Thread: Space Colonies

I've heard that O'Neil cylinders can be created so that people can live in space but the reason that they havent been made yet is because of the very large amount of money it would take to make it and ship it out to space.

what do you guys think?
pour all our money into this so that humans can start expanding of Earth?

your thoughts

i need more info on the O'Neil cylinders before i can pass judgment please post a link to them.

Wikipedia, as always a useful first stop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder

NASA's support site for their annual Space Settlement Contest for schoolchildren, which includes items by O'Neill
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Educat...EvolutionBook/

Amazon for information on O'Neill's book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-.../dp/189652267X

Or there are 467,000 entries to be found by googling O'Neill colonies.

Sending structural material up against gravity is astronomically expensive. I'm convinced the most affordable structural material is ice/water already in space.

We don’t have to “pour all our money into this”. Gradually an infrastructure will be created that will enable construction of O’Neil cylinders.
Space tourism may grow from simply orbiting the earth to actually staying in an orbital hotel. The ISS would have little in common with these hotels. The rich would be the first clientele (there are nine million millionaires in the U.S. alone), but someone would have to actually work in these hotels and quarters for long-term resident staff would have to be sufficient to sustain life on a permanent basis. This is because the moment you enter orbit, even in a spacesuit, your body starts to atrophy and die. Your heart and other muscles need gravity. Radiation is a constant hazard. An O’Neil cylinder can mimic gravity by spinning and provide a safe Earth-like environment.
Another space industry that is possible would be large solar satellites that collect sunlight and convert up to 30% into electricity that can be beamed to Earth as harmless microwaves. These too would require a workforce to construct and maintain. Most of the material can be mined on the Moon and shot into orbit by automated mass drivers that use electrical current to accelerate the ore along a rail.
As more and more people work and live in space, the expense of building in space will decrease as space industries develop to be independent of the Earth. The virtually endless energy from the Sun can be converted into electricity or used to smelt ore. The Moon or asteroids would provide sufficient building materials. Plans exist for a construction schedule that could house the entire Earth’s population in space habitats in less than a century.

Originally Posted by Pong

Sending structural material up against gravity is astronomically expensive. I'm convinced the most affordable structural material is ice/water already in space.

I'm more into the idea of building them from ordinary materials like steel, but mining it from the Moon instead of Earth.

Anything u build from materials on the moon won't be very hard to get into orbit from there.

I think the time of spacetravel is not yet reached, instead we sould focus on researching new technologies of defying gravity.
I agree with kojax, a lunar base, ignoring the immense cost, is still something worth doing.