You make a good point on the launching of stuff directly from the terrestrial gravity well.

I seriously, doubt that any space construction project is going to rely on natural light for anything but solar power. Quite besides the enormous inconvenience of maintaining one very specific orientation with respect to the sun, without the benefit of Earth’s atmosphere you lose the effect of Rayleigh scatter, the phenomenon that makes sunlight look warm, soft, and appealing rather than cold, harsh, and unforgiving.

Fortunately, some innovative Frenchmen have invented some sort of nano-whatever black magic voodoo technology that accurately replicates the effect with just an ordinary bright LED light source and a thin pane of the aforementioned black magic voodoostuff, enabling the installation of indistinguishable-from-reality seasonally summertime skylights in every room of every floor of any skyscraper, in any laboratory in Antarctica, in infinitely deep underground cities, and yes, in spaceships.

http://space.nss.org/national-space-society-space-settlement-journal/

I particularly like this one.

http://space.nss.org/media/NSS-JOURNAL-Bootstrapping-Lunar-Industry-2016.pdf

I think it’s foolish to launch all this stuff from earth. The way to do this is to build stuff on the Moon…slowly. With a small amount of money this could be done but you would have to build from scratch just the way our ancestors did. I mean build lathes, milling machines, etc. from Lunar material. 3D printing from lunar dust. What you would have to carry is a couple of programmable rovers with many arms that could be remotely operated. (Moties!!)One technique he didn;t mention is hypervelocity particle forging. They do this now with airplanes using aluminum. I think it’s been done with steel also. On earth they use air to drive powdered metals at high speeds. When they hit the material they instantly melt, fuse and build up. Just like when you spray paint on a surface. It actually forges the material together from powders.

https://www.spee3d.com/

http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Motie

With only what was on the Moon you could build most all of what you need. You would have to take a lot of concentrating solar film mirrors to get the heat to start things off and it would probably take a lot of messing around to get stuff to work.

You’re going to need make steel, aluminum and some sort of batteries or flywheels to get mass electric launchers on the Moon from there you can launch a massive amount of stuff. So you would have a few years of toil but after that it would be a bonanza of materials. I read about a propulsion system that used the solar wind, electric currents and large wire loops to propel the solar wind. Once you have the materials you could make these, launch them and then use the solar wind for fine tuning of where you want to place the materials. A lot of this stuff could be done remotely with telerobots. The key is to have a few million dollars up front and some people willing to drone away at this stuff for several years to get the system up and running.

One thing I’m adamantly against is having the only thing separating the interior of the habitat from space one pane of glass. I think there should be several and mirrors are used to channel the light through several layers of glass. In between the glass should be a mass of material so if micrometeorites break the glass it will hit shielding . Nothing can hit the outside and directly go inside. Here’s the basic idea where the light is folded,

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/long-term-colonization-of-the-solar-system-with-290000-square-feet-per-person.html

I’m confused on exactly how this thing is set up. I see him showing light coming in sideways but if it’s spinning??? Here,

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2018-09-16-at-3.08.42-PM-min.png

At 1 RPM there would be a lot of flashing light on and off. I must be missing something. I could see light coming from the dock but then you don’t need the rear portion. What he shows is confusing. I like the folded light path though with shielding in between the interior and exterior. With the inner glass shielded then losing a pane or mirror outside would be no big deal.