Orbital Colony Discussion thread.

[NSEP]

Spoiler

A space habitat (also called a space colony, space settlement, orbital habitat, orbital settlement or orbital colony) is a type of space station, intended as a permanent settlement rather than as a simple way-station or other specialized facility. No space habitat has been constructed yet, but many design proposals, with varying degrees of realism, have come both from engineers and from science-fiction authors.

This thread is for the discussion of Space Habitats/Space Colony/Space Settlement/You know the drill.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat

Edited February 6, 2018 by NSEP

[Nibb31]

Where is that definition from?

A habitat is something that can be lived in. The ISS definitely is a space habitat by any accepted definition of habitat.

[NSEP]

55 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

Where is that definition from?

Wikipedia. I should probably change the title. Habitat is not a good name, i understand the confusion.

[sevenperforce]

I've toyed with the idea before.

In order for permanent LEO colonization to happen, there has to be a reason for it. You need an economic forcing function. Try as I might, I've never been able to come up with a reason why it would be more suitable to live in space than to live on Earth.

Overpopulation? Nope. Yes, overpopulation is a problem, but it is a problem because of consumption, not because of physical space. The entire world population could live comfortably in a single city the size of the United Kingdom, if I recall correctly, but the world population consumes more food and other resources than its arable land can produce. Moving population off-world doesn't help unless the colony is totally self-sufficient and consumes nothing from Earth, which might be possible in the long-run but enough of a short-term solution to find a forcing function here.

Labor? It's impossible that any orbital colony would initially be a cheaper place to live than Earth, so the only way to have labor-in-space close economically would be if something very lucrative was being produced in space. However, it would have to be something that only humans could produce. I, for one, can't think of anything that fits that bill. Sure, there are a lot of Earth-economically valuable things that could be produced in space: intellectual property, entertainment, media, legal research, and a thousand other things...but if they can also be produced on Earth, what's the incentive to do it from space? There are certain things that could theoretically only be produced in space, like certain types of crystals that require microgravity to grow, or other manufacturing systems, but anything like that could be done via telepresence and robotics far more cheaply than by squishy humans.

Tourism? There aren't nearly enough rich people who want to live in space to finance a whole space colony.

Entertainment/reality TV? Sad to say, this is probably the only option which comes close to being a potential fit, but it's a huge investment to start up, and an even bigger gamble. You'd need very deep pockets and a conviction that the viewing public would have more long-term interest in watching Big Brother In Space (or Survivor In Space or The Real Space or Desperate Spacewives or whatever else) than they would in watching the on-Earth equivalent. Successful reality TV is less about the location and more about selecting the ideal personalities and selectively editing the footage to tell a riveting story.

What about expat/refugee/anarchy/libertine stuff? Space would certainly be a good place to escape perceived government control. However, the economic forcing function still comes into play. Money is power; if you have enough money to finance a space colony, you have enough money to change the things you do not like in the world.

All that being said...if at any point living in space became economically viable, there's a very good chance of an immediate feedback mechanism kicking in.

[p1t1o]

Ever? Sure. It is a virtual certainty. At the very least for tourism.

Practical? Well, not now, no. But "ever"? Sure at some point it will become trivially easy, at least relative to today.

But in questions with such open-ended timescales, it becomes more of a question of politics (who has the right to build what where?), anthropology (will we still want to do it?) and future history (how long will the human civilisation last?) rather than science, technology or even practicality.

I mean is the Burj Khalifa "practical"? Not really, by a long shot, but there were still tons of reasons to build it. And many other very practical projects have not been built for various other reasons.

[YNM]

I'm all for making human race non-terrestrial, but I guess we'll just be just in the nick of time to flee when that happen I guess.

It's either that or things will collapse waay too soon.

 

13 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

I mean is the Burj Khalifa "practical"? Not really, by a long shot, but there were still tons of reasons to build it.

Burj Khalifa is practical. In the sense that you *can* make one.

Do they really need one ? No.

But do they want one ? Oh darn it yes.

Which is why they're making another one.

Edited February 6, 2018 by YNM

[p1t1o]

18 minutes ago, YNM said:

Burj Khalifa is practical. In the sense that you *can* make one.

I'd call that "plausible" rather than "practical".

Its plausible that we could build an orbital colony now, but the time, expense, difficulty and danger make it impractical.

Its just semantics though, either way the point stands.

[Nibb31]

"practical" is meaningless if it's taken out of context. In the end, it's all about meeting requirements. If your requirements are:

• Status symbol
• Maximum floorspace for minimal footprint
• Take advantage of low labour costs

Then something like Burj Khalifa starts to make practical sense.

