The High Frontier 51
| The High Frontier | |
| author | Gerard K. O'Neill |
| pages | 326 |
| publisher | (1989 edition) Space Studies Institute Press |
| rating | 10 |
| reviewer | apsmith |
| ISBN | 0962237906 |
| summary | O'Neill outlines how to colonize near space with little more than boring 1970s materials and engineering know-how, with boot-strap colonies of thousands of peopleprocessing moon and asteroid dust in high-earth orbit. |
The Big Idea
Continued growth in material well-being and freedom for humanity is only possible through colonization of space; O'Neill outlines how to do it with little more than boring 1970's materials and engineering know-how, via boot-strap colonies of thousands of people processing moon and asteroid dust in high-earth orbit. The only problem is the seed capital to get started; his initial $100 billion was clearly an over-estimate - a later estimate brought the startup costs closer to $7 billion. Even more important we really should now have the resources and motivation (global warming!) to make it happen. There is a new 2000 edition with additional material from other authors.
The Scenario:
In 1969 Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill organized a weekly seminar for the advanced students in his freshman physics class. It was Apollo's heyday, but also a time of deepening skepticism in the benefits and relevance of science and technology. Both the Cold War with the Soviets and the hot war in Vietnam were at their height; pollution seemed to be worsening everywhere; serious people were arguing that humankind was already overstepping Earth's carrying capacity, and it was time to retrench. In this climate O'Neill asked his students:"Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?"
And despite what Isaac Asimov called our "planetary chauvinism", O'Neill and his little group came up with strong arguments and designs for artificial colonies in high orbit or free space, well away from planetary surfaces. O'Neill was so taken with their enthusiasm for this that he committed a good deal of his spare time over the next several years to developing the ideas and trying to get them published. Along the way he enlisted a young MIT student named Eric Drexler, and colleague Freeman Dyson, among a small group of supporters. Worldwide publicity finally arrived in May 1974, when the NY Times sent a reporter to the small conference O'Neill had organized on this new topic of "space colonization".
Three years later came "The High Frontier", O'Neill's main publication for a popular audience on the subject. In his 1993 obituary Freeman Dyson said, "The High Frontier... established O'Neill as a spokesman for the people in many countries who believe that the settlement of space can bring tremendous benefits to humanity ...."
Repeated throughout the book is O'Neill's goal: "the humanization of space", by which he means in part the capacity to move the bulk of humanity off this planet and into colonies with resources vastly greater than what the Earth can provide. These colonies would be more than self-supporting; their first great contribution would be in construction of solar power satellites from lunar materials, allowing the nations of Earth to vastly expand their energy resources in the most environmentally sound fashion possible. Earth's surface captures only a tiny fraction of the solar energy available; something like 30 times what Earth receives comes through even the relatively narrow confines of geosynchronous orbit; another factor of 100 times as much energy is available inside the Moon's orbit where the "L5" or "high" orbits for the colonies are suggested.
O'Neill goes through in some detail what it would take, using the capacity of NASA's then-planned space shuttle, to first set up an initial mining station on the moon, which would then launch hundreds or thousands of times more mass to high orbit. The one new technology O'Neill relied on was his "mass driver", an electromagnetic acceleration system used both on the lunar surface to dump raw materials into space, and as a propulsion system somewhat similar to the electromagnetic "ion drive" NASA is now using on its Deep Space 1 mission, and of course related to the electromagnetic particle accelerators O'Neill worked with at his real job. O'Neill and colleagues even put together several "mass drivers" out of spare parts to test what accelerations were feasible -- even the first model achieved over 30 g's.
The centerpiece of the book is the design of the colonies themselves, constructed for the most part out of lunar material. These are the hollow spheres or cylinders, which O'Neill refers to as "Islands", rotated so as to provide a land area with artificial gravity. There's no fancy technology needed, despite what you might expect reading Clarke's Rama novels, or Greg Bear's Eon, or countless others. The magnitude of Island One, a colony designed for some 10,000 people, is well within the scale of many artifical structures we have built here on earth; O'Neill compares it to shipbuilding in particular. O'Neill's materials are aluminum alloys or even steel; no need for carbon fiber composites here (and the Moon is a little low on carbon anyway). The colonies provide comforts similar to home, with terraced apartments, rooftop gardens, forests and rivers and recreational areas. Lighting is provided through a somewhat complex system of mirrors, baffles, and ordinary glass windows - no need for a central "plasma tube"! Radiation shielding is the usual six feet of slag or lunar dirt.
The book is chock-full of great ideas that seem to make the whole scheme obviously practical. Did you know the space shuttle cargo bay has roughly the same capacity as a DC-9 airliner? In principle our current space shuttles could be used to ferry over a hundred passengers into space at a time; O'Neill estimates that even a limited shuttle fleet could get close to a hundred thousand people into low earth orbit every year (of course that was back when NASA thought it would be doing 60 shuttle missions a year). O'Neill was sure that other better ways of getting into low earth orbit would come along; the next few years should be very interesting in this regard with new launch systems from Kistler Aerospace, Rotary Rocket, etc. supposedly in the works. With O'Neill's reasonably optimistic scenario, we would have hundreds of millions of people in these colonies in 35-50 years. Sounds outrageous? A hundred years ago most people thought it was impossible to fly something heavier than air, but now airlines routinely handle hundreds of millions of passengers every year.
What's Good?
Just about everything -- I'd heard about this book probably since I was in grade school, but never got around to reading it until now. It's the clear foundation for any logical expansion of humanity into space; all we need to do is get with the program! O'Neill founded the Space Studies Institute to gather private donations to spur further research into the whole scheme, which it has done very extensively. What's Bad? Why hasn't it all happened yet? The 1989 edition contains a newer appendix by O'Neill with the following quote that sums up at least part of the problem: "In 1973 the U.S. space program had been fifteen years ahead of all others. By 1988 that lead had been thrown away." But O'Neill's prophesying was somehow also at fault. With such huge untapped resources, why hasn't Exxon or Mobil, or General Electric, been leaping at the chance to invest some of their spare capital to make a killing? Maybe they're just too clueless about the possibilities here? Or maybe they've made a rational judgment to be second or third, not first on something as apparently risky as this? Somebody has to do it first, and O'Neill in his 1989 comments at least seems to have lost faith in NASA and its over-cautious contractors to get the thing started. So who will it be?What's in it for me?
There seems a good chance space development will be "the next big thing" after the Internet has run its course through our lives. After all, we still need material resources to do the things we want to do. Earth's population is still increasing, and its resources really are limited. The threat of global warming traces almost entirely to our burning of fossil fuels for energy. If we don't get started on a long-term solution now, when will we? This book is still the clearest rational outline of why, and how, space development makes sense. Plus, who wouldn't want an apartment on one of those "islands in the sky"?"
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
Shuttle external tanks were part of O'Neill's visi (Score:3)
The Shuttle ET is discarded right before an orbital circularization burn and could be held on to during that burn without depleting the orbital maneuvering fuel supply badly. For more information on how this these tanks could be converted to space stations and more, visit the following:
http://www.orbit6.com/et/
Re:Don't understand... (Score:2)
Because of gravity. You would only weigh 1/6 on the Moon as on Earth. If you lived there for a long time you could forget ever returning to Earth.
Re:Let Bill Gates do it (Score:1)
Create an operating system that didn't need nightly reboots...
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Where the flaws are. (Score:2)
Economically, the costs in supplying the construction from Earth with food and "tools to build the tools" and temporary habits and other essentials would run into the trillions before the first solar power sat started beaming power back to Earth. And the sat would only produce a little (at most thrice) more Earth-usable power for the Earth than Earth-based solar collectors with tracking motors.
The result is that one would have to bet trillions on unproven technology to sell power for marginally less than Earth-based solar power can sell for. Which means any return is dependent on nuclear fusion failing, our running out of both fosssil fuels and uranium, and no cheaper-than-space-solar energy technologies being developed on Earth.
As a social vision, The High Frontier is a great book. But it won't be a viable plan in any of our lifetimes, even with tellomere treatments.
Another review.. (Score:1)
Re:I have sex with goats! (Score:1)
Well, yes. The name Skywalker was a corrupt form of the ancient family name Aigowanker, "Diddler of Goats". It was Mr. Vader's use of that ancient form, known only within the family, that convinced Luke that he really was Mr. Vader's only begotten son.
As usual, the tragic subtleties got lost in the translation.
For more information on the colorful history of the Aigowanker family, read Smeg Heartyfartblast's From Half-Goat to Half-Machine: The Rise and Fall of the Aigowankers, Tatooine University Press, Mos Eisley, 31312.
