But it does need to be balanced. There are other systems that require pinpoint accuracy. Communications require the antennas to be pointed within a degree at the most, as an example.
Antennae don't need to pointed with that kind of precision, all EM signals lose focus with distance and with that kind of distance it will be a massive focus loss. That is of course assuming a directional antenna is used, which I doubt because it would make it much harder to properly aim.
You need attitude thrusters before you even get to a spinning hull. That is how the ship will turn. A spinning ship will need more. Gyroscopes work fine when keeping a ship pointed in the same direction when it is not spinning. Hubble is also much smaller than a ship that will be going to Mars.
So you would need them anyway is what you are saying, then what is the issue? Hubble uses them to turn not to just keep pointed at something.
Panels are fine in space. There is no atmosphere, so they are more efficient. NASA even used one on the surface of Mars for the
Sojourner Rover. The rover worked fine until the signal to the base station was lost.
Panels work best when they are at 90 degree to the light source, a planet where the position of the sun is pretty constant. Another issue is the amount of power needed, the rover has no life support system, moves at crawling speed and is pretty small. A ship that is going to Mars will have to be massive, will not necessarily be in the best position for the panels to work and will require a ton more power to keep squishy bags of mostly water alive. Those panels would either have to be absolutely massive and have a mechanism that allows them to always face the sun @ 90 degrees. That also means that you can't have any panels that are "below" other panels because they would be doing nothing.
Back to the shielding issue, along with added weight.
That's again imminently solvable, we sent a rover with a nuke battery, yes it did require shielding electronics don't like radiation, all the way to Mars so the tech is mostly there. Weight is only of major concern if you are building on the ground, something of that magnitude is likely to be build the way ISS was.
You still need to accelerate the ship out of orbit and decelerate it at Mars.
Yes but that is a tiny fraction of the total travel time, not to mention that you can use orbital mechanics to help with establishing orbit and save a lot on fuel.
Okay, now you have to seal the atmosphere into the ship and there has to be a connection between the "stationary" portion and the spinning portion. I know there are joints on deep sea suits that have a seal that stops moving when it fails, but if that style joint were used on the ship between the two sections and it failed, the ship would transmit all that motion into the stationary section and that could twist the ship into bits.
It could be hit by a micro meteoroid shower that will make a bunch of holes in the hull and cause atmosphere to escape. It could blow up before leaving orbit, it could fall apart on deceleration, someone could use metric and imperial calculations and not properly convert. A million things could go wrong. Additionally why would the central portion need oxygen at all? Central portion would house a lot of the hardware needed to run the ship, it need not have atmosphere. Alternatively each module, including central can have it's own atmo, which is a better idea than a centralized system in the first place as it takes away single point of failure.
I am sure such a device will be there as a back up, but not as a primary way to catch the extra vehicular vehicle.
That's the primary way of docking to the ISS at the moment, so why would it be a backup?
I doubt there would be enough surface area to cover the ship to provide effective power. Besides, the only way they work as partial shields is to be away from the ship and to reflect some of the Sun's(the main source) radiation away from it. Being away from the ship also allows the panels to provide shade for the ship.
See above
Yes, water will of course be used as part of the shielding system as well as the heating and cooling systems. But that means that more water needs to be carried on board, and that is even more weight. Using solar panels away from the ship as part of the shielding system is lighter while still being effective.
See above
Autonomous is where it is at. People are fragile and hard to protect and limit the performance of the ship.
Autonomous is extremely limited, not to mention the cultural and social implications of putting people on Mars, space race during Cold War was a major engine of innovation, a huge amount of technology we use in our daily lives comes from NASA and space exploration.
People will not be on Mars this century.
NASA disagrees.
Musk needs to prove part of his technology before going to Mars, so he will have ships on the Moon as soon as he can get clearance to launch.
I'm not disagreeing, but it has little to do with the topic of UBI and how to avoid it. Having a large number of the population work in space is not a possibility *
in the next couple of decades* but neither is a need for UBI. The more resources are allocated to space exploration the faster technology will progress and the faster the possibility of lunar bases, advanced space stations and manned flights to beyond Mars will come.