Now what are the requirements of your space colony, and why ?

[DerekL1963]

3 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Entertainment/reality TV? Sad to say, this is probably the only option which comes close to being a potential fit, but it's a huge investment to start up, and an even bigger gamble. You'd need very deep pockets and a conviction that the viewing public would have more long-term interest in watching Big Brother In Space (or Survivor In Space or The Real Space or Desperate Spacewives or whatever else) than they would in watching the on-Earth equivalent. Successful reality TV is less about the location and more about selecting the ideal personalities and selectively editing the footage to tell a riveting story.

Reality TV won't even come close to financing any kind of space colony.  A show that rakes in ten times the cash per episode of a show ten times the size of the current largest hits...  wouldn't even pay the interest on the interest.
 

3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I mean is the Burj Khalifa "practical"?

Certainly.   It's well within the realm of engineering practicality.  Financially, it was well within the realm of practicality at the time of planning and construction - subsequent events beyond the control of the owners/financiers however rendered it marginal.

I mean, it sounds like you're constructing an argument that we should build a space colony regardless of "practicality"...  but really you're playing silly semantic games.

[Thor Wotansen]

I honestly think it's inevitable.  At some point a permanent settlement will be established on the moon for scientific research on the effects of low G on various terrestrial processes like plant growth, gestation and embryonic development, and the human body.  In conjunction with that there will be experiments on in situ resource processing and the viability of producing at least basic materials and systems on site.  This will lead to greater numbers of researchers on site and eventually there will be people on hand for the more mundane tasks involved in running a growing lab and things will go from there and that's just assuming there's not other interests like tourism.

[DerekL1963]

53 minutes ago, Thor Wotansen said:

I honestly think it's inevitable.  At some point a permanent settlement will be established on the moon

Well, duh.  Certainly a permanent settlement is inevitable - Antarctica is practically infested with them.

But a permanent settlement isn't a colony.

[p1t1o]

13 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

Certainly.   It's well within the realm of engineering practicality.  Financially, it was well within the realm of practicality at the time of planning and construction - subsequent events beyond the control of the owners/financiers however rendered it marginal.

I mean, it sounds like you're constructing an argument that we should build a space colony regardless of "practicality"...  but really you're playing silly semantic games.

See my response to YNM where I address that exact point.

[kerbiloid]

1.
The only difference between "ground" and "orbit" is ~10 km/s, i.e. ~50 MJ/kg.
And the orbit is just in 100..200 km up from here.

Say, we want to get up an down like now by car once per day.
Say, we want to do this at a helicopter/plane velocity, i.e. ~300 km/h =100 m/s.
So, the road will take ~100000/100*2 = 2000 s per day.
Gravity loss =2000 * 9.81 ~= 20 000 m/s = 20 km/s.

So, we need ~10 + 20 + tips = 40 km/s per (kg*day) ~0.8 GJ/(kg * day) ~= 10 kW/kg.
Say, a 100 kg human + suit + seat ~= 200 kg.
So, required power = 200 * 10 / 1000 = 2 MW/person.

If put a solar panel near the Mercury orbit and send the energy ith a microwave beam, then 2*10⁶/1370 * 0.387² =  220 m² = 15x15 m.

Or 2 MW = 3*10^-6 g of ³He per day.

So, once the humanity receives ~2..3 MW/person limit the difference between "ground" and "orbital" will be dissolved.

 

2.
Some of the future Panhuman Scattered Overmind ganglia _{(aka "servers", "data centers")} will be orbital.
This follows as from p.1, so from simple routine redundancy requirements.
Some of the orbital ganglia will be equipped with a pack of cyber-augmented organic semi-autonomous serving bodies (former "humans") and a life support system for them.
(An Orb Gang (from Orbital Ganglion), or just gangsters.)
You may name this "habitat" if you wish, anyway It doesn't care.

[Bill Phil]

OP: You should link to more articles about this topic. 

Here is a pretty good one:

http://www.nss.org/settlement/physicstoday.htm

[justidutch]

Here's some more interesting articles; I've been interested in this for a while now.  My overall take is that once we figure out how to manufacture/create sheets of buckminsterfullerene, structures in space will become way more feasible.  

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Ring_(habitat) 

http://www.iase.cc/openair.htm 

http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nano4/mckendreePaper.html 

 

[DDE]

On ‎06‎.‎02‎.‎2018 at 7:15 PM, YNM said:

Which is why they're making another one.

That one's really interesting.

The project around it risks starting a war with Egypt because the Saudis don't quite own some parts of the land this entirely new city-state is to stand on.

Also, they haven't made any use of the previous one.