Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 6255397" data-attributes="member: 13107">I thought the blockers for a moon colony, or for a colony in space, was more of the sort of getting tech that seems like it will work, to actually work, and, that there were major problems of maintaining health, and of achieving self sustainability.&nbsp; I'd accept &quot;close&quot; to self sufficient to be good enough for a start.That is: Large scale spinning habitats in one of Earth's Lagrange points.&nbsp; Mass drivers on the moon to boost raw material to those points.&nbsp; Rabbits and hydroponics for food.&nbsp; The moon is a pretty lousy target for habitation.&nbsp; We would want a base on the moon as a supply of raw material, as a much cheaper alternative to boosting material out of Earth's much deeper well.&nbsp; A problem there is whether there are sufficient volatiles on the moon to avoid having to bring that from Earth.&nbsp; The leading and trailing lagrange (trojan) points are the places for near-Earth habitats.But, even questions like how big does the habitat need to be are unanswered: Too small and folks get motion sickness.&nbsp; Large enough may be miles wide.&nbsp; There are big unanswered questions about building close to 100% recycling environments.&nbsp; The dome experiment that was tried failed miserably, and I'm not aware of any new attempts.&nbsp; I'm imagining that there are huge technical problems still be solved, some which can predict, and others which have yet to discover.So probably we can put habitats in space.&nbsp; But, as it seems to me, not definitely.Thx!TomB</blockquote>

[QUOTE="tomBitonti, post: 6255397, member: 13107"] I thought the blockers for a moon colony, or for a colony in space, was more of the sort of getting tech that [i]seems[/i] like it will work, to actually work, and, that there were major problems of maintaining health, and of achieving self sustainability. I'd accept "close" to self sufficient to be good enough for a start. That is: Large scale spinning habitats in one of Earth's Lagrange points. Mass drivers on the moon to boost raw material to those points. Rabbits and hydroponics for food. The moon is a pretty lousy target for habitation. We would want a base on the moon as a supply of raw material, as a much cheaper alternative to boosting material out of Earth's much deeper well. A problem there is whether there are sufficient volatiles on the moon to avoid having to bring that from Earth. The leading and trailing lagrange (trojan) points are the places for near-Earth habitats. But, even questions like how big does the habitat need to be are unanswered: Too small and folks get motion sickness. Large enough may be miles wide. There are big unanswered questions about building close to 100% recycling environments. The dome experiment that was tried failed miserably, and I'm not aware of any new attempts. I'm imagining that there are [i]huge[/i] technical problems still be solved, some which can predict, and others which have yet to discover. So [i]probably[/i] we can put habitats in space. But, as it seems to me, not [i]definitely[/i]. Thx! TomB [/QUOTE]

Verification