Interesting story from Fox News (or Faux News, depending on your politics :-) ).

=====

Setting Sail on a Giant, Floating City

.....

Freedom Ship today exists only on paper. But some 3,000 families and businesses have already signed on to live and work on it. When it does launch, in 2006, this leviathan of comfortable living will travel a lazy circuit around the world every two years.

.....

The size of four aircraft carriers, the $8 billion Freedom Ship will essentially be a flat-bottomed barge with a 25-story steel building, propelled by gigantic turbine engines. It will be topped by airstrips and ringed by a marina where residents and visitors can dock boats, and will measure nearly a mile long — 4,500 feet long, 750 feet wide and 350 feet tall.

Freedom Ship will have space for 17,000 resident families, up to 20,000 daily visitors and 3,000 commercial enterprises, including banks, restaurants, grocery stores, and video-rental places.

.....

To that end, the ship has been designed in a way unlike any cruise ship. There are ocean-view suites that cost up to $40 million and cover thousands of square feet. But the ship will include less expensive apartments so that there will be a viable middle class. And smaller 450-square-foot studios are available for about $130,000, a steal by New York City, San Francisco or Tokyo standards.

.....

The 500 engineers and countless workers who will build the ship are scheduled to begin construction this summer and should complete the ship in 44 months. If the ship does well, they might build three or four more ships like it, each crewed by 5,000 to 10,000 staff, Gooch said.

.....

=====

Could a small LEO space colony be funded the same way? Is an orbital "city" any more far-fetched than a floating one? I'm thinking the reduced-cost/increased-volume inflatable habitats Bigelow Aerospace is developing as part of a $500m ten-year Earth-Moon cruiseship project could be mass-produced and launched relatively cheaply using Russian boosters, like the upcoming "Aurora" launched from the space complex on the Australian territory Christmas Island.

Being the first orbital "retirement village" or "luxury resort" or whatever would make it a prime tourist destination for those who could afford it. Its existence may give impetus to the development of some form of CATS - see <a href="http://www.interorbital.com/Manned_Space_Ops.htm"; target=_blank">this webpage, for some recent developments. This of course would lower launch costs and increase the tourist market.

Maybe CATS won't happen until there's a demonstrably "sizable" tourist market (no matter how select) and a place to actually VISIT. (The ISS doesn't really count IMO, since it's designed to cater for the needs of scientists, not tourists, although even Tito and Shuttleworth are proving there is A LITTLE demand.) Classic chicken and egg conundrum, I suppose, but we don't necessarily have to wait until CATS to launch a few inflatable habitats NOW. We don't even have to finish the orbital colony before people could actually move into the first deployed habitats. Hurry up, Robert!

Of course, some people will be deliberately contrarian and knock this idea without constructively suggesting solutions to possible problems they forsee - but then the critics never make history. :-)