More-recent space development study

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Combs, Mike" wrote:
>
> Hey, check this out. Looks like an outfit called the Laboratory for
> Spacecraft and Mission Design (LSMD) has had a go at updating the High
> Frontier plans as recently as 2002. Go to this page
> http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~shane/talks/ and look for "Heliopolis: a
> profitable, self-sustaining foothold for humanity in space". The links
> to this presentation on the LSMD site don't seem to work, though.

Mike, I found the project site archived on the Internet Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041011152916/http://www.lsmd.caltech.edu/ae107/
ae107.php

> Interestingly, they want to put both the construction shack and the
> Stanford Torus-like habitat at L-1 instead of in HEO. But largely they
> seem to agree with O'Neill on the fundamentals.

On close reading, a halo orbit around L-1. This would leave L-1 itself wide open for
locating a mass catcher (I'm unsure at this stage of reading whether that's where they want
to put it). As I recall from a later introduction to THF, Dr. O'Neill himself qualified L5 as
being a synonym for "whatever orbit the production engineers and the celestial-mechanics
experts finally settle on" (Preface to Bantam Mass Market paperback edition of THF, 1978).

Dr. Ross' work seems to be the same research area that Dr. Ed Belbruno of Princeton has
been working on for the last 15 years or so. Lee Valentine has talked of the importance of
this work on the SSI site. Incredibly cool work, everyone; go check it out!

>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Combs
>

Shane