"John Schilling" wrote in message
...

But it's probably going to be a *lot* less expensive if you allow for
the inhabitants to build, provision, and resupply their habitat using
local resources.

And there's every reason in the world to expect an asteroidal settlement to
be doing this.

And Mars has a much broader range of useful resources
than any NEO. Than all NEOs combined, probably.

I'm not sure why you would say this. What resources would be available on
the surface of Mars that you couldn't find in a well-selected CC-type
asteroid?

Mars also has gravity, which is quite useful if you want your inhabitants
to remain, like, alive and stuff. Providing gravity on or near an NEO is
rather hard, especially at small scales.

I wouldn't so much say "hard" as "requiring a certain minimal scale". If
one has two counter-rotating structures of equal mass, nothing is required
to spin them up and keep them spinning other than an electric motor between
them.

On the other hand, 1/3 G may turn out to be too little gravity to remain
healthy. If so, a rotating structure in close orbit of an asteroid could
provide a full 1-G.

Right, so, settling Greenland is likely to be less expensive for
hypothetical European explorers than settling North America or the
Carribean?

I think you would find the magnitude of the relative energy differences to
be very large.


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Regards,
Mike Combs
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By all that you hold dear on this good Earth
I bid you stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn