"Damien Valentine" wrote in message
ups.com...

So I just got through O'Neill's "The High Frontier". There seem to be
some philosophical inconsistencies -- O'Neill claims to be promoting
individual freedoms and small-scale economies by building monolithic
power satellites

I think John Schilling did a good job of explaining why SPS need to be big.

and kilometer-scale orbiting cities, for instance --
but that's neither here nor there.

You might be thinking of Island 3, but remember that even when talking about
Earthlike space habitats, the first-generation ones would only have
populations of 10,000. That's small as many cities go.

which will be used to build a 3-million ton, 10,000-man space station
the size of Manhattan; then that will build 80,000-ton satellites, and
those will transmit solar power back to Earth."

It might interest you to know that after The High Frontier was published,
O'Neill turned out other studies where small, simple "space manufacturing
facilities" and construction of SPS came first. Lush, Earthlike habitats
came much later in the program, and then only with the understanding that
once you had mining facilities on the moon and/or asteroids and
manufacturing facilities to construct SPS in space, most of what you needed
to build large habitats is pretty much already in place and amortized.

I suppose I want to start off by asking, "Would a Solar Power
Satellite work in the first place?" I know that the idea has gotten a
lot of flak recently; is it still viable or just hopeless?

Interestingly, the military seems to have revived interest in this concept.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._airforce.html


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Regards,
Mike Combs
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm
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Aragorn