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Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:2)
To a large extent, the Americas were to the 16th and 18th century European the equivalent of our Dot Com madness. And, I suspect we will see much the same pattern. Early birds - many of whom lose their shirts/lives. Then comes the Fad and everybody buys in. The Bubble(s) Burst - see last year. Compare to the South Sea Bubble or Scotland's Darien Adventure. After which things shake out and the real business commences - which doesn't after all have such huge profit margins as first imagined.
So the way to space is to make people think that there is Lots of Moolah to be Made by the First Ones There!!
Maybe the discovery of five pound diamonds on Mars?
Updating O'Neill's vision with nanotechnology (Score:1)
While commenting on some problems regarding SETI searches, I provide a discussion [aeiveos.com] of how O'Neill's colonies might be updated using biotechnology and nanotechnology. Steel and aluminium are terrible structural materials compared with diamond, buckytubes and sapphire. The combination of the short replicating times allowed by nanoscale self-replicating systems and the material properties of the strongest materials will allow us to rapidly go far beyond O'Neill's vision -- to the point of dismantling entire planets [aeiveos.com].
Government support or programs is not required to do this. Molecular Nanotechnology [zyvex.com] of the type being developed by Zyvex [zyvex.com] is required. In addition, we need the designs for the nanobots to take apart the asteroids or planets, construct the mass drivers and solar arrays, etc. The lack of molecular designs, is discussed in the Nano@Home [aeiveos.com] proposal. Because we will be able to do the designs at home, a small dedicated group will eventually be able to bootstrap the development of space and achieve the vision O'Neill described. Because of the rapid increase in the available resources (matter and energy) per person, the large number of people living in poverty should disappear as well. The only potential problem I see is if Mind Uploading [aleph.se] becomes feasible (or real AIs are developed) and unlimited copying of such entitites is allowed. This has been explored in more detail by Robin Hanson [gmu.edu] in If Uploads Come First [gmu.edu].
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:1)
Re:Cheap Shuttle Assumption of "The High Frontier" (Score:2)
Dude, your Cock!!!! Did you get to pee on Quayle at the now-infamous party w/ barb, newt and george sr.? Did Barb's labia unfold like a legal accordian file.
\
Dude!!!
Let Bill Gates do it (Score:1)
Re:Where the flaws are. (Score:2)
And even if it weren't, nuclear fusion is every bit as dirty as nuclear fission. In fact just about the only known practical way to make energy from controlled nuclear fusion is to use nuclear fusion to irradiate material- make it radioactive and feed it into a fission reactor!
If you add up the amount of money spent on nuclear fusion over the last 50 years, we could have had a high frontier by now...
Re:Where the flaws are. (Score:1)
Technologically, this is entirely possible, with one exception -- we do not know how to make the mirrors which his colonies would be dependent on for food
How so? Making mirrors are not understood?
And the sat would only produce a little (at most thrice) more Earth-usable power for the Earth than Earth-based solar collectors with tracking motors.
It would produce more, I think. In space: 24-h days, no weather, no absorption by air, no vast areas of Earth real estate needed, zero-g means flimsier structures are possible etc. But a cable along the space elevator would probably be a better transmission system than microwaves.
/Dervak
What encryption and rocket science have in common. (Score:2)
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:1)
Re:The Problems are Not Technical (Score:1)
It only takes one person to found a company. From there, that one person can gather the resources (including and especially people) to realize the dream. Heck, maybe I'll do it.
Re:Don't understand... (Score:1)
The advantage of an orbital habitat is that you have controllable "gravity". You can live at 1G to keep your bones strong, and ride the elevator up to a micro-gravity environment to manufacture foamed-titanium widgits or wotnot. And travel from one habitat to another does not require burning fuel to get up out of a gravity-well.
The moon is a fixed 1/6th(ish) G. You can stay healthy by exercising in an expensive centrifuge, but you can't manufacture any super-pure semi-conductors or anything else that requires a micro-gravity environment. And to travel from the moon to anywhere else requires you climb out of a gravity well 1/6G deep.
Don't understand... (Score:1)
Also, as regards shielding, I suspect the 1970s designs didn't take into account the amount of kinetic engery in a meteorite strike - its been shown that standard metal protection is not sufficient to stop even small meteorites over any length of time and that more innovative (carbon-based) materials are required to prevent effects such as spalling. IIRC, the ISS habitation module uses layers of nylon-related material and foam to dissipate impacts.
