Crosspost: SPS and $87 billion

On Friday, November 7, 2003, at 12:46 PM, Bill wrote:

>> SPS's in this context simply don't make sense. The incremental
> development
>> of technologies to build SPS's in orbit from Lunar or other off-Earth
>> sources does, but that requires vision and long-termism. Something I
>> frankly don't see in western society.
>>

If western society can't see long term, how do you explain the 50 year
struggle to defeat the Soviet Union, or the 25 year development of the
internet before commercialization, or the 40 year commitment, including
large expenditures, to very expensive human space flight with little
scientific or commercial return on investment?

Western society has an excellent record of long term thinking.

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~150 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

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