Solving the Mass Problem
The key to accelerating space settlement might not be any clever architecture or new technology, but simple brute force.
The vision of human settlements in space has been clear to many people for a while. Practical designs for Mars bases abound, and there have been many iterations of free floating habitats since Gerard O’Neill wrote The High Frontier in the 1970s. These concepts have been studied and found to be technically feasible, but today we don’t seem to be much closer to seeing them realised than we were in the 60s and 70s, when NASA was hoping to land men on Mars by 1981 and Libertarian Bernal Spheres would save us from energy crises. The only part of the current space sector that really offers a connection from the current state of things to that long imagined future is SpaceX Starship, and many people I talk to seem to very skeptical it can do what Elon Musk says it can.
One thing that would be required to move from the present situation of human spaceflight - two space stations with 10 crew between them, each typically staying for a few months - to a more expansive future is simply being able…
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