Wheto construct a Habitat?

Message text written by INTERNET:spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
> You can't pollute
space, it's too generalized a place. For pollution to happen it have to be
in
small localized place like in New York City and it have to be mixing with
something like soil, water, or what have you. You can't pollute hard
vacumn. <

Space debris can damage objects of value. So, whether you want to call it
pollution or not, you do need to think about it when you are designing a
system. It was considered when O'Neill and others were doing space
settlement designs thirty years ago; the risk from debris caused by catcher
misses was compared to the background meteor danger and deemed acceptable.
Since we (I?) expect space settlement to grow rapidly once an initial
foothold is gained, this rapid growth will have to be taken into account.

If you don't see why hard vacuum can be polluted, perhaps a better way to
think about it is objects in orbits which intersect. The mixing is
satellites and other useful objects with random bits of matter. The
current space equivalents of cities would be geosynchronous orbit and low
earth orbit. Matter on any orbits which intersect these could be
considered as pollution. In the future, matter on orbits which intersect
space settlements could be considered as pollution. As with pollutants on
earth, often the contaminants could be useful if recovered.

Lynn Olson