NASA Moon Plans Are a Disappointment

NASA current plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and to create a lunar gateway (a mini-ISS space station) in lunar orbit would be a disappointment.

If this happens it means that the Space Launch System rocket was not canceled and another $20 plus billion was spent on an outdated and expensive rocket. It also means that a space station would be built for tens of billions of dollars that does not rotate to simulate gravity and which has an internal volume several times less than a SpaceX Starship.

The NASA 2019 justification for the gateway and SLS is that the Space Launch System (SLS) is designed to evolve to the highest mass and volume capacity rocket ever built. There is no feasible means to redesign it or any other heavy left rocket to more transport the lunar landing elements on a single launch by 2024.

If NASA is still able to say this that would mean that the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship with a fully reusable launch capacity of 100 tons is not flying commercially by 2021 as planned.

It means that we do not switch to just leaving a SpaceX Spaceship (the upper stage) with eight times the volume of the lunar gateway for moon bases or for orbiting lunar cyclers or other purposes.

The SpaceX Spaceship has a volume of 1000 cubic meters versus the lunar gateway’s planned 125 cubic meters. The SpaceX spaceship has more volume than the 2016 ISS with 931 cubic meters.

Two SpaceX Spaceships could be tethered together and rotated for simulated gravity.

NASA is also justifying the lunar gateway as support and to develop two to three-year missions to Mars. This would also not be needed with the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. By refueling five or six times, we could have a fully refueled SpaceX Super Heavy Starship at a high earth orbit Lagrange point where it would choose the right time to leave earth orbit with 9-10 meters per second of delta-V to get to Mars in 4-6 months one way. This would be the delta-V that we take off of Earth. Instead of the 2-3 meters per second of delta-V with a final stage Mars mission if we start from Earth without refueling.

74 thoughts on “NASA Moon Plans Are a Disappointment”

  1. It is super-heavy that is the threat to SLS

    Right now, I want SLS to be supported because I want NTRs. If Super-Heavy starts launching hydrogen—then SLS cores will still be used as upper stages for it.

  2. I don’t think Antarctica would have been colonized during the age of exploration, certainly. But the place is chock full of exploitable resources just begging to be mined. It would have been colonized in the last 50 years, the Antarctic treaty wasn’t arrived at because colonization of Antarctica was a purely theoretical prospect.

    It was adopted because the place was starting to look worth taking on.

  3. ‘Antarctica would already be colonized by now, if it weren’t contrary to enforced international agreements to do so.’
    I think it’s the other way round – a handful of Chilean and Argentine children have been born on the Antarctic Peninsular – the Riviera of the Antarctic – as a nationalistic statement with no economic rationale. A couple of isolated settlements on islands south of New Zealand collapsed decades ago, long before the government set about removing the rats and goats and restoring the birdlife. They were just too isolated and hard, and that’s places far less hostile than mainland Antarctica.
    North America wasn’t markedly more hostile to habitation than Europe – it already had people living there. The Bolivian altiplano, though, had a more extreme environment. It took 300 years after the Spanish conquest before a European woman gave birth in the thin air up there. The Incas had had thousands of years to adapt. Orbital and Martian or Lunar environments will have a whole raft of major differences to cope with, and the most difficult, I think, will be psychological.

  4. Errr… pure iron isn’t at all brittle.
    It’s very soft and malleable.
    That still makes it not very useful to make things out of. But the brittle thing is completely wrong.

    Your reference may have been referring to “pig iron” which the stuff that comes out of a blast furnace where you feed iron ore and coke in to get iron. But pig iron isn’t pure iron, it’s actually filled with very high carbon content plus heaps of other impurities. It’s brittle precisely because it isn’t pure.

  5. Spacex need to start building Starship components in Alabama, it’s just good business.
    What the local pork loses from less SLS work they gain from new Starship business.

  6. Yes, and at the time North America was colonized, Europe was a much nicer place to live, physically. So, why did people do it?

    Because colonization is driven by the political/social environment, not the physical.

    The overwhelming attraction of off-Earth is that it offers the potential to get away from the PEOPLE on Earth.

    Antarctica would already be colonized by now, if it weren’t contrary to enforced international agreements to do so. The major powers couldn’t agree how to divvy it up, so they agreed nobody would get it.

  7. Starship is presumably designed to do great with force coming up from its base – but it seems unlikely you could simply attach a tether to the nose or the tail (or the sides) and spin for gravity without it coming apart.