Re:This is so true (Score:1)
Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:5)
Case in point: When the Europeans overflowed into the Americas, it wasn't because the land had been 'just discovered' or 'it was ripe for opportunity'. The first commercial ventures for American exploration were complete and utter financial and physical disasters. Hundreds died in the early periods of starvation and disease. Worse, they brought their disease with them to infect Native Americans. Their backers realized that American exploration was costly and unprofitable despite the fact that there was a wealth of untapped resources.
The people who took the risks and learned a new way of living and made American exploration really work were those who just didn't have any hope of living the life they wanted to in Europe: The poor, the tired, the huddled masses, etc...
This carries over into today. Americans don't *need* space exploration in the same way the rich, elite Europeans didn't *need* American exploration. The people who could really benifit from space exploration are the relatively poor from 3rd world Asian and South American countries. Unfortuneately, it's not so easy to build a dome on Mars as it was for early settlers to build log cabins and sod houses. Right *now*, we're in the same period of exploration where the ultra-rich (like the King of Spain and his funding of Columbus's ventures) are throwing money into exploration, hoping to find profit where there is none yet. It will only be when there is a driving, urgent *need* for the middle-class and poor to get the hell off Earth that space habitats and Mars domes will become viable and profitable.
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:2)
But that's the point - cut ties just like some of the colonists of the "new world"... This time, there are a lot fewer natives. It would have to be understood that people moving and working on the moon would be doing so on a permament basis.
Tourism is a luxury that isn't included in the initial colonization - for business purposes, there will be people moving back and forth - but for the real bang for the buck, people have to stay behind and have children themselves. I don't even envision tourism as being viable until waaaay after permament colonies are present, and people move beyond basic survival requirements.
But you do have an interesting point about gravity - we do need more research on minimal gravity required for basic and continued human health. Hopefully 1/6th would be good enough - we know that 0 is pretty harmfull...
Re:What the hell? (Score:1)
If you've read the book write a review and submit it.
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:2)
The third, and the only one not fundamentally dependent on already existing human societies in the Americas, was upper-middle-class members of society liquidating their personal wealth to travel to a land where they didn't have to fear persecution for their religion and were free to persecute others for the others' religion.
Later these colonies were supplemented by convicts transported from overseas as punishment and poorer people hired or bought by the wealthy descendants of previous settlers. Only after they developed into wealthy countries connected by fast, cheap transport to Europe did the tired and poor huddled masses travel to those colonies.
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:1)
Re:Where the flaws are. (Score:1)
On solar, I did say "(at most thrice)". The numbers work that avoiding the atmosphere gives you a factor of about 1.5, and 24-h days plus tracking gives you a factor of 4 -- that is, x6 generation, which then suffers about a 50% loss in microwave transmission, to x3 generation vs. a fixed Earth-based solar plant. Make the Earth-based arrays track the Sun, and the Earth output almost doubles, giving the space sats a mere 2x to 1.5x advantage per unit area than Earth-based solar power generation.
In the meantime, you'll have invested trillions in making the sats, which means a multicentury period before a profit can be made at current electrical rates. Meaning the sats will only be economically viable when all other current electricity generation methods are insufficient. And at current rates of increase in use in power, that'll be over 150 years, if fusion fails.
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:2)
Re:I have sex with goats! (Score:1)
Re:The Problems are Not Technical (Score:2)
Geeks can't organize *lunch*, let alone something this large.
To say nothing of getting a million geeks to agree on anything anywhere this large and complex. The phrase "herding cats" comes to mind.
There are already a bunch of nonprofits trying to put this together. They range from simple pro-NASA lobbying organizations to total ga-ga idealists. None of them that I've seen seem to have any idea of what they're up against (hint -- look at the title of this message!)
If we ever do get off this mudball, I suspect that the organization that does it will look a lot more like a mixture Ghengis Khan's hordes and General Motors than it will like something from a libertarian/cyberpunk/ecofreak science fiction novel.
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Several points (Score:2)
First of all, you don't build on the moon. That would require launching assembled items, which in many cases couldn't be done with a mass driver and so couldn't be done nearly as cheaply. You mine on the moon, and do most refining (even the slag is useful for radiation shielding) and assembly in orbit.
