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Old October 3rd 07, 04:54 AM posted to rec.arts.sf.science,sci.space.history
Johnny1a
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Posts: 25
Default Questions about "The High Frontier"

On Oct 1, 12:45 pm, 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.

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.)


Your impression, unfortunately, is dead right. It _is_ a Rube
Goldberg scheme of the first order.

The thing you have to understand is (IMHO of course), the point of the
exercise for O'Neill is not energy, it's the space habitats as an end
in themselves. The idea of selling electricity is simply an attempt
to come up with a plausible reason to build the Habitats. In a way
that puts O'Neill into a less dreamy category than some space
enthusiasts, he at least recognizes that there has to be an economic
incentive in it all somewhere. But it's still pretty doesn't work.

If the primary goal were to build SPS, then the Habitats are
extravagances of the first order, you could achieve the same thing
more cheaply with orbital hotel type structures, utilitarian
facilities designed to house a rotating construction crew on a medium-
term basis. For a comparison, think offshore oil platforms. They
aren't luxurious, but they are tolerable/comfortable for a rotating
crew. To draw out the comparison (which I grant is imperfect),
imagine if someone proposed that the key to exploiting off-shore oil
resources was to construct floating towns that were ecologically self-
sustaining and designed to duplicate suburban living out of an
advanced Western state at sea.

O'Neill's plan called for totally unrealistic space access by the
standards of the 70s, he was assuming not only that the Space Shuttle
would live up to NASA's hype, but that it would do _better_ over time,
and he was assuming radically unrealistic constructions costs at every
stage of the game, including assuming the availability of working
models of technology that just hadn't been proven yet (and much of it
still hasn't been.)

What really makes me a critic, though, is not that O'Neill dreamed
big, I admire that. The problem is that his dreams became so hyped
that they actually became a negative force from a POV of space
exploration and development. Critics used them as 'proof' that the
entire concept of space exploration/exploitation was silliness, empty
pipe dreams, while they raised supporters expectations to levels
guaranteed to be disappointed.