Who Needs Fender? wrote:

bob haller wrote:

imagine what sort of structure could be in orbit if most of the ETs
had been assembled into a station

Interesting idea--I wonder if it would be possible to reach orbit with
the ET still attached (e.g. how much extra fuel would be required at
OMS-2)...

You could have a very massive structure up there by lashing several
together... now, how useful would it be based on the structure of the
ET... I guess it could be used as a storage facility... or refilled on
figure flights and used as an orbiting refueling station for later
deep-space missions...

Yeah, we would have a Space Station with two, three or four times the mass. Available volume to would be huge. Safety Factors on all the aluminum parts could meet civil engineering standards. Yeah, lots of excess aluminum would be available for lunar/mars exploration. Of course, this would have required the development and early launch of some spacebots to reprocess the aluminum into more useful Space Station structures. I can imagine the first spacebot developed would have be to simply cut most of the aluminum into wire for storage. Or, melt it into a great big raw materials blob. Reducing drag and stripping all the foam in a high drag orbit. I wonder if the foam would melt or sublime first in a vacuum? If it melts, it could be reused. If it sublimes, it could provide thrust.

I can imagine a fifth or sixth generation Space Station that might actually be built out of upper stages. The spacebots would be really busy keeping up with each launch.