    Maybe you could run two tethers to opposite sides of the base of each ship, and ‘up’ along the ships, with a stabilizing cable run from each cable to each ship’s nose to hold it vertical.

    Oscillations are another big factor to consider, especially since the tethers aren’t likely to be perfectly inelastic. Maybe also put a spacer in every dozen meters or so, to reduce the chance that the two main cables somehow twist up like the rubberband on a toy airplane.

    And then there are issues of orbit maintenance in LEO – do you put one rocket at the center of mass, or two side-pointing rockets on each of the Starships, or what? Not to mention questions of how you safely do outside maintenance while spinning.

    These sorts of issues are why we should have been working on developing rotating environments for (maybe 10 of) the past 40 years instead of slowly building yet another Zero-G station out of blocks small enough to be carried up on a winged near-spaceship. Which process NASA is now planning to essentially repeat for a lunar orbital station.

  8. Three ships for artificial gravity. That only two will experience the gravity. Centre one is used for docking with other crafts for supplies to leave or accept crew and etc. To dock to, craft matches the rotation of the centre ship and slowly join together. To send two tethered together near the moon makes it difficult to dock with if they share the middle of the tether as its central spinning point of axis. If two ships go end over end would be to difficult to dock with.

  9. The older I get, the more I see (I’m sure myself too) great ideas become addictive. It is more than just avoidance of the new, it is a personal alarm if a different idea challenges. Once the idea has been passionately accepted. Anyway, that does not seem anything new.
    Two Skylabs!
    Also, military in particular does need this info, just don’t wait for full 0 g science if most of the time will be 1 g. What is a catchy name for 1 g? Spin g?

  10. I sometimes wonder if there’s a reason they’re trying to avoid getting definitive answers. A simple mission to launch a bolo station using two Bigelow modules would be quite easy, and we’ve known for literally decades that we needed to do this test.

  11. Um, actually I’m a mechanical engineer, I do know a fair amount about steel.

    I stand by my point: A foundry on Mars is no less new technology than a foundry on the moon, or in zero g near an asteroid. Different new technology in each case, of course.

    But the availablity of already reduced iron in the case of the Moon and the asteroids would considerably simplify matters compared to Mars. It allows you to skip some seriously energy intensive steps.

  12. I’m in favor of reconfigurable (modular) robots. Why limit yourself to a fixed morphology?
    There are still technical issues to solve, but the same can be said of other options.

  13. I think that’s pretty clearly the case, chiefly because sunlight is a very low entropy source of energy, which means that, in principle, you can push conversion of light into usable energy up to 50% efficiency, or even higher. (Just have to sort the wavelengths and match them to the band gap for highest efficiency.) And the power density of a PV junction is pretty darned high, with much less support material needed in zero G.

    While nuclear energy originates as a very low entropy source, even lower than light, most approaches to converting it to usable energy degrade it terribly, which means the waste heat is both larger per KWH of usable energy, and must be rejected at a fairly low temperature.

    Not a problem on Earth’s surface, especially if you have water at hand. A BIG problem in vacuum, when the efficacy of your radiator scales as T^4.

    Now, in principle you could build a plasma MHD fission reactor that would be terrifyingly efficient and compact. But good luck developing that on an inhabited planet.

    No, I think solar IS the way to go anywhere inside Jupiter’s orbit, so long as you don’t have to worry about being shadowed. (Darn shame about that Philae lander, wouldn’t have happened if it was nuclear.)

    And, as Heinlein once said, “The sky is raining soup, we just need a bucket.”

  14. The only way this pig (pork) gets canned, is if SpaceX gets their Starship in orbit, and a few test runs. That will send shock-waves throughout the industry, and NASA will be forced to change their plans.

  15. Actually I have started to come around to legged centaur types (with somewhat stumpy legs) with Twheel feet on at least the rear legs. Why you might ask? In centaur mode, you can move reasonably fast on uneven terrain with the legs stably, and have the upper torso arms for work. If you need to be at human height, the centaur rears up on the rear legs and stabilizes like Boston Dynamic’s Handle robot, and the forelegs can double as auxiliary arms (to hold a work item, or to grab onto a holdfast, not really for fine work). High speed movement can be done reared up on the hind legs, letting the Twheel feet do the fast movement.

