Cities in the Sky


  • Optical astronomy using a fleet of Hubble-type telescopes maintained by resident technicians at a tiny fraction of the current cost.

  • Materials development. Ten years after the first colony is up and running, space factories should be turning out carbon fibers with a strength-to-weight ratio high enough to build the first geosynchronous towers. This will drop the cost of space transportation from the current thousands of dollars per pound for chemical propulsion to perhaps ten dollars per pound for a three-day train ride up a carbon-fiber rail into space. The departure point: Somewhere on the equator.

    For the first time, it will become possible to travel to the immense O'Neill cylinders of Trojan orbit using average personal resources. Some travelers will not want to return to earth. They will find green expanses under blue skies inside structures twenty miles long and four miles in diameter, spun about their long axes to simulate gravity and illuminated through skylights by gigantic mirrors the length of the colony. And while the horizon may seem oddly curved at first, and the night sky strangely configured, colonists will quickly accept the rainbow shimmer of the giant mirrors as they transform day into evening and the playful call of young aerobats skimming the cloud tops near the zero-gravity axis on human-powered wings. Space will have become home.

    Earth, the cradle of humanity, can be transformed into a garden only by using the resources of space:

    • Weather control by the use of space mirrors to heat and cool the earth at selected times and locations. If we don't like the results of an experiment, we can terminate it quickly and easily, and with little loss of investment, because the people and materials are already in place.

    • Illumination from space, again by the use of space mirrors, to light the scene of an emergency or to lengthen the day at selected locations for increased agricultural production.

    • Environmental tools developed on space colonies. These will find application on earth. Most discoveries occur by accident, in a strange environment, which is why a human presence in space is the best ally of science.

    • Biological and genetic tools of benefit to medicine. Procedures that will meet political resistance on earth because of their hazards will flourish in the perfect isolation of space, where the accidental spread of contagion is far less likely. Laboratories constructed for this kind of work will also make ideal sites to receive sample returns from
      The copyright of the article Cities in the Sky in Frontier Theory is owned by Larry Winn. Permission to republish Cities in the Sky in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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