IMAX L5 First City In Spase.

> OK, time for my gripe against this movie, aka the reason I didn't
> give it a 9 or 10. This also this comment's spoiler. After the
> water is secured, Daddy is alive, and Keiko has grown up to be
mayor
> of L5, they have finally built another city. Yeah. Two cities. In
> thirty years. According to the NASA/Ames study the makers of this
> film used for reference, the time for one city to build another was
> three years, not thirty. Even if we assume that for some reason
> (politics, scarce water, whatever) it takes five years ...

I don't find anything surprising about a thirty-year delay between
doing something and taking the next step. Look how long we've gone
since Apollo without another space effort on the same scale. What's
there a market for that requires people in space, in the movie's
scenario? (Or at least pays for people in space.) How does that
market change over time? Or if it's government financed, what are
the ongoing costs back on the ground, and how would those compare
with the on-the-ground costs needed for another asteroid-mining
mission to get the materials for additional colonies?

Whatever determines how fast we build more colonies after the first,
I doubt it's going to be a matter of just building them as fast as
we can, or even related to how fast we can simply by a fixed
multiple. It's going to be politics or economics or whatever. And
if it says thirty years' delay, it will be irrelevant that we could
have built exponentially with a doubling time of three years.