A Guide to Colonization of the Solar System: Part II

It turns out that robots don’t care about unionization. Or air, for that matter.

There’s gold in them thar asteroids! (source)

For those who want to start at the beginning of this series, here is a link to Part I.

Let’s jump ahead a few years. Elon Musk successfully built that new city on Mars, and there’s rumors of a new interplanetary baby-boom. Thing is, that’s just Mars, and like Earth, it’s inside a gravity well. And as with Earth, branching out from Mars requires climbing out of a gravity well, with all the industrial-scale mechanical and chemical engineering that implies.

What’s much cheaper, more efficient, and probably practical within a decade or so? Spaceborne industries like asteroid mining and spacecraft construction. The great thing about constructing spacecraft in space is that their frames aren’t required to withstand planetary gravity, thus making construction less expensive and much easier. It would also be much more practical to send astronauts up to a low-planetary-orbit waystation, sorta like a bus terminal for astronauts.

“Honey, I might not make it back in time for supper. Don’t wait up.” (source)

From this “interplanetary bus stop,” astronauts could transit to other destinations outside low planetary orbit on…