ADusk and Dawn Obsolete?

On Tuesday, December 3, 2002, at 08:11 AM, Brad Walsh wrote:

> You and I want a
> natural environment for our colony.

Sorry, colonies will be entirely artificial. We may be able to make
them look, and even feel, 'natural' in some ways, we may use 'natural'
processes and subsystems (including organic gardening) -- but no matter
how we build them, orbital colonies will be 100% artificial, created
entirely by homo sapiens from vacuum, radiation, and rock with a small
sprinkling of 'natural' stuff imported from Earth.

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