A
Aetius
Guest
I have always been fascinated by the Uranian planetary system. It seems dull to some, because the planet lacks the flash of Saturn or Jupiter. However, the fact that I will probably never see a Uranian orbiter mission in my lifetime just makes the system more mysterious and interesting to me.<br /><br />Anyway, my point: Ice worlds like Callisto and Titan are blessed with gravities similar to Earth's Moon, possibly allowing permanent settlement in the distant future. However, many potential colony worlds have tiny surface gravities.<br /> <br />Free-flying O'Neill space settlements (with their simulated gravity) at first seem like an attractive option to me for living on or near the smallest, coldest worlds of Sol.<br /><br />The good news is that water ice has the same structural properties as industrial steel, at minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature at Uranus' distance from the Sun). The bad news is that millions of tons of building materials need to be transported from an ice moon, to a nearby orbital work site thousands of kilometers away. Another sticking point with orbital O'Neill settlements in the outer solar system: Too many of these relatively massive artificial satellites might create complex gravitational interactions with other moons, requiring costly orbital jinking of these titanic objects.<br /><br />My question: Do you think that O'Neill-style, spinning, simulated gravity habitats might be feasible on the surface of a small moon itself? I envision a spinning habitat disk, whose plane is parallel to the world's surface. It would be encased in a radiation shield, supported by massive structural supports and held aloft tens of meters from the ground below. That would create an open space in hard vaccuum, protected by the radiation shielding above, to construct large objects on the surface. The industrial sector and most of the space dock facilities would be located underground, without simulated gravity.<br /><br />Would it be more attractive to place t