On Oct 1, 11:44 pm, Troy wrote:
On Oct 2, 2:45 am, Damien Valentine wrote:

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?

The only way you could start off in space is to start off small. Like
Bigelow Aerospace's Sundancer module; yet it's also suffering from
that "if you build it, they will come." However, the desire for space
stations is there, and with smaller space programs like India and
China wanting their own in the next few decades, certainly the desire
for that inflatable technology will be there. O'Neill proposed that
the "small" gap would be filled by shuttles, funded by the government
and quickly scaling up to massive projects. I suspect he also figured
in economics of scale effects, as well. Only massive government
funding would be able to kickstart such a project.

That's why a cool POOF City worth of those "Bigelow Aerospace's
Sundancer modules" would more than do the trick as situated at Venus
L2.


Yet, his reasoning is sound - big projects do happen. However, if they
are not commercially viable (and there's no way that SPSs would be for
many many decades), they'd better be religiously significant,
militarily important or just the work of a cray rich megalomaniac.
Without that, launch costs had better be about $200 a kilo or less for
lunar/asteroid mining to become viable for supplying materials - just
to earth orbit. Building O'Neill colonies from refined lunar dirt...
unlikely. Real colonies would be built more simply (eg hollow
asteroid), be smaller, and less ambitious. From there it would be a
gradual scaling upwards. I see the first colonies as being in low
earth orbit as some kind of space hotel / servicing centre hybrid.

VL2 POOF City is offering much better than all of those, and it's even
more so viable as our first interplanetary geteway, especially since
our moon's L1 is still so taboo/nondisclosure rated and being rather
gamma and X-ray naked to the raw exposure of our anticathode moon,
plus otherwise our moon's L1 being unavoidably hot as hell (requiring
an artificial solar shade, whereas even the secondary/recoil worth of
IR from the moon itself is substantial)
- Brad Guth -