  16. I have spoke to with a number of the decision-makers (NASA & House space staffers). The issue for them is that Starship is a very unproven vehicle. To stop funding the SLS now and put all one’s money on the Starship is risking America’s space program. I do believe that, once Starship reaches orbit, the decision-makers will be far more open to shifting from SLS to Starship. This has been Elon’s plan all along. In his first ITS presentation he stated,

    “Ultimately this is going to be a huge public-private partnership…So I think that’s probably what occurs, and right now we’re just trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available, and just sort of keep moving both forward, and hopefully I think, as we show that this is possible, that this dream is real, not just a dream — it’s something that can be made real — I think the support will snowball over time”.

    So, as the Starship does its hops, as the Super Heavy is being built, and especially when Starship reaches orbit it will be clear to the decision-makers that the Starship is becoming real. At that point there will be a vehicle with Mars capability and at a price far below that if the SLS. And at that point and probably not before, we will see an official transition away from the SLS and to the Starship.

  17. This is both the dumbest and funniest thing I have read all week. I truly cannot tell if you are being satirical or serious. If you are serious, get help.

  18. As has been said before, there is that huge nuclear reactor already up there.

    The usual problem with solar is that it’s diffuse. But in space there’s no shortage of space. Also no gravity, so the panels don’t need much support. Fairly easy to deploy large panels. (Nuclear would require big panels too, btw, for the waste heat radiators.)

    The key metric for space is watt/kg, and I *think* solar is winning there too so far (not sure).

  19. It probably looked like a good idea in 2011. At that point SpaceX only had the Falcon 9, and was four years from landing its first booster.

  20. I have a physics degree, and studied under a couple of Nobel Prize winners. The Idaho National Engineering Lab, where they test reactors, had me come and give a lecture on nuclear rockets.

    What are your qualifications, and why are you so angry?

    99% of satellites run on solar power, and 1% on nuclear. It does have its uses, such as nuclear-electric propulsion, but solar has been winning the space power contest for decades.

    On the ground, nuclear power production increased 160 TWh from 2012 to 2017, while solar increased about 270 TWh in the same period. So the numbers indicate it is winning there too.

  21. Look, in theory you could build a perfectly conventional Earth steel foundry on Mars, (With slight design changes for the lower gravity.) inside a giant pressure chamber. You could replace the air and coke with oxygen and carbon obtained by cracking CO2 from the Martian atmosphere.

    “In theory” is doing a lot of work here, we don’t crack CO2 to carbon in kiloton quantities, we don’t run foundries on pure oxygen and soot. So, yeah, you’d have to develop a LOT of new technology to build a foundry on Mars.

    Meanwhile, asteroids have huge quantities of already reduced iron. (So does the Moon, of course.) You “just” have to melt it and alloy it, and it already has plenty of nickle, an expensive alloying element on Earth, and likely Mars, too.

    Granted, that would be new tech. But both approaches need new tech, and the asteroid/Moon approach needs a lot less energy per ton of iron produced, because you don’t need to reduce the iron ore, you just need to melt the iron. For many purposes, you probably could just use the meteoritic nickle/iron without further alloying.

  22. Right, that’s why it was canceled during the Obama administration.

    Catch a clue, the program originated in 2011, when Democrats controlled the Presidency AND both houses of Congress.

  23. I’m a big fan of nuclear power on Earth, but in space at Earth’s distance from the sun, a solar panel is baseload power collecting 5.4 times as much energy in 24 hours as the same size panel on Earth.

    Further out, or on the Moon where you have two-week nights, then sure, nuclear’s likely better.

  24. ‘People live in Siberia and the Sahara.’ Siberia and the Sahara are both much nicer than Mars – or the Moon. They have less extreme temperatures, more water, an atmosphere, and normal gravity. The South Pole and the top of K2 are also better prospects as good places to live, though for some reason, not many people do so.

  25. The current standard wisdom has pretty much settled on the idea that “useful” robots aren’t and won’t be humanoid – they’ll continue to be independent arms with custom end-tools or sets of arms working together, or powerful wheeled platforms that roll around warehouses carrying shelves, or other task-optimized designs.

    And yet… so much effort has gone into making humanoid robots work, and they’re getting pretty darn good. Very likely, SciFi dreams motivated a lot of that work. Nevertheless, as the researchers keep increasing humanoid robot capabilities, we should arrive at the point where a humanoid robot can learn any task by watching a human do it.

    So MAYBE we’re approaching a humanoid robotic revolution, which will fairly suddenly take over any physical labor that hasn’t already been roboticized or automated. Maybe not really getting rolling for a decade yet, and then taking a few decades as the humanoids get better, faster, cheaper.

