The inhabitants, members of the workforce of a space manufacturing complex, would return after work to homes on the inner surface of a large sphere, nearly a mile in circumference, rotating to provide them with gravity comparable to that of the Earth. Their habitat would be fully shielded against cosmic rays and solar flares by a non-rotating spherical shell, accumulated from the slag of industrial processes carried out on lunar surface material. Outside the shielded area agricultural crops, far less sensitive to radiation than are humans, would be grown in the intense sunlight of space.
Natural sunshine is brought inside through external mirrors.
For the short distances within the habitat, automobiles would be unnecessary, and transport would be on foot or bicycle. A climb for the equator past the small villages on the hillsides, to the rotation axis where gravity would be zero, would take about 20 minutes. A corridor at the axis would permit floating in zero-gravity out to the agricultural areas, the observatories, the docking ports, and the industries. In the economics of manufacturing, the provision of attractive living areas of this kind appears to be worthwhile relatively early in the program, because families could remain for several years at a time, rather than coming for short tours of duty at high cost for transportation.