Space Colonization Options (Orbiting Stations, planets/moons)

[valkyrie013]

Saw this,
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/astrophysicist-believes-in-megasatellite-habitats-around-ceres

Some scientist says its better to build a string of stations around Ceres than to colonize the Moon or Mars.
I don't agree, we might get out there eventually, but why go so far? We can build stations in earth orbit, probably in the Lagrange points, Ala Gundam and other shows. Bring asteroids/comets to those Lagrange points as supply material, but the idea of going ALL the way out there is just stupid at this point.

Now, say in 100 years ( realistic, we thought we'd have moon colonies by 2001 in the 60's.. yeah.. was going to say 50 years, but our malaise lately on space travel just stretches timelines) we might have some colony's in the asteroid field for people that are out there mining asteroids, or seting them up to be de orbited to an Earth orbit for materials. By that time maybe have some better options of propulsion for in system flight.

So, to me out next step from a small moon colony, which unless we get some gravity technology will only be a temporary place to visit, would be rotating space colonies in Earth orbit. Could start with a Stanford Tarus, with the eventuall goal of a large O'neill cylinder ( open or closed). As the population keeps ticking up, we need SOMETHING to off load some people.

Thoughts??

 

[XCV330]

I agree, in-orbit colonies are the way to go. Ceres has one thing the moon doesn't have. It has a LOT of water. The moon may have some, but not a lot, and what it does have might get exhausted quickly.

When O'Neill wrote The High Frontier he didn't factor in lunar ice, since nothing was known about it (and very little still is), so trucking ice in from the asteroids was always going to be part of the economy of an off world society.

Mars might be nice to visit for awhile, like on an extended holiday, but I just don't see the point of trying to really settle and terraform it. I don't see the point of terraforming at all, really. If we had the technology to terraform, we might want to use that first on fixing the damage we've done to our own planet. with orbital habitats, you can build your climate as needed.

I do think Venusian cloud settlements could be the caveat to that. I could imagine vast floating farming communities in the Venusian sky.It might be very pleasant.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Video from these guys.......

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

We'll see if they actually have any hardware ready to go.

Why can't we just build a collection of stations around Earth and join them all together to create a permanent presence in space?

 

[StarCruiser]

Mostly structural and cost issues.

The cost to build a continuous space "ring" around the Earth (at any decent altitude) would be incredible. The structural issues would also be complex and material cost would be enormous.

Would it be possible in a few hundreds years? Maybe...

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

James Clerk Maxwell showed in 1856 that a solid ring structure in orbit around a body such as Saturn or Earth in the centre of the ring is dynamically unstable. It will tend to crash into the body that it's orbiting unless constantly corrected. In fact, it would be better for the ring not to have much, if any, orbital velocity as it doesn't achieve anything anyway other than the centripetal force cancelling the gravitational force to produce weightlessness. Just station keeping would be necessary. Perhaps give the ring sufficient speed for a given point on it to appear stationary with respect to the surface of the Earth. The effective weight of anyone standing on the upper surface of the ring would then be reduced by roughly a sixteenth of that at sea level. Internal tension in the ring would also be reduced but we're not talking about a Ringworld-scale ring (2 AU diameter) so it's not much of an issue anyway.

Ringworld | Larry Niven Wiki | Fandom

 

[Santaman]

Personally I'd find a big nickel/iron asteroid, make it spin and dig out a ring shaped tunnel, tadaa instant big ass humanity saving space vault, use the surface for solar collectors and the like and you're pretty much set.

 

[XCV330]

Personally I'd find a big nickel/iron asteroid, make it spin and dig out a ring shaped tunnel, tadaa instant big ass humanity saving space vault, use the surface for solar collectors and the like and you're pretty much set.

and the work could be started on that long before people were ready to move aboard.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Probably use robots to do most of the work.

 

[Santaman]

Yeah, I think we're far enough with tech that machines can do the heavy hauling, also, nickel/iron alloys can be refined a little and used as building material as well.
These asteroids, if big enough, would also allow for sufficient radiation protection just by the thickness of the material surrounding the ring, depending on where you put a colony like this it could be a jumping board to other places in the solar system.

 

[Imaus]

I don't think we're going to have 'miners'. We'll have techies out there who might fix the machines, and some medical and admin personnel for them, but that's about it.

Space is not the new world. There is little need for explorers, conquistadors, purveyors, gold-rushers. Settlers, technicians, engineers, doctors, maybe a few scientists, and admin personnel, yes. That's the main difference.

And with that in mind, a orbital thus has no real reason to exist, unless you want a dedicated colony somewhere. A few blow-up and plop-down modules on a asteroid or a lego-like modular station is often enough to oversee a horde of robots and drones doing their thing, which could be moved or abandoned easily when the ore dries up. If they even care to do that, if you lose a few robots, so what - just launch a few more, get the ore drops going, no onsite personnel needed.

Repeat etc, etc.

I also think it's going to be a long, long time before mankind is rich enough and technologically capable enough for smaller groups to pack up and go. I think it WILL happen, just not as soon as, say, Khan doing it. The first Mars bases will be little more than glorified medical and science labs for a long time, and hopefully we decide to turn the moon into a testbed site for stuff like extraplanetary mining and refinement and manufacturing and space elevators and shielding and all that, but even then I'll be surprised if it grows up to be anything more than a international scientific testbed. Tourism will be a small accessible blip but not many people will choose to stay out there. At least for the next hundred, two hundred years.