Secondly, that refining may be easier to do on a large scale in orbit. What is the biggest mirror you've ever seen? A mirror in orbit doesn't have to support it's own weight, except for the few thousandths of a G needed for attitude control. And at the focal point of that mirror you have a region of space whose contents can be heated up to the temperature of the Sun's surface.
Third, the final resulting colony is really something you *want* in orbit. Solar power, microgravity manufacturing, asteroidal materials, etc. are either only available or are much easier to access from orbit.
Finally, one of the problems with planets is that while you have gravity, you're stuck with it. We do not yet have the medical technology to live more than a few years in free fall without crippling muscle and bone deterioration. Maybe the 1/6 G on the moon will be enough to prevent that; we don't know. But in free fall, we're not limited to 1/6 G; colonies can be constructed that spin to provide artificial gravity; even at a full G of radial acceleration, you can make and spin aluminum structures kilometers wide safely, and unlike on the moon you wouldn't have to worry about bearings or metal fatigue.
Also, as regards shielding, I suspect the 1970s designs didn't take into account the amount of kinetic engery in a meteorite strike - its been shown that standard metal protection is not sufficient to stop even small meteorites over any length of time and that more innovative (carbon-based) materials are required to prevent effects such as spalling
The designs take shielding thoroughly into account: intended to be outside the Van Allen belts, they worry about radiation shielding primarily, but once you've slapped enough feet of glass and slag around the colony to protect against radiation, meteorite shielding is well taken care of as a side effect.
Oh, and did I forget the biggest benefit of having space colonies along side planetary colonies?
We've only got a few planets and moons here, and they all suck in their own way or another... but we have a *lot* of space. The Earth-Moon system may have a little more resources and a few thousand times more available energy than Earth alone... but the amount of accessable material in the asteroid belt and energy radiating out into deep space dwarfs it all. "Mining the Sky" isn't quite as dated as "High Frontier", and is a little farther looking.
One last benefit: A lunar colony will be stuck on the moon, for good; with a space colony if you want to go anywhere you can take home with you. At first that will just mean a few ion drives to push a colony to Mars orbit or the asteroid belt. But God willing, we will develop fusion power sometime in the next millenium, and of course a "fusion drive" is just what happens when you let some of the power plant's plasma leak out the back of the system. Keep doing so until you hit 10-20% of the speed of light, and a century later you're at your pick of hundreds of stars. When that happens, we're going to have a choice to make. Are we going to bother building an interstellar spaceship for the sake of sending a half dozen young explorers to the nearest good-looking star, to arrive old and die there? Why do anything so half-assed, when we could strap an engine and fuel tank to the back of a 100,000 man colony, and go to the stars for real?
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor/convicts (Score:1)
The Problems are Not Technical (Score:4)
The problem is that we simply have no percieved business, social or political need to do it. Call it a "lack of will", for lack of a better turn.
Big business? They're focused on short-term, low risk profits. Also, they are violently opposed to anything that would challenge their business models.
Small business/nonprofit foundataions? Not enough resources.
Government? No payback at all before the next election, and (at least in the US) crippling turf battles. There's also the possibility of the "colonists" squirming out from under their thumb.
Result: no action.
Whatever entity (nation, corporation, etc) first gets appreciable numbers of people (and the infrastructure to support them)into space will be the ones to replace the USA on the world scene.
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Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:2)
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor/convicts (Score:1)
And is there a point to this? (Score:1)
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2000 Edition is out (Score:1)
http://www.ssi.org/high-frontier.html
It comes with a CD-Rom w/ hours of MPEGs of Gerry & others.
Make sure you check out the websites for SSI (http://www.ssi.org), the Foundation (http://www.space-frontier.org), prospace (http://prospace.org) & FINDS (http://www.finds-space.org) for what the dream of the High Frontier has become in the last 10-20 years.
The High Frontier vision is that of space settlement, finding ways to pay so you can stay in space.
