The High Frontier

As a rough guess I'd say that
Mars would eclipse Deimos once every 30 hours and 17 minutes for about half a
martian year. We could either have an orbital habitat whose day/night cycle
is 30 hours and 17 minutes arranging for the eclipses to happen at night or
we could have a 24 hour day/night cycle and put up with some inconveniant
eclipses in the middle of the day and perhaps extend the daylight hours to
compensate. Since Deimos traverses a full 360 degrees of its orbit every 30
hours and 17 minutes, a Martian eclipse would last no longer than 2 hours and
7 minutes. I was wondering about this very thing. Sounds like there's no reason to rule out an O'Neill parked next to Deimos. Also makes it sound like Aresynchronous SPS might get eclipsed somewhat more often than ones in GEO, but perhaps not impossibly so. This orbit is also convieniantly close to a Martian stationary
orbit and a good location to manufacture Solar Power Satellites for
deployment into that orbit. For a large influx of settlers heading toward
Mars the economics of Solar Power satellites would make sense and would
compare favorably to them bringing their own nuclear reactors to power their
settlements. You should check out http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/msad03mar99_1.htm, where there's discussion of construction of rectennas on Mars from indigenous materials. One thing I found fascinating in this article is that it credits the original idea of making propellant on Mars from atmospheric CO2 with Gerard O'Neill, a concept now universally associated with Robert Zubrin. As settlements on the Martian surface grows, so too would the
orbital settlement on Deimos. Since Mars generates a lot of public interest,
it seems that Matian orbit might be a good place to built the first orbital
colony. Maybe, but I'll be surprised if the first orbital habitat isn't built in HEO. It just seems logical to expect space settlement to start out close to Earth, and then move outward gradually. But yeah, in the long run, they'll be orbiting Mars, in the Belt, in Jupiter's Trojan points, and beyond. The colony would be of Island One size or smaller, either a Bernal
Sphere, a torus, or a small cylinder such as Island Three - Model One.
Cylinders have maximum area at 1 g while bernal sphere force some people to
cling to a slanted landscape at less than 1 g. Yeah, I have a preference for cylinders for this same reason. But a sphere results in the lowest-mass radiation shield. I think a good compromise is a shortened cylinder with spherical endcaps, only about twice as long as its diameter. That increases the amount of level land area, but would only be a modest departure from a sphere.