War in orbit???

You are making the classic mistake: compare today's Earth with tomorrow's
colony. By the time a colony is built the Earth will have MUCH greater
space capabilities. Forget your week's notice. And there won't be one
missle, there will be thousands (or more). They will attack from different
directions. There will be countermeasures to confuse sensors, etc., etc.,
etc.

Bill wrote:

> Nonsense, the normal radiation sheilding the colony has would be more
> than adequate sheilding. Even if it wasn't, the colony has one week
> notice minimum that a launch has taken place. Given that kind of time
> scale, a colony could easily redirect the missle.
>
> Bill
>
> > It wouldn't even take a direct hit of the colony to kill it.
> > Detonate a nuclear weapon within a few tens of kilometers and the EM
> > spike would fry all their electronics. Something like that could be
> > launched using today's technology, and could probably be launched
> > within a few hours, given the need.
> >
> > ed
>

Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.

Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.

I think we should:

1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020 goal of

reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failure
rate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels will need to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.

2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroid are
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about 500 times

greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand space
colonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.

3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need their colony

to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearby stars.

Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.