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


I've the original book; as I remember it, it wasn't so much a political,
economic, or social system he was promoting as much as the technology of
using space colonies for large scale manufacturing due to the advantages
of large amounts of free solar power, while at the same time preserving
Earth's ecosystem by moving large-scale industries off planet to cut
down on pollution.
It was only after the book that every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a
political or economic axe to grind began looking at space colonies as
some sort of do-it-yourself Utopias where the innate superiority of
their political or economic system would no doubt be shown to all.
Once the likes of Timothy Leary got involved in the space colonization
hypothesis, the thing was screwed... they promptly turned into something
like a religion or revolutionary political movement.
What really bothers me is that the entire scheme seems too much like
something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon. "We'll build a base on the
Moon to deliver material to Earth orbit -- and we'll need at least
some mining ships scouting the asteroids for water and organics too --
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." (He offers other
justifications for his "Islands" -- building space telescopes, for
example -- but it seems that we've achieved most of those goals
already without them.)


Yeah..."if you build it, they will come." That was the same rational
used for SST's, commercial flights on the space Shuttle, and in the
1800's for Brunel's Great Eastern steamship.
Today, you can see an echo of it in the Space Tourism industry.

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?


You can do it; but it is going to be anything but cheap to do.

Pat