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Back when NASA was more ambitious and had better political support: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"What follows is a portion of the final report of
a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press.
    What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy."

As I said elsewhere:
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/the-science-behind-elysium/
"The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create transport spacecraft to land on Earth and solar space satellites to power them on the ground for launching back into space with people on board. So, all it takes is crowd-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation."

Related projects I've participated in:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://openvirgle.net/

It may be easier to figure out how humans can live in zero-G by bio-engineering though, compared to spinning big heavy things.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard

I also suggest living in liquid with probably "liquid breathing" as an option to prevent muscle wasting and bone loss (since whales do OK by resistance from water):
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.

Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/

But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.

Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/

I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/

The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.

The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.

I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.

Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.

Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.

... I've been involved with: http://oscomak.net/
http://www.openvirgle.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Maybe some ideas there might be useful in growing your efforts.

"True again, except that we have to build giant structures with radiation shielding and artificial gravity, no easy feat."

Yes, but with automation to help we could do that. If we can learn to live in zero gravity, other possibilities open up like Marshall Savage talked about in the Millennial Project with Asgard habitats that were basically bubbles with a two meter thick layer of water at the surface between two layers of transparent plastic.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
http://oceania.org/images/plate6.jpg
http://oceania.org/images/plate7.jpg

There are at least four ways I know of in theory to support good bone health in space (even assuming astronauts in space were not just vitamin D deficient since the RDA was ten times too low). People can wear clothes designed to provide resistance. People can live in a liquid environment that provides resistance (possibly breathing an oxygen enriched liquid) -- since whales do OK in effectively zero G. People could take (hypothetical) medicines to prevent bone loss. People could have their DNA altered.
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

Obviously, more research is needed for all of them. The big thing is that it is not clear if mammals always need gravity for babies to develop in a healthy way. Example: http://www.welcometospaceblog.com/2011/09/babies-in-space.html

I would agree we should solve our problems on Earth first, rather than export a tragic way of thinking. Related ideas (the last two by me):
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

We seem to know answers to the social problems (stuff like a basic income, unschooling and life-long learning, advanced conflict resolution techniques, and so on). The problem seems more putting them into practice against entrenched interests ranging from short-sighted billionaires (of the 1%) with a narrow sense of self, to public school unions, to those who profit from war, to the rest of us (99%) and social inertia with fear of change even as our technosphere is quickly changing. I think we could easily do much better socially than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside

As for scams and Rossi's Cold Fusion E-Cat device, I agree it is very suspicious -- it's just at the edge of plausibility, and he could easily dispel any doubt with some better testing. But in general, whether that pans out (we'll know soon), we have lots of energy alternatives, being developed including thorium power, hot fusion, solar PV, solar thermal, and more.
http://www.caelusgreenroom.com/2011/05/26/torresol-opens-world%E2%80%99s-first-molten-salt-c-s-p-plant-ecoseed/

I was a Senior Associate with the Space Studies Institute in the late 1980s (just meant I gave them money). I thought the space power idea was interesting then and it might have made sense then -- even though I suggested to Gerry O'Neill (I took a class with him) that we should build self-replicating space habitats instead -- he called *me* a dreamer. :-) He saw that we would have a slow industrial expansion into space driven by capitalism (which I now think is baloney because we will be moving beyond money soon enough with 3D printers and robotics and s

Living in water provides two benefits -- radiation shielding and progressive resistance for muscle maintenance (think whales having big bones but they essentially live in a weightless environment).

In The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage there was a discussion of using six feet of water as shielding as the outer layer of habitats, as well as drugs or genetic alteration to deal with weightlessness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps

There are other ideas like clothing that provides resistance to movement.

I wrote about this issue here: http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

From there:

===============

For a broader outline on "Liquid breathing", see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing

From Wikipedia: "Liquid immersion provides a way to reduce the physical stress of G forces. ... Liquid breathing for acceleration protection may never be practical because of the difficulty of finding a suitable breathing medium of similar density to water that is compatible with lung tissue. Perfluorocarbon fluids are twice as dense as water, hence unsuitable for this application."

However, consider if a suitable compound was found. Ignore the issue of acceleration. What is a potential big problem on long duration space flights or indefinite habitation in microgravity is bone loss. The body adapts to lack of stress by eliminating bone and muscle that in no longer used, but this makes returning to a strong gravity field problematical. Savage has proposed future medicine or genetic engineering to overcome this, and one can also in theory create big rotating O'Neill-style structures, and there is also (boring) microgravity exercise, but what if there was another way?