  26. Yes.

    9-10 meters per second of delta-V  is what you get throwing something by hand, not interplanetary speeds.

  27. I beg to differ if the Democrats win I think SLS will be cancelled no matter what Shelby thinks. Why, because most people know what a waste it is and most Democrats do not have the baggage of a tremendous ego like Republicans.

  28. The issues with launch pads are the reason for SpaceX plans to eventually build offshore platforms in shipyards for Starship launches. That’s likely dependent on the surge in new revenue from Starlink.

  29. We spent far more time and money studying zero g in the ISS than it would have taken to just spin something!

  30. When Bezos talks of trillions, he is being serious. Whether I am ahead of the average bear is another question!
    Have you read The High Frontier?

  31. Umm..ok…so who’s idea is it to tether two BFR rockets together to create artificial gravity. how about we capture an Asteroid and bring it to the moon orbit… then chain an an inflatable bouncy house around it to create artificial gravity…the type with lots of balls and Slides..

  32. It also helps that pads 39A/B were overbuilt, under the expectation they have the reasonable probability of needing to support a Nova class launcher, rather than the Saturns that were actually used.

    It’s also a shame they didn’t go ahead and Build 39C (originally named A actually) or even 39D but budget realities and difficulty of construction are understandable.

    While I love the crawlers (I believe nicknamed Hanz and Franz?), I always wonder what it would have looked like with a rail based transporter. A US design (likely vertical only), compared to the huge transporter/erector used by the russians for the N-1 and Energia/Buran.

  33. “We” as a civilization do NOT want to live on Mars. It is too small. I did not say nobody, as many clearly do. I’m just trying to wake them up to O’Neill

  34. It think it be humanoid robots that will explore space in the future. Perhaps they will, in the 22nd century, take human embryos with them.

  35. That is a good point, esp if the boulders are either all the same and good, or different. A grabber could fling them much as Hep’s lunar launcher, into a bag that would end up in the right orbit.

  36. Of course, I was asking nbfdmd about his reading, not you!
    The market balance between lunar and asteroidal source material is a very good problem to have!
    Love the Seed Factory work.
    Nice thing about Space is we just need to do stuff we can already do on Earth and go. No need for totally new science breakthru, altho such is welcome.

  37. This, note that the pads them self are priceless as they are expensive constructs you can modify without an 10 year study if new ones might frighten alligators at freak weather settings.

  38. > But we do not want to live on Mars, after all.

    Speak for yourself. People live in Siberia and the Sahara. Not everyone will want to live on Mars, but one in a thousand is plenty to colonize a planet.

    > bulldozer traction may be a prob.

    There’s 2-8 meters of loose regolith everywhere on the Moon. Just load up some weight buckets if you need the extra weight for traction. The Apollo rovers seemed to have no trouble driving around. As long as you keep your load small relative to the vehicle weight, should not be a problem.

  39. Important to note the greater number of small ones. We need very little to start!
    Good question about factory location.
    At first, if using both lunar and asteroidal material, cis-lunar of course. Soon will make the miners from that material, and off they go.
    O’Neill bootstrap ideas emphasized start small and reproduce, so we should do the same growth pattern for getting the materials at first. Avoid launch costs, no matter how cheap!
    edit add:
    “and the energy to get stuff off these bodies is much less than the typical energy to turn raw materials to finished products.”
    from danielravennest below really makes things look differently!

  40. Jean, I think like a mining engineer and physicist. The Moon, Mars, and asteroids all have different ores, due to their different histories. Ideally you want to mine all of them, each for whatever useful ores they have in the highest concentration.

    For processing and manufacturing you need energy. Open space has at least twice the solar energy of planet surfaces, and the energy to get stuff off these bodies is much less than the typical energy to turn raw materials to finished products. So you get more product made faster by launching the materials to open space, and converting them there.

  41. I’ve not only read the High Frontier, I presented papers at O’Neill’s space manufacturing conferences. These days I work on the “Seed Factory” concept. That’s the starter set of machines you use to build more machines, and bootstrap your industry.

    Metallic asteroids are a good grade of iron alloy, and carbonaceous asteroids have carbon. Combine them and you get steel. That’s good enough to feed your seed factory metal-working machines and crank out second-generation metal parts. Later generation machines can extract other elements to make different alloys, but to start with you can use nearly-ready iron/nickel/cobalt.

  42. SLS will not be cancelled no matter what. It is not NASAs doing but the powerful Senator Shelby from alabama who doesn’t want to lose 50,000 good paying jobs from his state. So SLS will never be cancelled as long as he has the office and the head of the appropriations committee. Stop wasting our time with pointless speculation about something that won’t happen. I’m no fan of SLS but it ain’t going away.

