Economy in a Space Hab

Welll, if it was me and my group setting out into interstellar space in a rotating habitat, no doubt with the intention of becoming a generation ship, Id be sure to take a good sized c-type rock with me for materials. And maybe pick up a snowball on my way through the Oort cloud as well, for volatiles.

From: Adam D. Ruppe
Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2011 11:00 AM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] : Economy in a Space Hab

On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 09:22:51PM +0530, sraj wrote:
> It would be difficult to have such an economy in a space hab, since there
> would be real constraints on the availability of physical resources.

I actually don't agree with the premise.

On Earth, any one location is limited in resources too, but we
can just bring in more from another location.

I think the same thing would happen in space habs - you can have
mines elsewhere that ship material in, and we're back to the same
kind of thing we have today - mass production, economic specialization,
competition among material suppliers, different finished product producers,
distributors, and so on.

What if you only have a small, isolated group though? For example,
a habitat converted into a starship that's now in transit?

Well, that's going to be harder to manage!

I think in this case, some combination of making due with limited
selection and build to order would be good. You can put some incentives
on recycling old stuff too - the resale and repair businesses may
do very well.