>>12199960>How would /sfg/ build an O’Neill cylinder using today’s infrastructure?Simple.
First, build a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
Second, use that colony as a staging area for missions to Phobos (ie most equipment is build and launched from Mars, with the really specific and difficult shit like microchips being sent from Earth).
Third, develop the process machinery necessary to extrude high volumes of very long and high quality basalt fibers by melting Phobos rocks.
Fourth, construct a large steel bottle with a 200 meter diameter and a 1000 meter length by electron-beam welding steel panels together (make the steel from iron ores from Phobos).
Fifth, wrap the steel hull in basalt fibers (for tensile strength) and pressurize it to 1 atmosphere, outfit the interior with carpeting or whatever you put inside an O'Neill cylinder
Done. Recipe produces ~628,000 square meters of internal area. Pro tip, attach copies of the same mining and refining equipment you used to build this thing out of Phobos materials, use some very large low-TWR electric propulsion thrusters to escape Mars orbit and get into the asteroid belt, and park your habitat ship in Ceres orbit to repeat the process.
Fun fact, Phobos alone has enough building material to build enough habitats to house a hundred billion people assuming each square kilometer of internal area is as productive as a typical sub-tropical environment on Earth. Ceres has enough material to create living space for a population a million times bigger.
