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by maxander 3202 days ago
Your 10-ISS-doughnut habitat would be a nice objet d'art, but what happens next? It can't pull more stations up after it.

Thinking for long-term space habitation requires projects that make human space presence self sustaining, at least in some sense or other. That's the point of space-based manufacturing and huge habitats; the more industrial power we have in space, the cheaper all future space missions become. At some point, they might become as cheap as terrestrial projects- then we'll have colonized space in a meaningful sense.