-Jay Thomas
PS: You might want to check out my project at:
http://www.finds-space.org/thomasneurauter.html
Or check out my home page at:
http://www.jay.cx (http://24.181.128.90 for broken DNS)
The Real Problem With The High Frontier.... (Score:1)
Minor engineering solutions (Score:4)
Excuse me, but how do you know? It seems that all the experience we've had has been with 1 G and 0 G, with a couple short experiments at 1/6 G. Who exactly has spent a year at
Oh, well, it's irrelevant:
Steel is not strong enough to provide this in a rotating cylinder,
You want to do the math on this one, and get back to me? Neglecting air pressure (which makes the problem worse, but not much) and endcaps (which makes the problem better, but not much), the maximum radius of a cylindrical O'Neill colony would be
radius = (tensile strength)/[(density)(pseudogravity)]
Plug in your 8.8 m/s^2 pseudogravity, and 2700 kg/m^3 density and 185 MPa ultimate tensile strength for a good aluminum alloy, and you get a nice 7.7 kilometer radius. Drop down to the yield strength of structural aluminum, let the colony structure carry it's own weight in radiation shielding and contents, and throw in a safety factor of 2, and you still get a colony a mile wide.
Radiation storms strong enough to kill unprotected people happen frequently. Every few years, we on earth at sea level get an extra chest X-ray from one. They are not predictable, have fast onset. Solar flares are more predictable, but require lots of mass between living tissue and the sun.
Gee, that's funny, I haven't heard about all the Shuttle astronaut and Mir cosmonaut deaths over the past decade. Of course, they're shielded partly by the Van Allen belts, but they're also in a space station whose skin is dozens of times thinner than an O'Neill colony's would be. Would you provide a reference for this assertion?
I want to see us go into space, but all the simple stories like O'Neill's are just silly.
I've heard O'Neill's ideas called uneconomical, and perhaps they're not politically tenable either... but "simple" is one of the last words I would have used...
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:2)
Initially, you'd want to ship things to Earth. Leaving from the lunar surface means that you have to go against it's gravity, escape lunar orbit, then fling it all the way to the Earth.
At least, going down to earth requires no energy, as the space shuttle demonstrates in gliding down to earth by cleverly using it's atmosphere.
No so going down on the Moon. You have to counter it's gravity, and without any atmosphere to do so, you have to use expensive rocket fuel (you have to get it all the way up from Earth). This is why the LEM was such a flimsy affair, whose pressure hull could be punctured with a pencil, all just to save weight. It could not even support it's own weight on Earth!!!
To ship something from the Moon back to the Earth, you have to go up the Moon's gravity well.
When you're in space, everywhere is downhill from there. You're king of the hill, and you can laugh on your way to the Gravity Bank. So, it becomes trivial to ship down things from either Earth orbit, or from any of the Lagrange points proposed by O'Neil to put his space islands.
As for raw materials, you ship the minimum from the moon surface, and for a magnetic mass-driver, the energy can be solar, thus, free.
Or you just go mine the asteroid belt. It may be very far away, but it is not expensive in terms of delta-V to go there.
Of course, in this, time is the essence, and patience is not a virtue seen often in venture capitalists and other commercial endeavours...
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Gravity for health (Score:1)
It's obvious that large-scale colonization in zero-G is unfeasible due to calcium loss and other side effects. however, the "threshold" point at which bone loss ceases is an unknown. It could be 1/6th (lunar) or 1/3rd (Mars!) of a G, it could be your stated
And the O'Niell Islands would be have been steel, but built along the lines of suspension bridges, so there would be a lot of structures designed to add strength to the Islands, not just welded steel panels.
Happy Friday!
Cheap Shuttle Assumption of "The High Frontier" (Score:2)
NASA's Shuttle was supposed to have provided per pound cost of access to low earth orbit for hundreds of dollars, not thousands or tens of thousands. In fact, a Shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle was proposed that was projected to bring the transportation cost to LEO down under $100/lb.
When O'Neill et al realized that NASA was incapable of delivering on even a fraction of their promised performance figures, they started scrambling around to find ways to lessen the critical mass of equipment required to get a self replicating facility put in place on the moon.
This resulted in the publication of the paper: O'Neill, Gerard K.; Driggers, G.; and O'Leary, B.: New Routes to Manufacturing in Space. Astronautics and Aeronautics, vol. 18, October 1980, pp. 46-51.
That paper defined much of SSI's research and development agenda and inspired my activie participation with SSI as local support team leader. I ceased my involvement with SSI when they later entered into what I considered an inappropriate relationship with NASA.
Work along the lines laid out by O'Neill, Driggers and O'Leary has not died out entirely. See, for example Advanced Automation for Space Missions [islandone.org].
