Nostalgia!
Nov. 13th, 2012 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Remember L5 colonies? Well,
An example:

I chose this one because as far as I know it contains the only non-white person ever depicted in a space colony illustration from this era.
Three space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been scanned and are available here as small, medium, large, and publication quality jpeg images. Scans by David Brandt-Erichsen.
An example:

I chose this one because as far as I know it contains the only non-white person ever depicted in a space colony illustration from this era.
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Date: 2012-11-13 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 05:46 pm (UTC)It's a multi-phase project that's bound to take a few years and a few billion more than your naive, simplistic version.
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Date: 2012-11-13 07:58 pm (UTC)(The spinoffs are potentially tremendous, since automated universal make-anything machines could revolutionize industry once the space-colony project has made them possible. Of course, it'll be a bit inconvenient to get all our manufactured goods from a colony at L5, the only place where such machines can possibly work.)
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Date: 2012-11-13 10:34 pm (UTC)But there would be plenty of important, profitable, even revolutionary uses on earth even for CNT materials well short of SE requirements. So it's much more likely that those will drive (and pay for) most of the effort. In general, dogs wag tails rather than vice versa.
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Date: 2012-11-15 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 09:00 pm (UTC)This is NASA's secret ultimate goal for the soon-to-be-announced L2 station!!1!
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Date: 2012-11-13 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 01:49 pm (UTC)--Dave, or the all-important meme rebroadcaster
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Date: 2012-11-13 08:20 pm (UTC)The concept of lunar
tralphiumhelium-3 mines was still about a decade away at the time these paintings were painted.no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 01:16 am (UTC)Note: I work for a company that makes PV panels for ground-based solar farms, so I have a bit of a bias.
Military applications seem like a good excuse for space-based solar power. You could quickly provide power to forces on the ground or at sea. It'd also be good for constant-thrust interplanetary travel - a VASMIR unit powered by beamed power would be far more effective than one powered by solar panels or a heavy nuclear reactor.
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Date: 2012-11-14 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 12:02 am (UTC)Alpha emission from the solder in electronic assemblies is already a source of single-bit errors, now that transistor sizes are getting so small. There's already a market for isotopically-pure laser-separated Pb for electronics assembly (100x the price of regular Pb); future server rooms might have racks and wiring made of isotopically-pure metals, and be surrounded by metres of isotopically-pure shielding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_separation#Laser
Also, refer to "Lead-Free Soldering and Low Alpha Solders for Wafer Level Interconnects", by Dr. Ning-Cheng Lee, Indium Corporation of America.
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Date: 2012-11-15 01:51 pm (UTC)--Dave, and we'd have all the He3 we could eat!
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Date: 2012-11-15 05:05 pm (UTC)After that, we could move on to food depleted in 14C. But that could be done by growing plants in a greenhouse with CO2 from fossil fuel combustion (since fossil fuels have no 14C.)
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Date: 2012-11-16 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-16 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-16 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 06:21 pm (UTC)