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NASA's Space Colony Designs From the '70s
New submitter oag2 writes "Discover Magazine has a new slideshow of NASA's pie-in-the-sky (or, rather, toroid-in-the-sky) mock-ups of what space colonies would look like, complete with verdant mountains, flowing rivers, cocktail parties, and a guy on a floating bicycle. Though the designs are retro-futuristic, the artist who made them was prescient in other ways. From the accompanying article: "In the context of the 70s, when we had some sense of momentum from Apollo as far as expanding the human presence in space, it seemed like the kind of thing we could have just picked up and moved with," Davis says. "And it's still possible. It's just a matter of where we decide to spend our money." But Guidice remembers a more telling prophecy from O'Neill. "One of the most memorable things I ever heard him say was, 'If we don't do it right now,' meaning in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago, 'then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority. We will not have any sort of inclination to see this through."'"
The O'Neill referenced above is Gerard K. O'Neill, physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute. He wrote a book in 1976 called The High Frontier which featured these mock-up paintings, and explained in great detail how the space habitats would function. It's a fascinating book, and well worth reading if the pictures pique your curiosity.
A Dyson sphere and a Ring World?
"Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke in 1972 featured this heavily. Do a google image search for more eye candy. Oh yeah, and read the book too.
Look at the TFA that is. Too depressing.
It's just a matter of where we decide to spend our money." But Guidice remembers a more telling prophecy from O'Neill. "One of the most memorable things I ever heard him say was, 'If we don't do it right now,' meaning in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago, 'then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority. We will not have any sort of inclination to see this through.
Very sad. Very true.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ah, yes, "The High Frontier". Back when NASA thought they could build a shuttle that didn't cost $600 million per flight. The plan was to set up a big moon colony first, mine the moon, build a big catapult, and launch materials from the moon to a Kevlar "catcher" in Earth orbit. (What could possibly go wrong?)
The 1952 Colliers/Von Braun space program, with its plans for a big wheel-type space station from which Moon and Mars missions would be launched, was more realistic. What killed it was the Apollo "Man/Moon/Decade" goal. That was achieved, but with technologies useful for little else.
NASA still thinks that way. Their Mars Direct program would have sent a manned mission to Mars as a one-shot mission.
Space travel with chemical rockets is just too inefficient for big projects in space. Fusion still doesn't work. Fission would work but is rather messy. None of the big fancy hypersonic space plane things really work. (Remember Reagan's hypersonic space plane scheme? Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and designer of the SR-71's powerplant, refused to bid on that. "We used titanium (on the SR-71). You know of something stronger?")
Still one of the most influential concepts of space habitats since ever.
'If we don't do it right now,' meaning in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago, 'then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority.
Sure, we'll never do it, but the reason is completely wrong! This is about the United States, which is not overpopulated.
Have you ever been to Wyoming? Shoot, not even Manhattan's overpopulated.
The reasons we won't do this space stuff are completely political.
The "Space Age" was a historical anomaly, a facet of the Cold War.
...with these images for their cover when I was in middle school.
I went to middle school in the late 90s, the textbooks were circa 1980s. Goes to show how outdated Florida textbooks were at that time and probably still are somewhat outdated.
I loved glazing over the cover as it made my imagination wonder how they would go about building those mega colonies.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
A half-century has passed since Earth began moving its burgeoning population into gigantic orbiting space colonies. A new home for mankind, where people are born and raised...and die."
I think the only way such massively huge structures could be built is by having armies of autonomous, or semi-autonomous, robotic machines that could mine asteroids for raw supplies, and be factories to turning those raw materials into finished construction supplies, and then assemble the components. That technology didn't exist in the 1970's and any attempt at stuff like this back then would have been futile. It reminds me of someone who told me about a project that started in the late 50's to create an automated, mechanical card file system. By the time the system was finished in the 60's it was obsolete, having been replaced by computers, which could do the job cheaper, more reliably and many times faster.
Proverbs 21:19
Even the Chinese won't have the money eventually. L5 colonies are likely to be far, far in the future.
