>>12748514>How do they profit from doing it? The first rotating habitats won't really be habitats, they'll be factories. Doing resource extraction shit in zero G is an insane hassle and can be avoided completely if you just load your raw materials into a big centrifuge which contains all your crushers and sifters and leech beds and so on. If you are a space colony on a low gravity planet with a conveniently close but inconveniently low-gravity moon right above your head (ie, if you are on Mars), then building a spinning factory station next to that moon makes sense (because it lets you do anything you want to do in orbit without needing to launch bulk amounts of basalt fiber/steel/aluminum/whatever from the planet itself, meaning your valuable propellant production can get more leverage by only launching the really high cost/rare/complex stuff (microchips, machines, people).
>What resources or power do they gain? Rent from inhabitants? Like I said, they work like an offshore colony next to an island that is loaded with resources but inconvenient to live on. Think giant oil platform city next to medium sized island loaded with ores and things but toxic soil or something.
>How do those people get their living? They work in the factories turning asteroid mush into useful products.
>The void is cruel, there's nothing there. Except for billions of free floating objects with gravity way too low to directly colonize or industrialize. Learning how to build and live in rotating habitat things around Mars will allow us to colonize the asteroid belt as a direct next step.
>I love space habitats as much as the next guy but planetary surfaces are where it's at. There's simply not nothing on planets and moons and stuff.Planetary surfaces are definitely the best thing to colonize at our current level. We simply don't have the experience doing industry in orbit. However, we WILL learn to do that eventually around Mars, because Mars has its little moons.
