Gerald O'Neil and space travel

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A plan already exists to build a city in space which could house several hundred thousand inhabitants and boast an environment identical to Earths. This city is part of what will become a space colony orbiting the moon. The colony will have air and water, lakes and mountains. If this project becomes a reality, people born in the space colony can perhaps one day take a vacation on Earth.

The idea of creating a space colony where mankind could live in an artificial city was first proposed by Gerard K. ONeil. ONeil proposed the project soon after astronauts from the Apollo Project landed on the Moon in 16. When scientists gathered together to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to discuss ONeils plan, they decided the project was feasible and even came up with an idea about how the colony could be built. The scientists were influenced by the world population problem, then already topping 4 billion and estimated to reach over 0 billion within 100 years. The scientists believed that if the worlds population continued to grow at the same rate there would not be enough food or resources to cope.

Location and Designs

A space colony is seen as one of the most important options available to the continuation of mankind in the future. Prior to 176, the most helpful perturbations, in the best-studied orbits, were thought to involve what are called libration points or Lagrangian points. They are locations where a spacecraft can be placed so it will always remain in the same position with respect to the earth and the moon and the gravity of the Earth and Moon is balanced. The French Mathematician Lagrange showed in 177 that there are five such points. Three of them lie on a line connecting the earth and moon; these are L1, L, and L. They are unstable. The other two are L4 and L5. They lie at equal distances from earth and the moon in the moon's orbit, forming equilateral triangles with Earth and the moon. In the earth-moon system, these points are stable. L5 was decided upon to be the location of the first space colony.

The actual look of the colony is dictated by the needs which the colony must meet. If people are to live in a space colony, they will need an environment similar to Earths. The atmospherical structure, air pressure and temperature must be similar. Gravity should also be like that on Earth. The colony must rotate to create artificial gravity, in the sense of a 'down' toward which they will fall. This is not real gravity of course, but is centrifugal force. Artificial gravity will not be a precisely identical substitute for the real thing, but it will be good enough. It is desirable to make the colony as comfortable and earth like as possible. Space colony designers have tended to agree that the colony should provide normal Earth gravity, one g. This requires a limit to be put on the allowable rotation rate. At first O'Neil believed that the limit would be three rpm (revolutions per minute) to suit his cylindrical colony with petal shaped mirrors, its tracking of the sun, its reliance on solar energy, and its property of being a warm habitat for life in the cold of space (characteristics reflected in its name Sunflower).

A more advantageous design was later thought of, with a one rpm limit. The Stanford Torus space colony, an enormous inner tube with the tube 400 feet wide and bent into a circle with a circumference of some 4 miles. In the 170s, NASA scientists used this plan to formulate a means to build the colony. According to their plan, light would be provided by a massive reflective mirror that would shine the sunrays into the colony. The living quarters would be a donut-shaped area. It was the lightest design yet studied and offered the possibility of making effective use of interior space since there could be terraces for homes and agriculture. The colonists would have unobstructed lines of sight of half a mile or more. The colony would also contain areas for agriculture, animals and plants and would weigh about 10 million tons. The estimated cost of the project at the time it was devised was about 50 billion dollars and was calculated to take about 0 years to build. Without the support of the worlds people, such a massive project will never become a reality.

Mining the Moon It would be more efficient to bring materials from the Moon to create the space colony

If the space colony was to be built at a point between the Earth and the Moon, it is thought better to transport the necessary building materials from the Moon. The lunar gravity is only one-sixth that of the Earth and rockets taking off from there would require less fuel. Even before O'Neil and others suggested the use of lunar materials as building blocks for colonies at L5, other scientists argued for similar colonies on the moon. As it happens, the moon itself provides a wealth of minerals, some of which are already becoming increasingly hard to mine on earth.

The fundamental idea of space colonisation is the use of lunar and other extraterrestrial resources. With only the resources of Earth, there is no hope of building the colonies. With the resources of the moon, space colonies may soon become inevitable. The lunar rocks are not rich ores, but they are adequate. They contain sources of aluminium. Lunar rocks also contain silica- on earth a useless waste product, but of value in space. To build the colony, about 1 million tons of this rock must be shipped each year from the moon into space. The task will be the project of a group of perhaps 100 people the moon miners. Their task will to gather the necessary lunar material and to launch it into space where it can be caught. To do the first they will have bulldozers and power shovels built to operate in the lunar vacuum. To do the second they will build a device called a mass driver.

The mass driver will be an electrically driven launcher, a sort of electromagnetic catapult. It will accelerate masses of lunar material to escape velocity, 1.5 miles per second. There masses are to be launched, one or two per second, day in day out, indefinitely. They will fly out into space, curving in the moon's gravity and slowing down as they go outward. Two days after the launch they will reach the catching point, 40,000 miles above the lunar far side. There they will be intercepted. Nothing like the mass driver has been built yet. Nevertheless, it rests upon such long-understood principles, such as well-established engineering designs, that already can be described in detail. There designs have been prepared for use in high speed trains. For a number of years there has bee considerable interest in building railroads which could compete for speed with airliners. In recent years, most attention has been directed to magnetic levitation and to propulsion by linear electric motors. It is this technology which will serve to build the mass driver.

