Space Habitat Plan #2

I have this idea that the only way we are ever going to effectively explore the solar system is to construct a giant space craft that can house a large number of people (say a thousand) and protect and provide for them indefinitely. My original idea was to build a sphere approximately one mile in diameter with a one large interior space that would provide a couple of square miles of farm land. Recently I have been thinking more about the asteroid belt and while one large interior space may be large enough to give the illusion of being boundless, it does suffer from being susceptible to total annihilation from a single high impact collision. A craft with several separate smaller spheres, while not offering as good a ratio of ground area to structure mass, might be better able to survive such a collision.

The overall dimensions of the craft would be similar, but the habitation spheres would only be one to two thousand feet in diameter. Whether the entire assembly would be contained in a larger protective sphere is something that will have to be determined. These spheres would not rotate on their axis, but would be attached to the main craft at some distance from the central axis. Each one would have it's own top (pointing to the central axis) and bottom (pointing away).

Update September 2016 replaced missing picture.