Nostalgia!

[james_davis_nicoll]

Remember L5 colonies? Well,

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.

Comments

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

No, no, NO! I've explained again and again that the fleet of several score NextGen Space Shuttles (plus unpecified systems for TLI and lunar landing) first has to enable large-scale lunar mining and the construction of a mass driver. Then the mass driver sends up the materials for construction of the space habitats.

It's a multi-phase project that's bound to take a few years and a few billion more than your naive, simplistic version.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the mass-catcher and automated universal make-anything machine located on site.

(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.)

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

I was sniping at the same kind of SPAAAAACE-centric thinking on Harlie Stross's blog earlier today. Many of the space elevator enthusiasts seem to think that demand for cheap access to space will drive development of strong enough/long enough carbon nanotubes (if indeed that's possible) to make a ground-to-GEO SE possible.

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.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I liked the suggestion of an England-to-France bridge, for example; there are plenty of people who would use that the day it opened.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The mass catcher was going to be at L2.

This is NASA's secret ultimate goal for the soon-to-be-announced L2 station!!1!

[graydown.livejournal.com]

Mass drivers? They have been outlawed by every civilized planet!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

At least they're not using protomatter, which has been denounced by all ethical scientists.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

You say. I say that the authorities define evil as the use of protomatter. More cryptofascism, iow.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

And we still haven't perfected the schlock driver!

--Dave, or the all-important meme rebroadcaster