Spinning, Whales

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 04:23 PM, Jeff wrote:

>> Are whales seriously being considered as internal space settlement
> Fauna?
>>
>> Michael
>
> No, this was my fault. I had asked the group because I am working on
> a
>

In spite of an idiotic post I sent where I forgot that whales need to
breath air, I rather like the whale friendly space colony discussion.
I think it might happen someday (a long time from now). When there are
thousands of orbital colonies, and they get cheap to make, a group of
whale lovers could conceivably build a colony specifically designed for
whales -- although food supply is an enormous problem for reasonable
sized colonies.

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

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