I would agree that O’Neill space colonies can’t work, but that’s because of some engineering oversights.
The first thing I concluded was that the vast windows are an insanely expensive failure point, though not actually needed in any quantity. There are far better ways to accomplish the same thing that wouldn’t look like a bright star in black space, despite all the renderings showing what looks like a blue sky. Solar panels powering LED lighting would be just about as efficient at providing light per area of collector, and could double as display screens showing a sky. That unhooks the power source from having to rotates with the target of the illumination, and makes everything vastly simpler.
Nor is the dynamic instability of most O’Neill stations a problem, because you can avoid those problems simply by not building long thin rotating cylinders with giant mirrors hanging off them.
No, the real problem is that they have too much internal volume. We don’t think about internal empty volume on Earth because we don’t have to. Every internal space we build comes with free air, so it’s not a worry here.
But when you do the math, for every person you launch into space on a Starship, you’ll need to launch two or three more Starships full of of liquid nitrogen, which is going to be used to form a column of breathable air extending for miles above their house on the colony. What are those miles of air in that vertical column doing? Nothing. They’re just there to give the landscape painters something pretty to look at. So we need to ditch the big hollow space colony idea, or go all the way out to Neptune for a massive nitrogen harvest.
Once you strip that away, building space colonies of almost any size is pretty simple. They would be smaller units, perhaps more the size of airliners or ships, and thus much easier to manufacture, linked together and spinning on a common axis. That’s not much different from various imaginings of large, rotating, planetary transport vessels, but without a big engine to move them to other planets.
And from there everything is cost, ROI, and demand.
At some point I’m going to tackle Abundance so you won’t have to…
I would agree that O’Neill space colonies can’t work, but that’s because of some engineering oversights.
The first thing I concluded was that the vast windows are an insanely expensive failure point, though not actually needed in any quantity. There are far better ways to accomplish the same thing that wouldn’t look like a bright star in black space, despite all the renderings showing what looks like a blue sky. Solar panels powering LED lighting would be just about as efficient at providing light per area of collector, and could double as display screens showing a sky. That unhooks the power source from having to rotates with the target of the illumination, and makes everything vastly simpler.
Nor is the dynamic instability of most O’Neill stations a problem, because you can avoid those problems simply by not building long thin rotating cylinders with giant mirrors hanging off them.
No, the real problem is that they have too much internal volume. We don’t think about internal empty volume on Earth because we don’t have to. Every internal space we build comes with free air, so it’s not a worry here.
But when you do the math, for every person you launch into space on a Starship, you’ll need to launch two or three more Starships full of of liquid nitrogen, which is going to be used to form a column of breathable air extending for miles above their house on the colony. What are those miles of air in that vertical column doing? Nothing. They’re just there to give the landscape painters something pretty to look at. So we need to ditch the big hollow space colony idea, or go all the way out to Neptune for a massive nitrogen harvest.
Once you strip that away, building space colonies of almost any size is pretty simple. They would be smaller units, perhaps more the size of airliners or ships, and thus much easier to manufacture, linked together and spinning on a common axis. That’s not much different from various imaginings of large, rotating, planetary transport vessels, but without a big engine to move them to other planets.
And from there everything is cost, ROI, and demand.