perfidy

Boing Boing has a gallery up of artist's conceptions of space stations from back in the 70s.  I've seen most of these before, but it's always fun to look at pictures of space stations.  Always.

Sadly, I don't think that anything like that will ever be built, barring a truly vast change in our technological capabilities.  We can make space travel more affordable in the short term, to be sure - the current inefficiencies of NASA-style space travel are truly retarded.  Private space travel could bring costs down to (best case) the cost of air freight, as the fuel cost of a jaunt to orbit for a modest-sized vehicle are on par with a antipodal aircraft flight.  But that is a hard lower bound.

To get costs lower, you need new technology.  Nanotech diamond rocket engines burning exotic fuels, maybe.  Whole ships made entirely of ultralight diamondoid materials might get costs lower.  Real fusion torch drives, and a billion ecological impact statements might also do the trick.  A spacehook or elevator doing the indian rope trick would also significantly lower costs.

And costs need to get down to sea or rail freight levels, and they would need to be a thicker pipe.  Low cost, and large bulk lifting would be necessary to construct space stations.  Because, despite the availability of extraterrestrial materials in the belt and on the moon, you first need to lift an industrial complex into orbit to be able to process and move that material.  Colonies in space will need ecosystems, and the only known supply of livable ecosystem is at the bottom of an uncomfortably large gravity well.

The only way around that limitation that doesn't involve better earth to orbit technology is von Neumann machines, sending a small seed colony of self-replicating robots to the moon, or the belt, and having them construct the infrastructure that people could then travel to.  And is that really a good idea?