Transportation within a habitiat

On Sunday, July 7, 2002, at 04:59 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> Do you
> really foresee millions of cars in orbit? I sure don't.

I foresee hundreds of billions of cars in orbit. The materials of the
single largest asteroid can produce orbital colonies with a land area
approximately equal to 500 Earths. Assuming current Earth population
density (very sparse except in a few places -- look at a map and think
about oceans, deserts, and mountains), that gives us 6,000,000,000 x
500 = 3,000,000,000,000 or about 3 trillion people.

The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr. Tito
going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html