The original Stanford Torus proposal has detailed costings at the end. They base this on a mass driver on the Moon supplying most of the mass (consists mainly of the shielding). and they estimate it as $190.8B in 1975 dollars. So that’s $851.99B in 2016 dollars.
So if’ that’s right, it would cost less than a trillion dollars. If we can reduce launch costs of course it would go down further. Estimate here Building the Colony and Making It Prosper
I used the conversion calculator here US Inflation Calculator
- How much would it cost to maintain it. If almost nothing, if you can build it for a trillion dollars and then it just stays like that for a thousands years - that would be a cost of a billion dollars per year/
- Remember it is split amongst 10,000 people. So that’s about $100 million per person. If you paid for it over a century, its a million dollars per year.
- Can it pay for itself? If it can then that’s a big reason for building it. The original idea for the Stanford Torus was to pay for itself by export of low cost solar power to Earth and they’d use it to make solar power sations in orbit. Doesn’t quite work now, our modern solar power from space ideas don’t require 10,000 people living there permanently.
- If not, it’s a bit hard to see it being worthwhile to set it up as a place to live. Only very wealthy billionaires, but then, that hundred million dollars is an amount some wealthy people would pay for it.
It’s the same though for any colony in space. I can’t see them being built just as places to live. But if there is a strong other reason for being there, people could end up living there as part of their work / project. And then if the habitats could be made very easy to maintain, then longer term people might be able to just “live there” but first they’d have to pay off their construction cost. And I’m not sure how easy it would be to make them easy to maintain long term.
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