Of course, it is not easy to build a large space station where hundreds of thousands of people can live, or even more. You need a lot of materials, and even if it is built, the station residents have to deal with two major health problems: the effects of low gravity on their bodies and too much cosmic radiation. A recent non-peer-reviewed article offers an ambitious solution to these problems. According to this solution, the space station can be built inside an asteroid and the asteroid can be rotated.
This approach was put forward by David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Researcher at Rockwell Collins, and it gives a pretty detailed idea of what will be needed to build this station. More importantly, using self-replicating robots, the asteroid can be turned into a space station in just 12 years and at a relatively low cost of $4.1 billion. This is quite a reasonable amount when it comes to large space projects.
Ignoring the robotic requirements, the first step for Jensen was to find a suitable asteroid that could be converted into a space station, and he chose the asteroid Atira for that purpose. This asteroid is a Near-Earth Object that never crosses the orbit of our planet. With a diameter of 4.8 kilometers, this asteroid has a stony structure and even has a satellite, a secondary object about 1 kilometer across.
The idea is based on using the material from the asteroid to build everything, including the solar panels and the station itself. Jensen decided on a structure in the form of a torus, that is, in the form of a donut. The outer edge of this hollow-centre circular structure protected against a variety of hazards, from radiation to micro-meteorites, while multiple levels could be built on the inside to maximize habitability.
Atira rotates every 3.4 hours, but this needs to be accelerated significantly to provide near-Earth gravity to the inhabitants of this ring station. With a radius of just over 2.1 kilometers, the station only needs to complete one turn every 105 seconds.
The cost and timeline are approximate, but these stem from crucial robotic details: sending robots that can build every component of the space station, from habitable modules to solar cells, using materials found on the asteroid. This will include other bots so that the first group sent will be as small as possible.
Once these robots are built, they can easily move to other asteroids and restart the rebuilding process.
People have been dreaming of this since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903. Plans may not always be viable, but this idea certainly gets one step closer to what can be achieved.
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