Asteroid use

--- "Combs, Mike" wrote:
> From: Marcel Williams [mailto:newpapyrus@...]
>
> MW: Of course, living on a 1G space station would
> mean
> that you would have to provide cosmic ray protection
> for your workers. Doing this by mass shielding would
> dramatically increase the weight of your rotation
> habitat and stress on your cables.
>
> Mike Combs: Not necessarily. There are habitat
designs where
> the radiation shield does
> not rotate with the rest of the habitat. Both the
> Stanford Torus and the
> Bernal Sphere use this approach.
>
MW: If you're talking about housing your workers in a
Stanford Torus or A Bernal Sphere, then I think that
your talking about more than a few dozen or a few
hundred workers at your operations and your talking
about a huge investment by your company.

> MW: Alternatively, you could provide cosmic ray
> protection
> by positively charging the metalic exterior of of
> the
> rotating habitat to repel ionizing protons while
> beneath the metalic exterior, providing a small
> magnetic field by internal coils to deflect the
> significantly less massive electrons.
>
> Mike Combs: Maybe, but the Ames study looked at this
option and
> concluded that passive
> shielding was a better solution. I'd see more of a
> case for active
> shielding on a ship or a mobile habitat than a
> stationary habitat.
>
MW: While that is may be true for a large habitat,
that would certainly not be true for a small space
station which would still require housing areas roated
along tethers at least one kilometer in radius.

Marcel F. Williams
1/9/01