Not to be confused with the ‘beamships’ of UFO mythology, the concept is intended to address a very simple but crucial question; how to effectively build a spacecraft from scratch on-orbit. This is a question little considered by space agencies in the past due to the presumption that the Earth would serve as primary supplier of all technology and hardware to any communities in space. But on reflection such a notion is obviously impractical. For a space-based branch of civilization to be sustainable it must be capable of independent production of everything it needs –including its means of transportation. And many necessary spacecraft may be so large in scale that they preclude any notion of launching them wholly fabricated from the Earth. This, however, presents one with the same essential