Well. A coupla interesting things.
It’s a bit depressing – on the face of it – that Obama has cancelled Constellation – the open-ended project stream that would have resulted at some point with men on Mars, but reading between the lines, it’s not so bad. There will be a move more to privatised companies doing the lift bit into space and supposedly a move to find more efficient means of getting to Mars (propulsion-wise). I do find the tone of the speech (?) or document by the Mars Director a little false though and I am not sure how many of their employees will buy into the ‘mood’.
What worried me most is that, as some commentators have pointed out, for many of us, a part of our hope in life is carried by NASA projects. This may be dubious in that NASA was founded on a combination of aeronautics research in the USA and Nazi scientists at the end of WWII but at least casting your eyes upwards to the stars provides some kind of common frontier – a reason to ‘collaborate’ rather than fight.
Without this we are in danger of becoming a species ‘looking inwards’ and this introversion, I think, seems to correspond with periods of increased conflict. Continue reading “NASA’s Project Constellation cancelled” →

So, I am starting to research the sci-fi story and very pleasant it is too. I was thinking about locations for the various parts of the story and remembered those ‘big wheels’ from the 60s and 70s – those things that float in space and look really good from the inside. I found out that the most popular one is called the ‘Stanford Torus’.

You get views like the one below. It all looks quite utopian but of course it wouldn’t be.
Anyway I then found that in actual fact, whereas I thought these were simply figments of sci-fi writers’ minds in those days, NASA did do quite a detailed study about their viability (NASA content link no longer available).

It makes interesting reading. For one thing, the cost would be astronomical – 50Bn in those days. I am not sure what that is now but I would guess at least 4 times that – so 200Bn. At first I thought – well who would fund this and why was NASA even thinking seriously about it? Perhaps, since the Cold War was still on, they were thinking about evacuating people. But actually it’s not that much. I found out yesterday that a certain City’s banks are preparing to pay out 50Bn in bonuses this year.

Now I need to start thinking about what life would be like on one of these colonies and what sort of political environment would it be. It will be interesting to think it through.

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