Fish and mammals like whales and dolphins spend their entire lives in a sort-of microgravity suspended in water. They can have strong bones and muscles. Aquatic therapy in a pool is often recommended for humans to improve strength. So presumably, like the mythical Seapeople, if humans could breathe a liquid while living in outer space in microgravity (like during a long trip to Mars), then by just living and moving around in a liquid environment in a space craft, they would maintain their muscle tone and bone mass. The liquid might also provide cosmic ray shielding, and might even be designed to use cosmic rays to clean or re-oxegenate itself.

An important difference between an undersea civilization and a liquid-breathing space-faring one is that there is no water pressure in space in Zero-G (beyond surface tension or compression). Thus, liquid structures could extend in space for miles in three dimensions of endless tubes, all at essentially the same pressure. So there would be no risk of the "bends" when moving around this construction. Another possibility is that a big drop of liquid a mile across might be all one needed for a large space habitat floating in zero-G if the surface tension held the liquid in. This might make it trivial to construct habitats, and micrometeorites might pose less of a problem as the surface would heal itself by surface tension. Comets and asteroids could be mined, but the major result need only be a stream of this breathable liquid, which could be shaped into habitats of desired size by how much liquid was added.

This is all speculative at this point.

Liquid breathing obviously should not be experimented with outside a well-monitored research laboratory situation due to the risk of drowning or lung damage. Various research has already been performed, see Wikipedia for links.

Anyway, all speculative. But kind of cool (to me). I was inspired a litt

Glad you liked that part.

I agree that the USA in general might have been a lot better place if it had borrowed more sooner from the Haudenosaunee, whether economics and common land/infrastructure ownership:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Iroquois
or more aspects of their democracy and culture:
http://www.tuscaroras.com/graydeer/influenc/page1.htm
"In order to accept the premise that the Haudenosaunee had a profound influence on the founding fathers' thoughts on what would later become the United States Constitution, two important steps need to be taken. First, one needs to step back in time and examine what was influencing the founding fathers during their era. Secondly, one must relinquish ethnocentric prejudices of native peoples being "uncivilized" and in need of assimilation because of the stereotypical belief that they were "too simpleminded to engage in effective social and political organization." (2)
In this paper, the Great Law of Peace (also known as the Iroquois Constitution) will be discussed through the perspective of a Haudenosaunee to show how the Confederacy functions. The influence that the Great Law of Peace had on the founding fathers and on the United States Constitution, as well as the interaction between the great Mohawk orators and the founding fathers, will be discussed. This paper will add an Haudenosaunee perspective, and will hopefully make suspect the judicial framework on which federal-Indian policy and Indian law is built, which in an ethnocentric way falsely stereotypes native peoples as savage, uncivilized, and in need of assimilation."

That said, no one is perfect (and a standard of perfection itself is in the eye of the beholder). The book "The Walking People: A Native American Oral History"
http://www.amazon.com/Walking-People-Native-American-History/dp/1879678101
talks about the eventual decision by the People (some of whom become the Oneida) near the end of the book to study both diplomacy and war. I had never really understood before the notion of there being a "war path" (as in, "going on the war path" when I was growing up was lampooning native anger), as a "path", and as a choice compared to a path of peace and diplomacy. Anyway, you might find that book (at least the last parts) of some interest.

I quote Leon Shenandoah here, in my trying to give thanks for the many positive forces in my own life (and his book was one of them):
http://www.oscomak.net/giving_thanks.html

===

So the new quote [related to the OSCOMAK project I am doing on and off] is from Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah (from the book To Become A Human Being by Steve Wall, pg. 24).

"The thing wrong with the world is that people don't have instructions." -- Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah

He might be called "Iroquois" but the term people with those roots used for themselves was "Haudenosaunee" which simply in a sense means "human beings", like us all. (Even those sentient AIs reading this in the future. :-) The Haudenosaunee ideals informed the better parts of the US Constitution, which might have been a better document IMHO if even more had been borrowed. :-)

I include the beginning ... here, and also to make clear that, as with "adult education", "have instructions" is not about being told what to do, but in finding help in the human quest for meaning. At your own pace.

The thing wrong with the world
is that people don't have instructions.
We were told almost three hundred years ago
that people would be coming to us and asking for our instructions,
We were told that back in the 1700s
that there'd be a day whe

http://oscomak.net/ could go far for half a billion US dollars (my site).

The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).

Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?

But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.

Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."

That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).

Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:

What started as an April Fool joke by Google for 2008 called Project Virgle is now a real and genuine effort by an increasing number of people to create ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology. This project is a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate on simulations of space settlements. Rather than argue whether L5 or Mars or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn should be humankind's first space settlement, we could be asking what is common between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared.

The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. OSCOMAK stands for "OSCOMAK Semantic Community On Manufactured Artifacts and Know-how".