This is surely the way ahead for long-term manned stations. It still has significant engineering challenges:
Do you de-spin the hub dock, or do you spin up the approaching shuttle? Spinning up the passengers in a zero-gee environment might have physiological kickback (think vomit comet), while having everything spinning on the station is a PITA for communications and survey, so my money is on attaching the lock to the de-spun stuff.
Given you have some zero-gee de-spun stuff, how do you vacuum seal the bearings? This is everyday engineering for the waferfab and cryopump industries, but scaling up to a bleedin' habitat will take some doing (think multiple bearings and scavenging pumps).
What is the structural lifetime of a plastic fabric under space radiation? Even light alloys are proving a challenge. How do you provide adequate insulation? My money is on a double-wall construction with structural inner, and an aerogel particle-shower catcher in between. The aerogel would be squooshed in post-inflation.
Seems to me this is a lot more plausible than hypothetical medical advances to induce long-term tolerance of low-gee einvironments.
Like the SSTO in the background, but don't believe it any more than the bioengineering.
