With KESTS to GEO's transportation abilities, it would become possible to build large space habitats such as the passively shielded 1976 Stanford Torus for 10,000 people's residence, agriculture and light industry, with simulated internal gravity; but built out of earth surface materials instead of requiring construction at Lagrange-5 out of Lunar materials. These could be development prototypes for a vast ring of such space settlements in GEO, although most of the others would have their main structure built of lunar and asteroidal materials; there is room enough for 1,500,000 of them per ring in GEO, up to 10,000 people living well in each of them: lots of real estate potential there.

Initially they could be used beyond their own development purposes, for tourism and retirement facilities, able to simulate environments from hot deserts to springtime streams to snowy winterlands within their virtual gravity interiors yet with quick access to low-g sleeping facilities.

Proven out, then with the vast resource access enabled by GEO spaceports, lunar and asteroidal materials might be more useful for industro-robotically building the main structures for rings of such space settlements in GEO. There is room in each ring for comfortable life systems for 15 billion people, for example, using the Stanford Torus basic design.

Such facilities could also enable an exodus of large numbers of the earth population if the ecosystem totally collapses, maybe enabling the intelligent restoration of the ecosystem (see my Sci Fi attempt re this scenario).

An idea for safer passive shielding in GEO

One of the worries of building rings of rotating space settlements (like the Stanford Torus of 1976 design) built in GEO (enabled by high volume cheap ground-GEO KESTS electrically powered lift transportation, if people decide to do that) is that in the distant future, the earth-encircling rings of space settlements might slow down and collapse into the atmosphere, causing much atmospheric dust, among other debris impact problems.

Although the KESTS is likely to be able to couple earth-surface referenced thrust to the ring where it contacts KESTS, and mass launchers ought to be able to continue to keep speed up elsewhere around the GEO habitat ring. But times are not always fine, and conceivably a time of civilization decay might happen eventually, another Dark Ages. And the orbital velocity maintenance mass launchers not be kept working, for example, and orbital degradation eventually collapses the orbiting ring and down they come. (One might remember the fairy tale of Chicken Little's "the sky is falling").

Presumably the shielding would still be passive, that is, each mile-diameter rotating toroid forming each 10,000-person city, would be surrounded by a non-rotating shield equivalent to a 2 meter thick layer of dirt. It is mostly this material that would likely dust the planet's atmosphere, be environmentally catastrophic, in that hypothetical far eon distant time.

So, here is my idea for dealing with this problem: Back in WW era, there was a plan to pour sawdust in a North Atlantic coastal bay, let it freeze in winter, then saw it out so as to make a floating aircraft landing strip to be moved out into mid-atlantic, the tensile strength of the sawdust fibre combined with the compressive strength of water ice, providing the strength needed for a long landing strip within Atlantic waves. Add remember that comets passing by are mostly water ice, in the hard vacuum of space. So, put the two things together: build the passive shields for the GEO space cities out of water mixed with sawdust, frozen in place as the shields, about 6 meters thick. So if it all comes down, it just makes rain with some sawdust in it. Thus that environmental dust catastrophic part of the collapse scenario could be averted, it seems to me.

And there may be ways to design the huge city internal structure so as to minimize impact along the equator, but that is another subject.

If we create KESTS to GEO correctly, it will be built as a continually rebuilt thing, like the human body; and with civilization remaining in function, if there were no way to keep the speed up for the ring of GEO space habitats, they could be taken apart and brought back down via the KESTS, bit by bit.

But we also have to plan for things not always working fine.

Copyright © 2005 James E. D. Cline