Endeavour Stage 2, or, Buggering around with massive rocks

For any of my imaginary readers who aren't familiar with the weird ideas of the That Lot, as of some time last Wednesday (starting with a throwaway comment getting out of hand and working up from there), me and a few of my friends have been designing a micro-nation, or rather a sort of Micro-meme-polity, not tied to any particular land. Think something like The Culture, except with an anarcho-democracy instead of the Minds, a much more open approach to morphological freedom, and an approach to external contact more similar to the Zetetic Elench (if you haven't read Excession, what I'm on about is that instead of buggering about with other people's cultures to make them 'better', we let them influence us a bit, learn from them). It's been named The Endeavour.

None of us can quite work out whether we're taking this seriously or not, but in any case it makes a wonderful excuse for siliness, thought-experiments about land which might teach us a few planning skills, writing up strange legal documents, giving each other silly titles (with associated Special Hats) and some fun speculative fiction about what might happen if the Endeavour was let loose on... well... anything bigger than a feild or two.

Plans for actual land for the Endeavour range from fairly feasable ideas of getting a few obscure feilds somewhere and setting up an earthship village, to my personal favourite "For when we've got a bit firmer footing" plan of colonising a big ****off asteroid. I've personally taken it upon myself to try and work out how we could go about actually doing this (with us somehow actually getting into space being a given). And I thought it might make for a fun blog post or two (maybe some stuff about proposed Endeavour demarchy systems, gift and barter economies, and conlangs later too... a theoretical entity like this can make for quite a fun sub-plex)

I've only recently taken a real interest in asteroid habitats (as opposed to slighly more ambitious constructs like Niven rings and Banks orbitals) when I heard about Cole Bubbles, which have an aesthetic I'm very fond of.

Essentailly, back in the early 1960's, when Men were Men and Aerospace Engineers dreamt BIG, Dandridge Cole of Martin Co. suggested making artificial-g colonies from nickel-iron astorids. Process was simple: drill a hole to the center of the asteroid, pumo a boatload of water in, then seal up. Then, using truly huge mirrors, refelct sunlight onto the asteroid until it nearly melted. The water inside would boil, and what with the nickel-iron alloy being soft and malleable, it'd blow up like a balloon... When i read about he concept and saw some of the rather ispiring illustrations, especially the ones featuring the landscaped interior. Strikes a personal vibe as well since it looks a bit like a scottish glacial valley from the 'gound'

As wonderful as the idea is... I'm skeptical of it in its simplest form. The steam would find a way to vent out of the rock waaay before the iron got soft enough to start expanding through pressure. It could potentially be done with some ridiculously intense magnetic manipulation, but it would take far too long. Put it in the 'if we discover force-feilds' pile for later.

Personally, I think a better idea would be to hollow out an existing really big C- or M- type asteroid with a rougly spindly shape, like 216 Kleopatra and terraform the inside surfaces once you have a large hollow cylinder. This would take a lot longer for the initial mining but does reduce the need for finding some way to contain superheated steam from rushing out of a huge rock... you could possibly even combine the two methods with an M-type by expanding some sections and mining others depending on the consistancy of different materials.

Later in this blog or possibly subsequent edits of this post, theres a lot of material that will be useful in plannig the terraforming process that I've downloaded but have yet to read. Expect:

Spin dynamics vs. human adaptability

Atmosphere

Laying down the ground

Water cycles

The Luminaire (artificial sunlight)

Dwellings, transport, etc.

Fun! (detailing the sorts of Wild Hoopy Stuff one can get up to in one of these habitats... this is the Endeavour, after all)