[ExI] Why no space colonies or lunar bases? was Mooon.

[Stefano Vaj]

On 23 July 2011 03:06, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:

> So why not bring up Orion and its relative clean variants for putting large
> payloads in GEO or on the moon?
>

Yes, this is my ritual, but not rhetorical ,question in this context.

Sure, Orion Project vehicles could damage to an extent the terrestrian
ecological system or increase the cancer ration by 0,0...03% per year,
albeit much less, I suspect, than many other things we do as a matter of
routine.

But even if this is true, the overall cost-return balance of Project Orion
vehicles might change dramatically if they were adopted not as a
final-and-forever solution, but simply as a "bootstrapping" technology.

Let us say for instance that they can be used for once to establish a source
of abundant, cheap energy (or other resources, even though I suspect that
energy is the only one that really matters). Maintenance and development
thereof might be subsequently sustained with the very energy it produces,
eg, in the form of hydrogen.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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