Of course, had we started them in the 70s, they would have lasted until we flatlanders couldn't resupply them with machinery and critical raw materials. Perhaps it's best.
I love the concept of these space colonies. They could be a great benefit for science in low gravity conditions. Imagine what kinds of materials we could make in the absence of gravity. Imagine harnessing solar energy directly from the source and send it to earth instead of suffering several transitions steps, where each of them incurs losses.
Sadly, the amount of material required to build a single self sustainable colony like this would be enormous. I wonder how much fuel it would take to lift that much mass conventionally. It would have to be a global effort with serious funding from every nation and a very long term project.
The only way I can see it happening with the current socioeconomic system is by using a mass lifting system like a space elevator or a mass driver or whatever is currently considered the most feasible option. Even then the economic cost of the materials alone might be too much. Towing an asteroid somewhere into Medium Earth Orbit and refining it's metals in space might be required.
All evidence of human population dynamics suggests that human population on earth is about to peak and begin to decline. Not only that it does not appear that this will happen as a result of resource exhaustion, but rather as a result of some natural population dynamic. Just about every (if not every) demographic group on the planet is showing decreased levels of birth per person (actually the statistics are actually number of births per woman).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
As a child I could not wait for the year 2000 to come....
When it came I was dissapointed.
Still am.
...who looked at that illustration and instantly thought of what would happen if it got punctured by a micrometeor or similar fast moving small object.
lack of compartmentalization and emergency airtight shelters would probably ruin that cocktail party for sure
Can I get "things we've been capable of doing for decades but haven't" for $1000 please.
On a serious note, we do recognize that things like "the skywheel" (e.g. halo?) will be plausible once space mining finally gets going, right?
'If we don't do it right now, ... then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority.
O'Neill was right. The world population recently passed 7 billion people and its growth does not seem to be slowing down. As I see it, if we don't come to grips with this and learn to regulate our own numbers, mother nature will eventually do it for us, but then through war, famine and disease, in which case space colonies will be a lot less likely.
And it's not like space colonies can ever be an answer to overpopulation. Think about it: if we could manage to build an orbital habitat large enough to house a million people, a thousand of these would be needed for a billion people... after which there would still be billions of people left on the planet. In my view this strategy would only be feasible if 1.) we had hordes of robots and nanobots that could quickly build the colonies for us using only asteroids as raw material, and 2.) we had multiple space elevators to transport all those people up into orbit. None of that technology is available yet, while overpopulation is already a problem.
Finally, even if we did manage to build one or more successful, self-sustaining colonies in orbit, on the Moon or on Mars, overpopulation would probably still be an issue for them, so we might as well learn to deal with it now, here on Earth, before we start working on grandiose schemes to populate the rest of solar system.
#7 looks a lot like a Soviet Venus lander:
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/venera-on-Vensurf-artists.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
In these times this just looks like another escape from reality. Cut spendings on hopeless military missions, focus on internal issues like poverty and illieracy. Building a new economy based on space exploration sounds intriguing, but it won't make a real difference to emplyment rates.
of the Space Nutter religion. They really fervently believe that the Earth is a deadly rock but that space is somehow filled with fresh air and mountaintops.
I've seen it on TV! I think the name of the place is Babylon 5.
As a child I could not wait for the year 2000 to come....
When it came I was dissapointed.
Still am.
/AC cradles AC in his or her arms and gently rocks you back to sleep.
I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/
The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.
The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.
I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.
Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.
Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If it is a govt publication, use "Space Settlements" (NASA SP-413). If it is a non-govt publication, OK to title "Space Colonies" (Stewart Brand). Colonies is a bad word for many third world countries, and in 1970s NASA didn't want to stir the pot on this.
Artwork (big Mb files, great for posters) at http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArtHiRes/70sArt/art.html (including vintage 1970s rogallo hang-glider. Oops, that C word appears)
NASA SP-413 at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770014162_1977014162.pdf
Space Colonies (A Coevolution Book) at http://www.amazon.com/Space-Colonies-A-Coevolution-Book/dp/0140048057/
mfwright@batnet.com
Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg
Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.
Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/
But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.
Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I waited almost 20 years for 1984, I wish I could have been disappointed.