The high efficiency transportation between ground and GEO could enable the building of a few R&D versions of the rotating torus space settlements envisioned in detail by the NASA SP-413 record of a summer conference in 1976 at Stanford. Passively shielded, ought to be close to ideal for use in GEO, too. At 10,000 people each, along with their condominium style homes, agriculture and light industry, a good start at expanding civilization into space. Once a working debugged design is proven out there, many more of them could be built robotically using mostly materials from lunar and asteroidal sources. Several illustrations of how the Stanford Torus could appear can be found at:

http://www.spaceref.com/redirect.ref?url=members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm&id=2078

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