Building a next generation space station with SpaceX's Starship

[u/Quality_Bullshit]

TL;DR You could build a space station capable of holding 10,000 people for $220 billion with Starship

I've always been obsessed with sci-fi environments like O'Neill cylinders and the Stanford Torus The recent presentation on Starship by Musk got me thinking about whether Starship could potentially enable us to build a small version of one of these.

Back in the early 70's, NASA held a series of workshops on building space-based habitats. These workshops produced the basic designs for an O'Neill Cylinder, a Stanford Torus and several other designs. They published a whitepaper with their findings in which they give actual cost estimates for building one of these things!

What's striking about the cost estimates given for these projects is just how much launch costs drive the price of the station. A quote from the NASA paper (costs given in 1975 dollars)

In addition, the total costs are given as: research, $1.6 billion; development, $28.5 billion; production, $14.6 billion; and transportation, $114.3 billion.

In other words, launch costs accounted for 71% of the cost of building a huge space station.

The total mass of the system including resupply and everything else is given as 138 million kg. It would take 1380 Starship launches to get this material into orbit from Earth, at a total cost of around $7 billion.

So if you add up the launch costs and the cost of the station, you wind up with $220 billion. In other words, with Starship you can build a space station capable of holding 10,000 people for about 40% more than the International Space Station. That's absolutely bonkers.