  43. Go look at photos of Bennu and Ryugu, the two asteroids being visited by probes right now. Both are littered with surface boulders. So you don’t have to move an entire asteroid, just grab rocks off their surface. With low gravity that’s not hard.

    80% of known Near Earth Asteroids are larger than 30 meters in size, and therefore more than 20,000 tons in mass. Sometimes a lot more. They are too heavy to move as a whole with near-term technology.

  44. It’s the other way around. The Moon is depleted of volatiles due to its history. Some NEA’s contain up to 20% water and carbon compounds because they were never severely heated (>300C). The water is in the form of “hydrated minerals”, where the OH groups are loosely bound, and can be baked out.

    Water and ice in their unbound form require a combination of colder temperatures and/or gravity well to be held on to.

  45. The question is, are you trying to bring the asteroid to the factory, or the factory to the asteroid.

    And, of course, the ones we see are the size they are because we’re lousy at seeing them. Better telescopes will find smaller asteroids, and a lot more of them.

    Asteroid size is subject to a power law. The smaller the asteroid, the more you should find that size. We just can’t find the smaller ones yet.

    https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/LPSC98/pdf/1680.pdf

  46. Having worked as a NASA contractor, individual NASA engineers can innovate. The problem is politics intervenes to prevent good ideas from being implemented. As an example, the old mission control center in Houston (Shuttle era) had 603 staff. The updated control center (Shuttle + Space Station) still had 603 staff, despite improvements in computers, display technology, etc. between the 1970’s and 1990’s. Preserving jobs is more important than making progress.

    The same thing happens at the Kennedy Space Center, where the same launch pads keep getting recycled for new programs (Apollo, Shuttle, SLS), even reusing the same crawlers from 50 years ago. There’s a certain number of jobs associated with those things, and you can’t cut jobs without Congress getting angry.

  47. “Saying “we can just get the materials from asteroids” is a case of not understanding the difficulty of the task. Large scale material processing and manufacturing requires industry. You can’t look to the asteroids for said industry; that would be a non-sequitur.”
    A perfect example of planetary bias! So, you can look to Mars? Really? Proof you entirely miss O’Neill’s basic finding.

  48. “go straight into making O’Neill habitats” Well, that is a major and common misconception. What you often see is the “Island 3” habitat, as in 3rd generation. It can be started smaller, but needs no planet to start from, other than Earth! Al Globus has the best stuff I’ve seen in a long time.
    Living/working on planets makes no sense! ELEO in particular is far easier, at first especially, than Moon. Obviously Mars. But we do not want to live on Mars, after all.
    Now, processing, factories and mines on the Moon, sure, with human stints limited away from the living early O’Neill rotating habitat.
    By the way, there will probably be drag line mining because bulldozer traction may be a prob.
    “Apparently they are afraid these endeavors will divert resources and take us apart from their cherished goal.”
    I see a lot of that! Let there be equal coverage!

  49. I bet the main problem with asteroids is finding the really good ones that are *small* enuf to handle, as a start. The ones we see are too big!

  50. I don’t we are even close to having the capabilities to start a full O’Neill cylinder, some minimally viable sized version could could be built. Anyone who thinks Mars is a first step to an O’Neill cylinder should become the next president. I think it would be fun to have one who is even more irrational and inept than the current one.

  51. “Starships” never intended for reentry don’t need a heat shield, plumbing, and methane capacity for same, fins, the fin actuators, hard points to connect the actuators, or the hydraulics, or power electronics that run the actuators. It’s a lot of mass that can be used for payload on that first launch, and will cut the strength needed for the tether.
    Two of these orbital starships, and maybe a center of mass storm shelter for flare weather made of mostly ice, would make a great Mars cycler station. An ion engine in the center, with an “orbital” ship balanced by a reactor, and heat engine would make a manned planetary spaceship. Just remember to reel in the tethers for gravity assists.

  52. It’s obvious NASA cannot innovate and break through the old school way of thinking and being creative. They are a has beens with brains. Needs someone like Elon to spearhead this enormous project. More value for less and most importantly faster. But I wouldn’t be surprised if China surpasses everyone including Elon. They make it faster, cheaper and more.

