Mars colonization versus Stanford Torus

"Jim Davis" wrote in message
0.80...

Take it up with Mike Combs. He's the one who sees benevolent
billionaires building space colonies, not me.

Jim, you are misrepresenting what I said. I clearly said that I expect
orbital habitats will be built by large international corporations building
large numbers of SPS in order to house the workers. I merely implied that
there might be more than one revenue stream in the mix, and that some very
small minority of residents might have paid their own way, even toward the
beginning of the project.

To be very clear about what I foresee, I see space-oriented billionaires as
primarily the second generation of space settlers, and most certainly not as
the ones for whom space settlements were built in the first place, nor even
as the most significant group of space settlers.

--


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

Oh, I found the Orion reference that I was looking for:


http://www.angelfire.com/stars2/projectorion/EPPP.html

-- Larry



On Tue, 30 May 2006, Larry Gales wrote:

Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 23:54:09 -0700
From: Larry Gales
Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
Subject: Mars colonization versus Stanford Torus


On Tue, 30 May 2006, Paul F. Dietz wrote:

Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 20:38:54 -0500
From: Paul F. Dietz
Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
Subject: Mars colonization versus Stanford Torus

Mike Combs wrote:

Could be. My only observation there is that when you compare our
knowledge
of rocketry with our knowledge of how our own brains work, I still
consider
it likely we'll be to a High Frontier future before seeing a post-human
future. But nobody could rule out the possibility of the converse.

I conclude the opposite. Look at the rate of increase in our knowledge
of how brains work, and the rate of improvement in the capacity of
information processing devices, vs. the rate of improvement in rockets.

Paul

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However, a deep space version of Orion (one that never operates less than
several hundred thousand miles from earth -- perhaps parked around L5 --
and which would eliminate the problems of nuclear fallout and EMP which
killed the original Orion) appears to be well within our abilities and
would represent a truly prodigous increase in rocket capability. Of course
it probably won't be built in the near future but not because
can't be built. Such Orion vehicles could move 500,000 tons of material at
a time from asteroids such as Nereus to L5 to build O'Neill colonies.


-- Larry

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