GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design

[Proteus]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

If you have SPS arrays, you will likely need lunar mines for the construction materials. Since they would use mass drivers to deliver materials into orbit, you would want substantial security, meaning a decent population on the Moon, which will likely need to go back to experience normal gravity after 6 months on the surface of the Moon. It is cheaper, easier, and safer to send them to an orbital habitat than to the surface of the Earth, so your space habitat would also support your lunar mines.

Or you could have asteroidal mines sending regular packets of refined material in large, slow-moving transfer orbits, to be "caught" locally and then used.

I'm willing to believe that environmental / artistic / traditionalist concerns could scotch most attempts at mining the near side of the Moon, and that scientific concerns (radio-antenna placement and stability, etc.) might be enough to hinder far-side exploitation.

Then you have to have security way out in the Belt, and you've still got rotating stations out there, but it is a different dynamic.