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Living in Space
| Article
# : |
20229 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
2,148 Words |
| Author
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Gerard K. O'Neill
Gerard K. O'Neill is president of the Space Studies Institute
in Princeton, New Jersey, which supports engineering research
in space development. He has authored four books, one of
which, The High Frontier, won the Phi Beta Kappa science Book
Award. He is professor emeritus of physics at Princeton
University. |
People move to new frontiers for better economic opportunity, to escape political or religious oppression, or to live in better or more exciting surroundings. All three reasons, but especially the first, are likely to motivate the early settlers of space. Their jobs will be in an industry that must be located in space itself to be economically viable. There may be only one such industry initially, but it could become so large as to require a substantial population of highly educated workers in space together with their families. That industry would build solar power satellites for supplying clean energy to Earth.
Space has strong advantages over the surface of moons or of other planets as the site for location of human habitats (colonies.) In space we can build habitats that are large in scale--far larger than could be built on a planet, because those structures will not have to withstand gravity. But they can rotate, to provide for their inhabitants internal gravity equal to Earth's norm, for which we have evolved over millennia. A space habitat will be a spherical shell of metal and glass enclosing a normal, breathable atmosphere--something that does not exist on any planet other than Earth.
In space, clear of the shadow of a moon or planet, solar energy can be used full-time for every energy need, from climate control to the growing of food crops, grass, trees, and decorative flowers. Like outposts on the surfaces of the Moon, or Mars, space habitats will need protection against cosmic rays. That will be obtained by enclosing each rotating, spherical habitat in an outer shell, not in contact with the rotating structure. The shell will be made up of silicates, the waste slag from the industries in space that will use lunar materials. It will be thick enough to shield the interior from cosmic rays as effectively as Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field do.
With in the strengths of ordinary materials, space habitats could be very large indeed: several miles in diameter. But the early ones will be much smaller, as little as hundred meters across, and will be designed for a few hundred inhabitants.
Extending the range
Among the many reasons for extending the human ecological range to habitats in free space rather than to the surface an existing body is the potential land area available in the long term. There is enough "leftover" material in the asteroid belt to build space colonies with a total land area several thousand times
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