Science Fiction: The Lunar Gateway

 

Psyche 16 was a roughly spherical planet core about two hundred kilometres in diameter. Idealy the plan was to send a swarm of drones out to the belt to push the rocks together and build a planet from nuclear waste and asteroids cleaning up the solar system. But we went a different path.

We built a maglev catapult to launch a million ton space probe into space, and landing on the far side of the 'Asteroid' pushed Psyche 16 toward earth orbit where a second probe landed on Psyche 16 to put Psyche 16 in Lunar Orbit. 

Once here it was mined and an O'Neil cylinder cut from the Asteroid that was eighty kilometres in diameter, and one hundred and sixty kilometres long. The dominant feature being the large impact crater from the original Asteroid. This would become the Lunar Gateway, its slow rotation creating a false gravity and there we built a farming colony with access to the Ice and minerals mined on the Moon to supply it.

The Spherical Remnant on the other hand would continue to be mined. Its cold and dark hollow served as a shipyard and metal mining facility for the three dee printing of a second O'Neil cylinder.