Stanford torus:
This design utilizes a "donut-shaped" tube approximately 1 mile in diameter. The entire unit would rotate roughly once a minute to create a gravitational effect inside.DonDavis/NASA
Stanford torus:
The Stanford torus concept was featured in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and would be able to accommodate about as many occupants as a Bernal Sphere.DonDavis/NASA
Stanford torus:
A series of spokes connect this ring to an axial hub for arriving and departing spaceships. The estimated mass of such a colony is roughly 10 million tons.RickGuidice/NASA
Stanford torus:
A system of mirrors channels sunlight into the interior "habitat ring" of the torus.DonDavis/NASA
Bernal Sphere
The Bernal Sphere model is in total about a third of a mile in diameter. To create a gravitational effect via centripetal force, the entire colony rotates about twice per minute.RickGuidice/NASA
Bernal Sphere
Food to feed these colonies would be grown in external cylinders or rings. These areas would have specific atmospheric settings to optimize the growth of each crop.RickGuidice/NASA
Bernal Sphere
A single Bernal Sphere could house roughly 10,000 people at a time. These living quarters would be stationed on the curve along the expanse of the sphere.RickGuidice/NASA
Bernal Sphere:
These colonies were designed to withstand major meteorite impacts. In fact, researchers have posited that a meteorite would breach the exterior roughly once every three years. However, even after such an event, it would take centuries for the all of the interior oxygen to leak into space, meaning engineers on location could fix these individual shattered panes well before any impact event could threaten life inside the colony.DonDavis/NASA
Bernal Sphere
Similar to the Stanford torus, the inside of the colony is provided sunlight via a system of mirrors and also window bays.RickGuidice/NASA
O'Neill Cylinder
The largest of these basic colony designs were the O'Neill cylinders. A single cylinder could contain up to 100 square miles of total land area and support one million humans. These cylindrical colonies -- ranging up to 20 miles in length -- would contain vast forests, bodies of water, and entire biomes. Inhabitants would be able to control not only the climate but also the seasons inside.RickGuidice/NASA
O'Neill Cylinder
According to Jerry Stone, leader of the British Interplanetary Society's Project SPACE, due to the sheer size and climate control capacity of these massive O'Neil cylinders, you'd have "natural rain clouds" forming inside.DonDavis /NASA
O'Neill Cylinder
According to an excerpt from a 1975 Congressional hearing on future space missions, we get this very specific tour of one of these colonies: "A ten-minute walk could bring a resident up a hill to a region with much reduced gravity, where human-powered flight would be easy, sports and ballet could take on a new dimension."RickGuidice /NASA
At the peak of the Space Race, both the Russian and the United States space agencies were developing plans to establish permanent space colonies in orbit around our planet and beyond. In fact, in 1975, NASA’s Ames Research Center gathered 19 professors at Stanford University for 10 weeks with intention of not only designing what a human space colony would look like, but also figuring out how these systems might function as self-sufficient, long-term human outposts. The team of researchers was given a theoretical budget of roughly $35 billion dollars (or about $200 billion in 2017 when adjusted for inflation) to create these apparatuses.
While these massive structures may seem straight out of vintage pulp fiction, these colonies were well within our technical and engineering capabilities 40 years ago, and it’s even been argued that a series of such permanent colonies could be readily constructed for less than what the U.S. spends annually on its military.
The Ames Research Center studies concluded with three main design concepts: The Bernal sphere, the O’Neill cylinder, and the Stanford torus. While each design has its own unique structural shape, they all rotate to create a centrifugal force to induce gravity for inhabitants inside. Once constructed in-situ, these colonies would revolve around the Earth in the same orbit as the moon in a sliver of space between the Earth and moon known as the Lagrangian libration point.
At the time of these proposals, NASA had just launched the Pioneer 10 probe carrying a “interstellar greeting card” to grant salutations to any extraterrestrial life too haphazardly drifting through the cosmos. It wasn’t so long ago that the future of extended manned space exploration and colonization never seemed more feasible. In just 14 years mankind went from hurling the most rudimentary of satellites into orbit to quite literally teeing off on the moon using a makeshift six-iron — a true testament to the ingenuity and boundless curiosity of our species.
Unfortunately, more than 40 years have passed since this conference and unfortunately we are still without a drifting Logan’s Run-esque colony glinting in orbit or even the most primitive of terraformed bubbles. Perhaps this will change in the near future — especially if Elon Musk has his way. Whether we ever actually leave this space rock and become a multi-planetary species is anyone’s guess. Only time will tell…
