O’Neill cylinders were the template for space colonies in the Mobile Suit Gundam anime, going all the way back to the series premiere in 1979. One of many details which lent the show an air of gritty realism, despite its colorful giant robot fights.
Space Colony Art from the 1970s
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#12The Russians had good art too: https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-soviet-artists-imagined-communis... Sadly reality is never that good
I like how they have helicopters on the moon. I guess it might make sense if you're in a dome filled with air.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#13We are so driven by settling other planets, which of course I think we should do, that we forget that space habitats might be a more economical and also healthier first step into space.
Apart from the ones depicted in these images I'm more in favour with starting with cheaper techniques where we could wire up an initial station to a wire/tether, and put a weight (or another small station) at the other end, have them spin around to reproduce gravity.
Then we can move these pieces closer to asteroid belts to get resources.
A planet on the other hand is a gravity-well: it will always cost us energy and money to get out of such wells. My point is that we should start in pieces, and not necessarily put all our efforts to reach a planet. There can be many other steps in between.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#14The Russians had good art too: https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-soviet-artists-imagined-communis... Sadly reality is never that good
the ideologies (suburbia vs manufacturing strongholds) behind both visions is striking
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#15How 'serious' were these pictures? Was this something they were seriously expecting in the coming years? I'm mindful of the fact that man had basically gone from just achieving orbit, to landing on the moon in a decade, so anything could have seemed possible at that stage.
> Was this something they were seriously expecting in the coming years?
I started high school a few months after the last time anyone walked on the moon. If you'd told me then that no-one would ever again walk on the moon in the following fifty years, I'd have told you you were nuts. The general mood in the 1970's was that humankind would start to inhabit space over the following decades, and space colonies like these would be orbiting the Earth. Instead, the only humans publicly known to be in space right now are the 3 aboard the International Space Station.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#16Some of these arise from of Gerard O’Neill work on space colonies. I saw these in National Geographic in the late 70s they were hugely inspirational to me. Note while Musk advocates settling Mars Bezos has indicated a preference for space colonies such as O’Neills. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
A modern take on the idea is the somewhat smaller Kalpana One:
https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/Kalpana/KalpanaOne.htm...
https://medium.com/space-anthropology/kalpana-one-318f4e3bef...
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#17I grew up reading kids sci-fi with those kinds of pictures... makes me nostalgic!
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#18The Russians had good art too: https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-soviet-artists-imagined-communis... Sadly reality is never that good
I like how they have helicopters on the moon. I guess it might make sense if you're in a dome filled with air.
Probably not, unless those rotors we're spinning really slowly; you wouldn't need nearly as powerful a helicopter in such a weak gravity...
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#19We are so driven by settling other planets, which of course I think we should do, that we forget that space habitats might be a more economical and also healthier first step into space. Apart from the ones depicted in these images I'm more in favour with starting with cheaper techniques where we could wire up an initial station to a wire/tether, and put a weight (or another small station) at the other end, have them…
My thoughts exactly. Especially since it's much easier to simulate 1 gravity in space with rotating space stations. (You live long enough on Mars/Moon/etc., you are not coming back without being crushed).
The stations would need to be rather large, but that's just an engineering and motivation problem. But with a little extra shielding (lot's of water in the hull - could be obtained from asteroids) they'd be very useful as living space (especially after climate change ravages our home planet).
They'd also be much better staging places for solar system exploration and have an advantage in trade (refueling, low energy requirement to get anywhere, excellent target for asteroid refinement without having to bring stuff into a gravity well and back up).
Not having to fight the atmosphere for solar energy is also a plus.
But humanity still clings to traditional gravity wells like the images in the OP show. Old Italian land-house style dwellings in an orbital ring station..
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#20There’s an under appreciated problem with spinning space stations: they would be set off balance by uneven distribution of weight around the ring. This would make small scale rings a bit problematic because people and stuff need to move around. Rings the size of halo would have enough mass that the movement of people wouldn’t be enough to matter.