On Apr 15, 11:56 am, wrote:
On Apr 12, 12:31 pm, Joe Strout wrote:





http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/3722

Pretty neat. $15M for a 4-week stay on orbit; that's quite an
improvement over $20M for a 5-day stay. And $88M/year to lease your own
300-m^3 space station module? That's a real bargain.

In such an environment, I can imagine a lot of smaller countries
developing an astronaut corps that way. NASA will look a bit foolish
when there are twice as many Japanese astronauts on orbit as Americans,
and they're paying a fraction of what we pay for that capability.

The cool thing about this is, even if the schedule slips and the prices
creep a bit (as they are almost certain to do), it's still a starting
point much lower than anything governments have done. And once there
are regular paying customers, prices will continue to come down and
performance will go up, both in the launchers and in the on-orbit
facilities. Bigelow won't long be the only player in that space. And
besides direct competitors, there will be lots of room for support
companies providing on-orbit fuel, power, tug service, and much more.
Real space infrastructure at last!

What's not extremely cool about POOF city at Venus L2(VL2)?

It seems zooming aroud mother Earth is getting somewhat pointless, as
well as having become more lethal by each and every item tossed into
orbit, not to mention the ongoing gamma and Xray dosage contributed by
our nearby moon, and for otherwise having to avoid the outer contour
of that nasty SAA.
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Brad Guth- Hide quoted text -

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Venus L2 is apparently too cool and otherwise too darn space station
energy efficient for its own good.

What if anything is all that hocus-pocus or otherwise insurmountable
about a Bigelow Aerospace / Nautilus (aka POOF) city at VL2?

We're talking 5 POOFs / 125 tonnes (all China or all Russian?)
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Brad Guth