  53. I could not agree more! I happen to favor Criswell’s Lunar Solar Power, a small exception to the general O’Neill anti-planet outlook, and lunar (I call them) telebots run from students’ bedrooms late at night seems a good thing.
    Almost always, starting exponential growth (ISRU-In Space Resource Use) beats launch (linear) placement. But you have to start! Without a planetary bias!

  54. Did commercial air-flight die with the passing of the founder of the first airplane builder company? no? well, commercial rocket launchers won’t do it either.

    I think even SpaceX would live on if Elon Musk came to suffer an untimely demise. The unified vision of Tesla, Solar City, Boring company and SpaceX providing the parts for manned settlement of space would die with him, though, delaying some things a few years.

    But we would sill have SpaceX, Blue Origin, their rockets and their landers. Gwynne Shotwell, Jeff Bezos and others would ensure that happens.

  55. “Mars satisfies these requirements.” As does the Moon plus asteroids plus scooped N from Earth atmos. But way easier, and again, as per O’Neill.
    Once we get started, large scale will soon follow. O’Neill talks of bootstrapping. Have you read The High Frontier?

  56. So what if… SpaceX goes bankrupt or Elon dies suddenly? Should we rely only on SpaceX and do not develop an alternative government project?

  57. This is why I don’t understand some O’Neill habitat proponents being so judgmental and dismissive about building space facilities on the Moon and Mars, whenever the prospect of sending crewed landers, habitats and machinery to the Moon or Mars arises.

    Apparently they are afraid these endeavors will divert resources and take us apart from their cherished goal.

    Wrong. These settlements and facilities will be the basis for building an industrial capability extracting off-world resources, and later for building much more space infrastructure than we can now. We can’t simply jump over this phase of things and go straight into making O’Neill habitats.

    Developing automated asteroid mining can help, but that’s a long term investment. Humans can go and drive a bulldozer over there at any moment we build the spaceships and decide to do it.

  58. In the early years, four tonnes of payload delivered to ELEO results in four tonnes of habitat structure. For the Moon, four tonnes departing LEO results in one tonne payload to the lunar surface. But, if that one tonnes is a spare part which keeps a telerobot ten times its size working and if that telerobots produces metal at ten times its mass before needing another spare part then that one tonne payload results in 100 tonnes of habitat structure. So, we need to be thoughtful about which destination makes the most sense at different points in time.

  59. Near Earth asteroids have even shallower gravity wells, though. Some have remarkably low delta V to Earth orbit.

    Since the Moon doesn’t have industry YET, you might as well establish that industry among the asteroids.

    The counter-argument is that NEA’s are probably very depleted of volatiles, while we know those can be found at the Lunar poles.

    But, as I remarked of Musk’s plans, he who pays the piper… Musk wants to go to Mars, Bezos wants to go to the Moon, and I… don’t have billions of dollars!

  60. Are you sure you’re not confusing “kilometers per second” with “meters per second”?

    I still think the best mission design is to use the Starship with an external drop tank system assembled in orbit. This will solve the excess thrust while landing on the Moon issue, and can double as the base.

  61. Ah! An actual opinion about O’Neill Space!
    “Where do you get the materials for the habitats? Asteroids.” or the Moon, as per O’Neill. We agree totally.

    “Where do you get the infrastructure to build the ships that mine the asteroids? Mars.” Sort of the long way around, seems to me! I’ll go with Al Globus and Equatorial Low Earth Orbit starter kit.
    https://space.nss.org/orbital-space-settlements/
    down the page a little. There, the asteroid/lunar material can be made into further stuff. Sounds easier than Mars to me, but that is, of course, O’Neill’s point! As opposed to your Mars fantasy.
    Please be specific in your objections to O’Neill Space. It leaves Mars totally out of the picture, except for science.
    A very important decision for humanity!

  62. You don’t get the material from the asteroid belt. You get them from near-Earth asteroids and the Moon. It would be crazy to haul mass all the way back from the asteroid belt just to build colonies in Earth orbit.

    The first step is to build small orbital colonies just below the Van Allen belt, holding a thousand or so people each. You need little or no radiation shielding that way, and at BFR prices could even launch everything from Earth. Google “Kalpana Two.”

    After we’ve done that and established lunar mining, we can tackle bigger colonies further out where they need radiation shielding.

  63. Too bad they are planning on going to a planet, our Moon, for anything but material or surface area for (far side esp) radio and optical ‘scopes, or solar panels.
    Bezos supports now 50 year old ideas of G. K. O’Neill, which are obviously true to those who understand them. Most never see any coverage, however, in the popular press. Too bad!

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