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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.
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?")
There are no resource shortages, just resource allocation imbalances caused by market and government distortions
There are no water shortages, only water collection and distribution issues.
There are no energy shortages, only energy collection and distribution issues.
There is no doomsday like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth coming. People solve problems. The biggest problem humanity faces today is the increasing fascism of the 1st world governments by their theft of money through taxation and inflation. Governments create problems and they are larges mass murderers the world has ever known: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
We will get into space when is it "optimum" and the pieces all fall into place. I'm encouraged by SpaceX, Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries. Maybe we will have "The Man Who Sold the Moon" in my lifetime. I hope I live long enough to see it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2Wx230gYJw
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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.