives was cool, and probably there are
other neat technical ideas there too.

-xx- Damien X-)