Space station scenario feasibility

I have settings with orbital colonies around the earth. First off my idea is, if it is not profitable we would not fund it en masse. Therefore I came up with the idea that in the future we discovered that Space foundries create amazing alloys, basically near-perfect alloys - for example leading to the development of room-temperature superconductors. And of course other fine goodies, research (most notably some progress in Graviton research - which is one of the sub-plots) and most notably - staging area for lunching first long term self-sustainable Arc, which will serve as a habitat and base for Mars Ring Assembly construction workers. Mars still suffers from tedious and expensive sky-cranes.

Some techno babble tools, rules and hand-waves for my question:

• Where gravity is desired, I have classic centripetal rings where it's a pain to pour water into a glass.
• Power is solved with solar farms or SMES battery deliveries from the surface.
• Cooling, especially of foundries is made with another Unobtanium Alloy used as a heat-sink, ejected into space.
• Atmosphere is made with closed cycle life support systems which are effective but still require resupplies on average once per month (can function 3 months on emergency protocol)
• Food is partially supplied from the surface (the good stuff like meat, branded alcohol...), but a lot of the pressure in logistics is handled with commercial 0G hydroponics selling spacetatoes.
• Thanks to Room-temperature superconductors, we built a really cool Orbital Ring, lowering cost of surface-orbit transfer to 20 bucks per Kg. use allowed by everybody, profit shared by nations and corps who funded it.
• Inter-station trade and travel is done through shuttles either directly station to station or Ring train station to space station - I wanted space truckers for 'rule of cool'.
• To avoid collisions, orbital lanes are taken by "first come first served". Better lanes become expensive properties sold by moving your station to different orbit, allowing the buyer to move his station to your former place instead. Enforced purely by politics and economic embargoes - nobody wants tons of space debris flying around. Position is stabilized and corrected with thrusts, but there are emergency tug-ships which WILL for a big fine correct your position.
• Health effects of 0G are mostly hand waived by Centripetal habitats and advanced medicine.

And finally my question:

Are space stations feasible, under these rules, to for example have spacious corridors where one can "fly thru 4 people abreast"? Could there be Centripetal Rings with diameter 1600m (circumference 5000m) with speed around 1RPM to maintain 1G (correct me if am wrong here) made from CURRENT materials (To give me some perspective so I can scale my stations properly when super-alloys are applied). That must be MASSIVE structural strain right? And now... could there be maybe even hundreds of them around Earth in various distances, with collision safe orbit distance and still keep all of them in the planet's gravity well?

Feel free to pinpoint major red flags in my rules too (but keep in mind it is a sci-fi), but my main concerns are those stations. Thank you.

posted almost 4 years ago

Prahara‭

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