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Space Colony Art from the 1970s

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61–70 of 135 posts

Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s

#61
Some of the illustrations remind me of a book at my school library titled "50 Facts About Space":

https://www.amazon.com/Facts-about-Space-Mark-Lambert/dp/033...

These visions of gigantic space colonies were fantastic. I don't know if I could bear to live on one in RL, I'd be too worried about the micrometeorites.

Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s

#62

There’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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrLey-pX7Bc

There's also a few problems with Halo sized rings.

Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s

#64

I just came across this guy who seems to have drawn a lot through the years: http://www.mccallstudios.com/the-space-frontier/

Robert McCall! A classic, who made "The Prologue and the Promise", a picture I've used as a desktop background for quite a while (nice to make it span several screens).

http://www.mccallstudios.com/includes/uploads/2015/10/0037-0...

Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the description on that poster "The artist’s share of profits from sales of this poster will be donated to NASA." How, Though? You can't donate to NASA

You can order pizzas for employees?

Potentially... I vaguely remember my anti-corruption training, and the dollar limits for receiving gifts and meals were fairly low.

Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s

#68
post #13

We 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…

From what I understand, a structure needs to be quite massive to get meaningful gravity from a rotating hull unless you attempt to approach ludicrously unsafe angular velocity which would make repair / docking a big challenge. In The Expanse, Ceres station was spun up over many, many years and still only achieved about 1/3G. Not to use a fictional universe as a basis for science but afaik they at least tried to do the math correctly.

Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s

#69
post #13

We 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…

A station with a counterweight can be grown into a wheel station. A wheel can be widened until it becomes a tube station.
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