asteroid habitats

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Dave Logsdon"
>> From: capcartoonist [mailto:capcartoonist@h...]
> >"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.

Well, there's a solution to part of the design. 50 meters
thickness? Sure, why not.

>> "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 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.

I could be mis-remembering what I read. Rubble was probably the
wrong word to use. Basically, a stony asteroid might be an
aggregate of several smallere asteroids held together by mutual
attraction.