Reply To: The Future of Orbital Living

[DeVaultSetter]

Ensuring an orbital stays in its initial position is challenge enough, so adding/reducing mass to it may add further complications. Then there are other factors to consider like solar storms, meteors, interstellar radiation, and our very own space debris. To produce anything organic on it, temperature control is required, and is a challenge even on a “primitive” model such as the space station.
The depressing news on the space elevator is from Wikipedia:

Available materials are not strong and light enough to make an Earth space elevator practical. Some sources expect that future advances in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) could lead to a practical design. Other sources believe that CNTs will never be strong enough. Possible future alternatives include boron nitride nanotubes, diamond nanothreads and macro-scale single crystal graphene.

Having everything hydrogen fuelled for energy and heat would reduce waste a bit, the problem of waste disposal/exchange is, and will ever be costly and involved. Surely the garbots of tomorrow can come to the party as well! 🙂