Space Settlements - A Design Study 1977

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Because of the relatively high population density (15,000 people/km²) in the community, most of the circulation is pedestrian, with one major mass transport system (a moving sidewalk, monorail, and minibus) connecting different residential areas in the same colony. Elevators could also be used to travel through the spokes to the far side of the colony. The diagram of figure 3-2 suggests approximate areas and volumes needed for different modes of transportation in the colony. The chosen mode would be in addition to major arteries, secondary paths, collector paths and local circulation paths within the community enclosure.

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CHAPTER 4: Choosing Among Alternatives

A few years after people move into the first colony, the system should settle down and operate as described in chapter 1. But why is the colony shaped as a torus and located at L5 with ore supplies from the Moon? Why is it not a sphere out at the asteroids or near a moon of Mars, or a cylinder in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, or some other combination of alternatives? What are these alternatives, and why were they rejected? The purpose of this chapter is to answer these questions by evaluating reasonable alternatives in terms of the goals of the design study (ch. 1) and the criteria laid out in chapters 2 and 3.

A successful systems design combines subsystems satisfying various conflicting criteria to produce a unified working entity. The parts of the space colony — transportation, mining, the habitat, manufacturing, agriculture, and so on — must interact and interrelate in such a way that the demands of each for energy, raw materials, manpower, transport, and waste removal can be met by the overall system. In turn this system must satisfy the physiological, cultural, architectural, and physical criteria necessary to maintain a permanent human community in space using near-term technology and at a minimum cost.

In 10 weeks the study group was able to assemble only one reasonably consistent picture of life in space; there was no time to go back through the system and attempt to find optimal combinations of the subsystems. Moreover, again because time was short, many of the comparisons among alternative subsystems were more qualitative than study group members would have liked.

Effort devoted to alternatives depended upon the particular subject. A great deal of time was spent considering different forms for the habitat, how to handle the shielding and how to process lunar material. Less time was given to considering alternative patterns of siting the colony and its parts, of different ways to achieve life support, or of various possible transportation systems. In some cases much effort was expended but few alternatives were generated; an example is the system for moving large amounts of matter cheaply from the Moon to the colony. No alternative at all was found to the manufacture of solar satellite power plants as the major commercial enterprise of the colony.

It is important to realize that the alternatives described in this chapter constitute a major resource for improving the proposed design and for constructing new designs that meet other criteria. Rejection of any concept for the current "baseline system" does not mean that concept is fundamentally flawed. Some alternatives were rejected because they failed to meet the criteria, which were deliberately chosen conservatively and might well be changed on the basis of future experience or under different assumptions. Others were rejected simply because information about them was incomplete. Yet others were not chosen because their virtues were recognized too late in the study to incorporate them into a unified overall picture.

The alternatives might also be useful for designing systems with other goals than permanent human settlement in space; for example, space factories with temporary crews, or laboratories in space. Alternatively, new knowledge or advances in technology, such as the advent of laser propulsion or active shielding against ionizing radiation, might make rejected subsystems very desirable.

THE SHAPE OF THE HABITAT

What shape is most suitable to house this colony of 10,000 people? The question is particularly interesting for several reasons. The appearance and arrangement of the habitat are most obvious and understandable by everyone, being the most direct exhibition of the reality of the idea of the colony — seeing the form is believing and the habitat naturally attracts a great deal of attention although it is only one part of a much larger system. Moreover, the reader may already be aware of one or more possibilities: the rotating cylinders proposed by O'Neill (ref. 1), the torus of Von Braun (ref. 2), and their corresponding entities in the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke (refs. 3,4). The subject is also one particularly suited for systematic treatment and can serve as an excellent example of the methodology of systems design.

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