Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
There are a number of billionaires these days who are very interested in the exploration and exploitation of space and have founded their own companies in the rapidly growing space industry. These individuals include Jeff Bezos who founded of Blue Origins, Elon Musk who founded SpaceX, and Richard Branson who founded Virgin Galactic. The late Paul Allen who founded Vulcan was also a space entrepreneur.
These new companies and many other competitors have driven down the cost of sending payloads to orbit to the point where considerations of space habits no longer sound like science fiction. And, the founders of many of these companies are very interested in the possibility of space habitats.
There are other rich individuals outside the U.S. who are aggressive actors in the space industry including a Russian oligarch named Yuri Milner who has proposed using many tiny probes to carry out a mission to another star.
Alan Globus has been an advocate for space settlements for decades. He spent many years at the NASA Ames Research Center. He has estimated that it would require about sixty launches of the yet-to-be-built SpaceX Super Heavy rocket to place the equipment and materials in orbit required to construct a 360-foot diameter rotating space station. The project is called Kalpana 2. The SpaceX Super Heavy rocket will be able to carry a payload of two hundred and twenty thousand pounds into
Earth orbit.
In the 1970s, NASA was estimating thousands of launched to construct the Stanford Torus space station in low Earth orbit. The Stanford Torus would have been about six thousand feet in diameter. The more modest proposals outlined at the conference are much more realistic.
Globus suggests that a smaller Von Neuman rotating space station might be an even better starting project. He said, “A space hotel has requirements fairly similar to a space settlement. So you can build a small hotel, which you could do with a single launch, and you could start gaining revenue. If your small hotel is successful, you build a bigger one.”
Globus also said, “If you take the most optimistic rumors floating around about the [SpaceX] Starship and so forth and so on, and you assume that the cost of the stuff and construction is no greater than the cost of transportation — which is a big if, by the way — then you can argue that it’d cost a couple about $5 million to move in.”
A group called Space Decentral says that “We are building a decentralized space program, connecting thousands of engineers, scientists, and future astronauts, to devise and fund next-generation space initiatives.” They presented a plan for a multi-industry space outpost which was designed by architect Suzi Bianco from the University of Houston.
Skyframe Research says that its goal is to develop and “deploy deep space rotating habitats with extended capability for cyclical growth.” They will use radiation shielding based on a layered water design. Andrew Longman made the presentation. He said, “We need to find an evolutionary approach so we can make it affordable.”
Please read Part 3