Space News Letter to Editor

I just sent this to Space News. Thought the group might be mildly
interested:

I agree heartily with Mark Whittington ("Missing the Big Picture,"
Space News 5 May) that space settlement is a goal truly worthy of a $15
billion/year space program. If I may offer a slight change of course:
the Moon and Mars are great places for science and exploration but
lousy places to live. Our goal should be orbital space settlements:
kilometer scale spacecraft housing thousands of people each, initially
in earth orbit and later throughout the solar system. Princeton
professor Gerard O'Neill proved that these are possible, although very
expensive. True, many materials are easier to obtain on the lunar or
martian surface as opposed to orbit, but near-earth asteroids can
supply ample materials and some are energetically closer to Earth orbit
than the Moon is. In most other aspects, orbital colonies are vastly
superior to lunar or martian colonies. Consider:

- orbital colonies have ample solar energy 24/7 rather than half time.
- large pressurized structures will be much easier to build in 0g.
- orbital colonies can be much closer to Earth, vastly simplifying
logistics, particularly in comparison with Mars.
- while orbital colonies can be rotated to supply any desirable
psuedo-gravity level, Mars and the Moon have much weaker gravity than
Earth with unknown consequences on developing children.
- near the axis of rotation orbital colonists can enjoy 0g recreation
(and manufacturing).
- the view from many orbits (particularly near Earth, Saturn and
Jupiter) is absolutely fantastic, and always changing.
- the surface of Mars and the Moon combined is roughly equal to the
surface area of Earth, whereas the materials from a single large
asteroid can build orbital colonies with a livable surface area of at
least 500 times the surface area of Earth (yes, five hundred time,
that's not a misprint).

The problem, of course, is inadequate Earth-to-orbit transportation.
NASA should be spending at least half it's budget on this and cut
whatever else needs to be cut. In particular, I suggest:

- a robust propulsion and materials R&D program
- improving the usability of test and launch facilities and making them
available to private industry
- a program to buy the first 10-15 orbital launches of any new US
launch vehicle. This effectively pays for a flight test program and
will allow private developers to borrow development funds. The
taxpayer only pays for success (contrast this with the flightless
aerospace plane, X33, and X34). Note that a stimulus for sub-orbital
launch does not appear necessary, the X-Prize and potential tourist
market seem to be adequate.
- a robust program to identify and minimize damage to the atmosphere
from future large scale launch activity.

In any case, our future can be in orbit. We can, and should, build
thousands of orbital space colonies and bring this solar system fully
to life.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

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

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.