[aDyslecticCrow]

I suspect without ISRU production of bulk orbit sheet metal, the most feasible solution is to repurpose rockets in their whole.

Building a station this large is gonna be costly even within the cargo hold of starship. But six of them, gutted of insides as welded end to end could provide the vast majority of the bulk mass.

This assume rather sophisticated orbital welding and object manipulation; but its feasible we could do it with robots.

[Terr_]

> repurpose rockets in their whole

Reminds me of a short sci-fi story:

> The engines are part of the orbiter, so they can be brought home and reused. The solid boosters drop off minutes after liftoff and are recovered for refurbishment. Even the unmanned heavy-lift cargo launchers use the same basic system. But until our group came along, the huge external tanks were simply dumped, after fueling the shuttle to almost orbital velocity.

> [...] The main purpose of the design is simply to keep the tanks from falling. The two massive ends of the Farm act like a dipole in the gradient of the Earth's gravitational field, so each deck winds up orbiting edge-forward, like a flat plate skimming. This reduces the drag caused by the upper fringes of the atmosphere, extending our orbital lifetime.

https://www.davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm

[ceejayoz]

This was considered with the orange Space Shuttle fuel tanks; they went almost all the way to orbit anyways.

[m4rtink]

I think something would have to de done about the thermal isolation - it looked like to be quite flimsy & I guess a couple months on low orbit with all the UV light and atomic oxygen could easily result in cloud of dark orange stuff slowly departing the tank or any construction built from them.

[xavxav]

aren't rockets like the starship almost the opposite of what you want in a space station? They want to minimize the integrity of the rocket as much as possible (without blowing up) to reduce the mass while for a station you want robustness (for pressure & impacts).

[avmich]

Starship tanks likely hold several bars of pressure and survive transportation to orbit...

[aDyslecticCrow]

That is actually with the caviat that the internal pressure help structurally a bit. But that is still plenty for a gentle rotation in otbit and 1 bar of pressure.

And if the plan is to do this; you want to prepare the rocket for this purpose anyway so nothing stops you from making a thicker wall and sacrificing payload capacity since the hull is the payload.

[m4rtink]

Starship is also meant to be reusable, so there is an additional margin already built in.