So what ARE habitats good for anyway?

There are positive signs on the space resource front right now,
most of them relate to the moon.

There is a NASA project underway with a landing in about 5 years
to investigate lunar ice. The project documentation says that they
expect upto 58% reduction in costs for their space missions
and they have rough plans for exploiting the ice.

There's also a mission underway, funded by Radio Shack to land
a rover on the moon to look around. Proof of the existence and
form of the ice would be a great incentive to actually use the
lunar resources.

The chinese are supposedly working on something although they
aren't saying what. (Incidentally the Chinese could well be
very interested indeed in SPS-type projects, how else
are they going to power a billion people with the current
greenhouse targets?)

At the moment I have fair hopes for LEO-GEO work pushing
down costs and building launch rate. I think that within
10 years we will have seen a factor of >4x reduction in
launch costs. That may bring down the access costs to
the rich tourist range.

Combs, Mike wrote: