I want a country to make one. Any country. I would gladly pay for a ticket for a week long stay on an aesthetic space station. You have no idea how badly I want to live in the kind of futuristic future depicted in science fiction.
> I would gladly pay for a ticket for a week long stay on an aesthetic space station.
How much would you pay? Because the capital cost of building it was hand wavey thrown out as $500B and the operating costs of facility would be exorbitant.
Staring out the observation bay for hours on end with my favorite mood music playing through my headphones. Then going for a spacewalk, before heading back inside and having dinner with my friends in the rotating orbital restaurant. After that, I'll play an online video games with Earth-based players. To conclude my day, I'll return to my luxury pod, lay on the side in bed while looking outside at the planet through the port window, a mere inches from my face, and let my dreams, and the low humm of the station's machinery, take me to sleep.
> Because the capital cost of building it was hand wavey thrown out as $500B and the operating costs of facility would be exorbitant.
Yeah, estimated using the inflated cost of the ISS and other historic projects... give a tenth of the money to a private company not bound to political pork interest like NASA/ESA and they'll manage it just fine. Alternatively, give NASA/ESA free rein to do things the efficient way.
The problem at the root is that, historically, space access never was a plain "we need task X accomplished" - there always was the political interest of those with decision power to spread R&D and construction far across the country, so that everyone got a little piece (and every politician could claim of having brought jobs to their voters). That caused enormous inefficiencies - stuff needs to be shipped three times across the continent (look at Airbus supply chain, it's insane), there's an enormous amount of red tape and coordination efforts required, and turnaround times are insane. Meanwhile SpaceX has like two manufacturing plants and four launch sites and especially they manufacture a lot of what they need completely on their own so they don't have the typical delays you have with a classic vendor-supplier relationship, and they save on profit margins of all the intermediates as well.
