Thanks for publishing the report on the October 12 New Scientist story about building habitats using radio waves [A/CC October 2002 news].

I am posting information on this project at www.adl.gatech.edu/research/tff/.

The reason for my intermediate-term proposal to study building a big cylinder near the Moon is to provide a basis for developing a space-based economy, a reasonable way to argue that the payoff is worth the investment, and in fact a basis for attracting investors to space-based businesses. This sounds pretty mundane, but without such an approach, I'm afraid we'll be limited to watching the NEOs and dreaming about all the water, carbon and other resources there, or maybe sending the occasional nanosat over. From attending the Space Resource Utilization Roundtables since 1999, I've learned that the people who want to build lunar-based solar power plants, mine metals on the Moon, etc. have come a long way. And your community has systematically observed over a thousand NEOs, many of which require less energy to visit than the Moon. It's time we integrated the advances in all of these [areas] and developed a coherent plan for the next decade.

My radio wave idea of course sounds even more outrageous, but at the end of the Phase 1 project I conclude that it is quite feasible — far easier than I had feared. The solar collector area needed is only on the order of a square kilometer (yes, I'm still looking for the calculation error . . .).

Obviously, I do hope that the NEO community will help me learn more about what orbits, objects and materials are the best ones to go after, as we refine the concept.