 

[XCV330]

Humanity has been doing what its doing for as long as it has for two basic reasons, to survive. And since the agrilcultural revolution, the new extra reason: someone else told you to or they wont let you survive.

Why settle space? Why not. An artificial economy is no more real than any other. If we can build worlds as we see fit, why not go there and attempt it. Earth is a dump and it's not going to get much better any time soon. The sooner we move our manufacturing, resource gathering, and long term, even farming, off world and let the earth go wild, the better.

And I don't think we need centuries to do so. This is the century it starts happening.

 

[valkyrie013]

Read somewhere of melting an asteroid interior and blowing it up like a balloon .. Perfect sphere.

With some stories, like Gundam, half the population is in space colonies orbiting earth. One of the series explanation is that we screwed the Earth up, and kicked most of the population off for that reason.

We'll eventually get things like space colonies, space elevators etc. Probably by shere will of a few visionaries like Elon Musk and others.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Personally I'd find a big nickel/iron asteroid, make it spin and dig out a ring shaped tunnel, tadaa instant big ass humanity saving space vault, use the surface for solar collectors and the like and you're pretty much set.

Our very own Yolanda. Just don't put an AI onboard that goes nuts.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Probably by sheer will of a few visionaries like Elon Musk and others.

Elon Musk always reminds me of a wannabe Bond villain such as Hugo Drax. I don't think he's bought his own volcanic island like Larry Ellison has though.

 

[publiusr]

He launched Falcon one off an island

Now he is going to oil derricks
Stromberg one and Stromberg two.

Call starship the Liparus

On development
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/202...s-of-indifferently-spacefaring-civilizations/

Some talk about stable moons here
https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/...715176-two-moons-in-stable-orbits-for-fiction

Tidal force calculator
https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1360312100

Asteroid mining database
https://www.universetoday.com/161546/want-to-be-an-asteroid-miner-theres-a-database-for-that/

 

[Santaman]

Humanity has been doing what its doing for as long as it has for two basic reasons, to survive. And since the agrilcultural revolution, the new extra reason: someone else told you to or they wont let you survive.

Why settle space? Why not. An artificial economy is no more real than any other. If we can build worlds as we see fit, why not go there and attempt it. Earth is a dump and it's not going to get much better any time soon. The sooner we move our manufacturing, resource gathering, and long term, even farming, off world and let the earth go wild, the better.

And I don't think we need centuries to do so. This is the century it starts happening.

As for the asteroid idea, well, they're around anyhow, they already are a stockpile of building materials and they're far less fragile than the stuff we usually build, if you can colonize a big one and have it rotate for arteficial gravity then you've got something that can endure for a looong time which I think is useful as new eggbasket so if Earth would go boom then you've got at least a space colony, as for planets, really hard to adjust gravity for our needs, you want a Earth 2 then you'd need to catapult Venus into a better orbit, strip most of the dense atmosphere off of it and then do all kinds of terraforming magic we can't do anyway so... space habitats is the way to go and yeah I agree, get on with it damnit!

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

He launched Falcon one off an island

Now he is going to oil derricks
Stromberg one and Stromberg two.

Call starship the Liparus

Only that doesn't work because he's a fan of The Culture series and wouldn't do that.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Lots to choose from:

List of spacecraft | The Culture Wiki | Fandom

 

[XCV330]

one option for a first step solution to a 1st generation space habitat still would involve the use of some sort of mass driver for lunar regolith. it would probably be too difficult to precisely aim nonstop for those precious stable frozen orbits about the moon, so a means to get them to a suitable lagrange point would be paramount. But in the end, it's all about the simplicity and economics of doing it.

Lunar surface to Low-Lunar Orbit is about (and I may be off here. i am going off of some old Apollo data on the LEM ascent stage) 3.0 km/s -ish. Wasn't a TON of margin on those things, but we are talking about bulk material. I wonder if artillery in vacuum could actually hit those numbers on a parabollic trajectory leading into an unguided orbit a-la Explorer I, ready to be picked up and transferred by tugs. If not, rail guns could do so. Either way, the O'neillian idea of shooting regolith into orbit is alive and well. Using solar furnaces, that material can be extruded into the metals and glass (with some work) needed to a thick walled rad shielded rotating ring made of simple cylinder sections. It would not be as pretty as Island I or Kapala One of any of the other lead designs, but it could be done fairly rapidly. And most likely long term it would be abandoned for better residences, but it could be a safe place to live for the first decades, and work for the people who would be living up there maintaining the automated systems. Who needs a 40 hour work week? Society can invent itself, to some degree up there.

Now ice, nitrogen, some of the other volatiles you can't get on the moon, that has to come from somewhere, and the NEA's are the prime early mining areas for that.

 

[Maccyj571086]

I hope with the way technology is going we all band together to really explore and develope, there is so much out there we don't know and an abundance of materials we can utilise which would allow us all to further humanity. Why not do them all, moon bases, space stations, we will need them all and they allow us to step out and settle in new areas and properly explore.