Vulnerability of Space Settlements to Attacks

The orbital hotel will be nice, but the quarters for the workers at the
orbital hotel --- those unfortunate folk who will have to clean up the
vomit --- will likely be spartan. The workers at the hotel will be the
only ones "living" off Earth for sizable lengths of time. The tourists
will come for a week or two and then leave.

Ron
*****

Al Globus
01/24/02 11:38 AM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Vulnerability of Space Settlements to Attacks

Actually, I strongly suspect that the first medium scale commerce
involving people in orbit will be tourism (right now tourism is the
*only* commerce involving people in orbit). Thus, minimalist living
quarters, such as worker housing, is a really bad idea. A tourist hotel
needs to be a nice as possible, with as many amenities as can be
provided. The main issue here is mass and maintenance -- anything with
low mass and maintenance that can make an orbital hotel cooler should be
provided.

>
> rmenich@... wrote:
>
> > Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote,
> > I think that collectively we need to move away from thinking about
> > "colonies", and instead start thinking about "worker housing" or
> > "construction shacks with worker dormitories". We need to think
mentally
> > of the crew quarters on an oil rig as a model rather than the
paintings of
> > the interior of Island One that we see in O'Neill's books --- the oil
rig
> > analogy is far more likely to happen in the near term than the Island
One
> > habitat. I'm not saying that Island One won't happen, but we are
just
> > nowhere near that right now.
>

--
Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an
accident. Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.