asteroid habitats

From: capcartoonist [mailto:capcartoonist@...]

> I'm not really concerned about part of the rock being "substandard",
> if there's a hundred feet or so of it between the floor of the chambers
> and the outside.

"I was thinking that the floor might be as thick as a km."

With a large enough asteroid, that'd be possible, but I can't really see why
you'd want to waste *that* much usable area. Heck, you could cut my original
"hundred feet" example in half, and still have a much thicker, safer hull
than the original O'Neill design.

"The problem with stony asteroids is that they may not be
structurally sound. In fact, there's some speculation that many of
them are just loose piles of rubble held together by gravity."

Not "rubble": chondrules. The 'stony' and 'stony-iron' asteroids -- as
they've been labelled for years -- are more properly named L-class
(low-iron) and H-class (high-iron) ordinary chondrite asteroids. The fact
that they make up some 87% of the "falls" (meteorites) recovered here on
Earth demonstrates that they *aren't* "just loose piles of rubble", or else
they would have all disintegrated in the atmosphere. `Sand' and `Sandstone'
are made of the same substances; let's not confuse one for the other.

Dave