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:2)
Re:The Problems are Not Technical (Score:2)
There's starting to be some decent competition, and provided nothing screws up to stop that the costs to enter space have dropped and are likely to continue to drop (it currently costs $1300/lb to get to low earth orbit for freight, man-rated is 10x that.).
We may be looking at half that cost in 5-10 years assuming nothing much happens. If something dramatic happens like a new launcher then we are looking at one or more order of magnitude reduction in cost even with an expendable launching system.
You can bet that when the costs to launch get low enough, the amount of money that there is floating around in space is going to attract some funding. (Asteroids appear to be able to sustain a population of 100s of trillions.)
Even solar powered satellites have some massive environmental advantages. They are totally non polluting for one thing... A government can get some useful political capital by being seen to support it. Environmentalism is a growing force in this world.
Re:Where the flaws are. (Score:1)
Cut the sphere in half and you have two hemispherical mirrors. Do I need to add that thermite does NOT need an oxygen atmosphere to burn?
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:1)
Re:Where the flaws are. (Score:2)
1. solar-electric panels in space (not mirrors)
2. microwave transmission (20% loss experimentally, not 50%)
3. Much bigger area is possible in space (that's why its called space, like duh-huh; where were you planning to get the land from on the earth anyhow? How much was this supposed to cost? Earth solar panels aren't competitive at ALL.)
4. 24 hour availability in space (you can't use solar panels on the earth mostly because you can't rely on the power- I'm sorry we can't connect you to the internet today because it is cloudy. Please try again.)
5. No seasonal variation. Try heating and lighting your house in february using solar power, in the UK. If you have double glazing, make sure you include the costs of energy to make the windows...
6. Zero pollution. By the time you've accounted for the pollution and paid for the replacement cost of fossil fuels- it no longer looks very cheap at all (and we are running out of oil rather). In space no pollution. Nahda. Zip. Zilch. None.
Other advantages include: moveable generators (try doing THAT on the earth, wonder if China could do with an extra powerstation right now? How about India?), cheaper processing of materials. Probably cheaper EVERYTHING, once you're up there. Getting up there costs $2600/lb right now, and its on the way down...
Finally, you mentioned current rates of increase of power- I hope you don't live in California
This is so true (Score:2)
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:1)
Re:Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:1)
Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:4)
Although it makes sense, I'm not envisioning that it happens anytime soon... In fact, I'm not seeing a real drive to the commercialization of space with the plain fact that getting off this planet safely and inserting into an orbit, and then moving to locations that you need to get to, and survive is not brain surgery - it's rocket science.
And as easy as the math may be to work out, and state on paper, it takes an incredible infrastructure to get to that stage - so far, Russia and the USA are the only ones to launch people. China is catching up, and I expect that India will catch up as well, but it's not as easy as it looks. It took a huge amount of resources and energy to do so.
There is also a considerable hesitancy to send people into such a hostile environment without the immediate rewards being available. People left the "old world" because of political and population and philosophical reasons to a place where they had atmosphere, water, and some sort of food supply as well as something to sell.. There was incentive.
Although I see an incredible benefit to moving into space, a lot of people would not see it that way. Heinlein really did it best when he wrote "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I mean - there had to be a real good reason to go there - greed. And no, it wasn't easy, and people died in his space exploration stories.
Forget the space station - move to the moon, start working with a lower-gravity world, strip mine it for all it's worth - do nuclear fuel research there, and yes, grow food, have children, allow them to have children - then we will be on higher ground.
Minor engineering problems -- ideas are unfeasible (Score:1)
Radiation storms strong enough to kill unprotected people happen frequently. Every few years, we on earth at sea level get an extra chest X-ray from one. They are not predictable, have fast onset. Solar flares are more predictable, but require lots of mass between living tissue and the sun.
2) It takes
I want to see us go into space, but all the simple stories like O'Neill's are just silly.
Lew
Re:The Problems are Not Technical (Score:1)
> Whatever entity (nation, corporation, etc) first gets appreciable numbers of people
> (and the infrastructure to support them)into space will be the ones to replace the USA
> on the world scene.
Then may I suggest it should be us, the techies and intelligent geeks of the world!
We're smart. We're well paid and could affort to finance something like this. We can organize. Ten grand a year from all million of us, and we're on our way!