I'm not trying to take the wind out of the sails of any vehicles going elsewhere, just think LEO is a good place to start. Something like, before crossing an o

I'm not trying to take the wind out of the sails of any vehicles going elsewhere, just think LEO is a good place to start. Something like, before crossing an ocean, let's cross the Florida straits over to the Bahamas. > The Earth's magnetosphere actually captures dangerous radiation and various anomalies in the belt distribution cause portions of low-Earth orbits to be irradiated. Pick the favorable orbits. We have data on our ISS astronauts. Seems like we can go years up there if we wanted. > And the medical issues. Most folks are going to want to go up for a few weeks/months and then come back to tell the tale. A habitat might employ centripetal acceleration. Anyhow, I think medical issues will be manageable. I suspect there are a few orders of magnitude more people who are interested in a vacation in space or work from space scenario than a long distance voyage to the moon or mars where you are cut off from the home world and have a big latency cost on communications. I think this is about filling rockets with large sums of cargo to keep the space business growing. If a starship can be made for $5 million, there are plenty of yachts just down the coast from Cape Canaveral that cost more than that. If you could give folks a stay in LEO for ~$50k, there will be plenty of people who can afford that. I bet you could find tech companies that would let you work remotely from space as a signing bonus. > There are a handful of (very interesting) crystal manufacturing that requires zero-g. These could be done in automated or human tended LEO or LLO manufacturing labs. You don't need a large human presence. Agreed, I'd add that this isn't so much about keeping the number of people down, but increasing the demand for people to go into space. I'm excited about the side effects it will have for technology and science. > To the downsides, LEO lacks any resources whatsoever, and still has a nontrivial delta-v to the rest of the system. All your arguments in favor could be applied to the Moon, which does have LOTS of resources and better radiation shielding. The moon and mars are good places to settle too. I'm only arguing that Earth LEO is easier to start with because Earth has more readily available resources than any of the other locations. LEO is still hard enough where we'll have to improve our ships and space quarters for design and comfort. So I think it's a good stepping stone.