asteroid habitats

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Dave Logsdon" wrote:

> Does my version of an asteroid habitat seem more
> plausible, now that I've described it better?

Absolutely. The principle reason is that each chamber in the station
is structurally sound.

Have you read "Mining the Sky"? I'm thinking in particular about the
Aldrin Cycler. I could see the Cycler looking like this.

Even on this version of the idea I'm left wondering whether it would
be more efficient, time, planning, capital, wise to just build an
engineered Habitat.

Here's why:

To hollow out an asteroid, even when configured into room modules is
going to take effort and a slower pace.

Why not go up to an asteroid, blast a section off, grind it up, cast
it into formed concrete blocks and then in zero-g manoeuver those 100
ton blocks together into a whole, just like a bunch of lego blocks.
The casting process can be automated and no care has to be taken when
blasting segments of the asteroid apart and running those chunks over
to the grinder. This process can accomodate much larger volumes of
material and doesn't have to follow a defined excavating path.

The standards of the engineered product will be uniform and not
limited by by the size and shape of the original asteroid.

Think of it this way - there are plenty of people who live on acerages
that are covered with forests, yet they use lumber from a lumberyard
to build their homes rather than building with the raw logs that they
could get from their property. The house goes up faster, is cheaper to
build, is nore uniform in contruction and is a more efficient use of
material.

TangoMan