One of the early tasks in the space colonisation effort will be the building of the lunar base. Only when this is functioning properly will it be possible to begin construction on the space colony.

Terraforming Changing bodies in the Solar System to make them inhabitable

With a number of people concerned about the possible failure of a space colony, the suggestion of terraforming arose. Terraforming first became a topic of discussion in 161 after Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist at California Polytechnic, proposed transforming Venus to make it inhabitable. In our Solar System, there are several planets and satellites that are believed capable of supporting life. Terraforming would require to change planetary environment entirely.

If solar energy can be adequately harnessed it would hold the key to the success of terraforming. Planets like Mars and Venus currently have environments that are quite different to Earths. Looking at these two planets shows that Venus is a red-hot, high-pressured, planet while Mars is cold and dry. These problems are caused by the planet mass and how much of solar energy they receive. As such, the environments of these planets are directly affected by the Sun. Carrying solar energy to cooler planets and removing it from hotter ones is the basis behind the idea of terraforming.

As a result of the probes to Mars, a number of detailed terraforming projects have sprung up. There are two ways that Mars could be terraformed. One would be to increase the amount of sunrays absorbed into the planet, thus raising its temperature. The other way to terraform the planet would have sunrays absorbed by black, carbon objects on the surface. The objects would be fractured and distributed all over the planet, where they could absorb the Suns rays and heat Mars.

Introducing algae has also been discussed as a possible way to change Mars environment. Algae helped give the Earth oxygen, changed its environment and helped maintain it. If Mars can be heated and water maintained in liquid form, bacteria carried to the planet would perhaps help to create and increase the amount of oxygen available there. Some genetic engineers are trying to change algae so that they would be able to survive and thrive on Mars.

Along with Mars, Venus has been proposed as another site for possible terraforming. To make Venus inhabitable, the amount of energy it receives from the Sun would have to be reduced, its carbon dioxide eliminated, its rotation speed increased and water introduced to its surface. Terraforming either Mars or Venus would be a gigantic project. While we may have the technical ability to perform such a project, it seems that the first place that man progresses into space is more likely to be Mars than Venus.

Hazards to life on the Space Colony some people have expressed misgivings about ONeils plan

The space colony is the largest plan for creating an area for man to live in space. However, some people have expressed misgivings about ONeils plan. Mostly, they doubt the system will really be able to become self-supporting merely by the power of the people and creatures living in it and whether an actual living environment can be set up and maintained. In short, some people worry that those living in a space colony would be in open space, well away from the Earth, living under completely different conditions and subjected to life influenced by strong cosmic waves.

There would be some dangers in the colony. The colonists would have to take strong precautions against fire since it could knock out machinery essential for survival. But enough safeguards, including duplication of key equipment, could be built into the system to reduce the risks. Meteoroids might also be an occasional hazard, but an extremely small one. Most meteoroids are microscopic in size and could not penetrate the colony's tough skin. If the occasional rock did crash through a window, there would be no real cause for alarm. It would take at least a day or so for the colony to lose its atmosphere, giving repair crews plenty of time to fix the problem. But the chances of such a hit are very small; about once in ten million years. In any case getting hit by a moderate sized meteoroid would probably be more like being struck with an easily pulverised snowball than with a hard rock.

Cosmic rays would represent a somewhat greater danger, but the colony's heavy shielding and atmosphere should provide adequate protection under normal conditions. If the flow of cosmic rays suddenly become more intensive the colonists could retreat to special chambers with heavy walls until the menace passed.

There is a chance that the cylinder's artificial gravity might trouble some people. If the colony's rotation is too rapid, it will intensify the Coriolis force and possibly disturb the body's sense of balance. The result might be a space version of sea-sickness characterised by dizziness and nausea. There might also be more subtle long term damage that might affect the ability of colonists to cope with Earth's gravity and environment, assuming they wanted to return occasionally or even quit space altogether.

In any case, whatever the hazards might be, they would be offset by certain overwhelming advantages. Unlike earth, the colony would not experience divesting earthquakes or hurricanes or volcanic eruptions, all of which cost millions of lives over the centuries. In addition, slowly but inevitably Earth would recover from the assaults of the past. Rivers and the air would become clean again; dead lakes would spring back to life. Threatened animal species like the great whales might survive. Indeed, as more people decided to make homes for themselves in space indeed, industrial pollution and other ecological ravages would decline and Earth would become in O'Neil's view, a worldwide park, a beautiful place to visit for a vacation.

Colonies in Space the Next Giant Leap, Golden, Frederic 177

Colonies in Space, T.A Heppenheimer 177

The High Frontier, G.K. O'Neil, 175

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