Shala does have some population capacity though, and we are likely learning things with people being on Philadelphia and Enterprise.
With Columbia being a testing station, it might well be redundant by the time we are able to build it.
I don't think so. here's why.
We're learning things with people on
Philadelphia and
Enterprise, but we're learning
the wrong things. Or rather, not enough things.
The
Philadelphia is an office building.
Enterprise is a factory. Our lunar mines are the equivalent of deep-sea oil drilling rigs. All are places people go to work, and presumably stay for a certain length of time, and then
come back. They're not residences, and they're not designed to be scaled up into one. You could probably live aboard one of the big stations full-time, but they're not designed for it and people probably aren't even allowed to under the normal course of things. Presumably, people rotate on and off in long shifts.
So we're not learning enough things, realistically. We're not learning, for example, how to handle pregnancy and childbirth in space conditions. We're probably not learning how to handle disabilities, or how to handle medical care aboard the stations at all aside from "provide acute/emergency care and ship them back earthside as soon as something goes wrong." We're not learning the psychological requirements for people to be comfortable in a space station for years at a time.
Building
Columbia won't give us all that information immediately... but it's where we start learning those things.
Would not be surprised if the station designs change in the next plan. I expect we'll have a population target, rather than a specific project goal. (Or both.)
However, we are in a war. So I'm not sure that this is important right now.
Given a population target, it becomes quasi-mandatory for us to build
Columbia, that or skip straight to lunar bases... And realistically, we will want large-scale permanently inhabited space stations not parked on the moon sooner or later, so we might as well go ahead and do it.
Though in my opinoin it is a higher priority to get Tib Stabilizers in Venusian Orbit, or maybe set up the Conestoga Class to get the ball rolling on interplanetary logistics.
There is no reasonable way for us to do tiberium stabilizers in Venus orbit in the Fourth Four Year Plan.
Consider. The 2000-point megaproject was just to build the satellites and launch them to LEO. Putting them into orbit around Venus is a considerably more ambitious launch project. Note that it took dedicated ferry runs from
Pathfinder just to put a much smaller tiberium
mapping constellation around Venus.
Earth to Venus is days on a G-drive ship, and
months on a fusion drive ship. And we'd be requiring a whole lot of ships.
We'd need, at a
minimum, the
Conestoga-class (with several hulls ready to go), or a new class of interplanetary fusion shuttle using the second-generation engines that are restartable and can do multiple main engine burns. With a high production run.
The scope of ferrying all the satellites to Venus would be an immense project by the standards of our current space infrastructure. Furthermore, it wouldn't be enough. That is a satellite
constellation; there are a very large number of individual nodes. Realistically, they will require a continuous human presence capable of monitoring and servicing them in real time. Which means we need to keep people in Venus orbit. Which means either keeping one or more G-drive ships very very busy doing shuttle runs... or doing serious work on
Columbia so we can design a sustainble environment for prolonged stays in Venus orbit.
...
There's just very little beyond science missions that we can do on Venus until we develop more flexible and capable space travel infrastructure. Setting up major industrialized projects is too big.
