Plant Nursery In Space?

This is probably true. The reason I want trees in my colony is simply
that I like trees -- a lot. Space colonies probably won't be a good
place to send illiterate, technically uneducated people for quite some
time. Well educated people can do quite nicely on Earth, thank you.
Therefor, colonies -- from the beginning -- need to be attractive places
to live. Therefor, we probably need trees.

On Friday, August 16, 2002, at 10:49 AM, Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

> Unfortunately I don't have the figures to prove my point, but I strongly
> suspect that the efficiency relation is quite the opposite:
> cyanobacterial
> biomass is *much* more efficient than trees in oxygen production, I
> think.
> You should remember that the vast majority of the mass of a tree is dead
> weight: wood is composed by dead cells, and photosynthesis occurs only
> in
> the leaves.

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~500 times the surface area of the Earth in
usable real estate. See http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/
for details.

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