When I was in college, disillusioned by the end of Apollo, these were the images, from Don Davis and others, that re-inspired me to get involved in space again.
36 thoughts on “Space Colonies That Looked Like Home”
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When I was in college, disillusioned by the end of Apollo, these were the images, from Don Davis and others, that re-inspired me to get involved in space again.
Comments are closed.
The article didn’t really say it, but the suggestion is there that O’Neill colonies inspired the Golden Fleece awards?
Golden Fleece awards were not inspired by space colonies.
I was a teenager in 1975 when Wikipedia says he started, but I thought he gave one for the Boeing SST around 1970?
According to the fount of all knowledge, wiki, Proxmire gave the first Fleece award out in 1975.
Which can’t be right. I’m almost positive it was about 1970 since my Dad left Boeing in Seattle to work for Lockheed in California around that time (back when CA still had jobs.)
I-5 had a sign saying “Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights.”
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/search.asp?id=1742
“In March 1975, Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire sent out his first press release identifying wasteful government spending. He called these monthly bulletins “Golden Fleece Awards” and they became a popular feature of his Senate tenure. Given here are digital copies of the Golden Fleece press releases, 1975-1987, from Sen. Proxmire’s papers. In this digital version, each year opens with his summary of the 12 awards. A handful of the monthly press releases are missing and none have survived from 1984, which contains only the annual summary. The whole series is preceded by a 12-page list of all 159 awards compiled by WHS staff in 2010, and two undated compilations compiled by Sen. Proxmire’s office.”
Doesn’t mean Proxmire didn’t rail against Boeing prior to 1975, but according to several sources the first official GFA was in 1975.
Yes, utopian visions that led a generation of advocates astray looking for CATS and other short cuts to developing a space based economy. They completely neglected that settlement always follows business opportunities and they were never any justifications provided for such settlements to exist other that as socialist projects built and run by government.
But they are about as realistic vision for space as modern Boston would be to the Pilgrims and about as relevant as a reason for the economic development of space.
The socialist aspect is still going strong. I remember someone presenting at ISDC who nearly got shouted down for suggesting a frontier analogy for space settlements.
Is it ever! It seems people look at you weird if you suggest private ownership works.
Heh. I recall showing up at the Pittsburgh ISDC a year or so after starting at L5, and annoying a lot of people by explaining I didn’t want to live in a socialist space high-rise with them as neighbors – I’d far rather live in a space “house in the suburbs”, a single-home habitat on a tether-with-counterweight for gravity and a “garage” on the tether at center of spin.
That was the hotel where I kept hearing what I thought were construction noises for hours post-midnight, then was woken far too early in the morning by a film crew at my door. I poked my head out to see what they wanted, and saw they’d had to navigate through multiple demolished room-service carts. Turned out they had the wrong room – Bon Jovi was in town, and some of the band had been partying next door.
15-year old girls in leopardskin spandex hanging out in the lobby just adds that certain je ne sais quoi to a space conference…
When out of town, ya crash each others parties. How’d Bon Jovi (my youngest sister’s fav. at some point) like taking in the Lagrange?
15-year old girls in leopardskin spandex hanging out in the lobby just adds that certain je ne sais quoi to a space conference…
You think you’ve had it bad. Try working in the Japanese animation industry. 15-year-old girls in Spandex throng the hallways of America’s anime conventions. My wife and I are constantly amazed by teen America’s lack of good taste (and parental supervision). You won’t believe how many moms and dads have no problem letting their middle school sweeties run around unsupervised at a hotel all weekend while wearing a skin-tight cat girl costume.
Getting old sucks. One day, you’re Monsieur Cherchez-les-Femmes, the next you’re looking for a towel to drape around them.
(!@#$%! WordPress once again ate my post on the first try…)
You have the chronology all wrong. When I showed up for work at L5 Society’s office in Tucson in 1986, I noticed within weeks that everyone had their own favorite scheme for what to do in space, but nobody was doing anything at all about practical means to get there.
I was shocked, because I’d assumed we’d be helping organize cheap transportation developments. Nuh-uh! Everyone assumed NASA would take care of that – even post-Challenger. It took me and the few other like-minded types a decade to make a dent in that attitude, and even now it still lingers.
Yes, few then bothered either to think about making it happen by making it pay. G.Harry Stine was one notable exception on both points – I learned a huge amount from him in the next decade.
First you make it economically viable, then you buy, rent or steal the tech.
The extraterrestrial material acquisition plans never closed for me.
Nuclear powered maglev mass drivers on the Moon? How you getting it there?
The Lunarvator concepts never got fleshed out to even that degree of vagueness.
Asteroid retrieval sounds much more plausible these days.
Elon knows this. He said you couldn’t retrieve crack cocaine from orbit for profit, or something to that effect. People have to get their minds unstuck from the idea that economic growth is only about export/import. That has always been the smallest part of economic growth. Real growth comes from liberty and private ownership.
You mean this? http://quantumg.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/space-crack.html He proved himself wrong. 🙂
In any case, I wasn’t talking about economics. I was talking about how one even gets the mass exporting infrastructure in place. So far as I’m aware, bootstrapping from ISRU still requires thousands of tons in the “seed”, including humans and nuclear power. The kind of people who talk about making solar panels, self-replicating robots and mass drivers from lunar regolith are simply ignorant of the state of the art.
I wasn’t talking about economics. I was talking about how one even gets the mass exporting infrastructure in place.
Then you were talking economics, but I know what you mean.
Robots may gather minerals, but only in rudimentary cases are they going to manufacture anything on the moon in the near term. You really need people. Perhaps John’s Coffee Shop and Lunar Motel (JCSALM) on the moon idea may get you there?
If you want to throw regolith or whatever at lunar escape velocity you would start with the smallest machine capable of doing that with the largest bucket possible. You bring the pieces of the machine to JCSALM as extra stuff not part of the primary mission.
Lunar escape is 2.37 km/s.
BAE Systems has a railgun built for the navy the just exceeds that velocity for a 18 kg munition requiring 32 MJ (why don’t they give this value in power rather than energy?)
Sounds perfect, and from it’s picture, it doesn’t look too massive to drop in one piece on the moon, but I suppose it could go in pieces?
They say power is the easy part?
Trent,
You don’t get them there, you build them out of lunar materials, just as you build the solar energy firms needed to run them, cheaper and easier than nuclear systems. But you don’t need thousands living in a space settlement to do it. Telebotic robots work fine.
How? Magic? The bootstrap doesn’t close.
Trent,
Yes, the problem of the Moon.
Until funds are invested in lunar resource development the technology will not be considered matured enough for funds to be invested into lunar resource development.
Kinda like Christopher Columbus, no one wanted to give him the money to cross the Atlantic because no one had shown it could be crossed when he asked for it…
It wasn’t O’Neill’s Space colonies that inspired me.
Inspiration, for me, began with Alan Shepard and Freedom 7. 2001: A Space Odyssey kept inspiration alive with the design of the Discovery and the notion of going to other planets; and novels from authors like Larry Niven.
I saw no point to O’Neill’s colonies. So while thought there was some clever design ideas there, they seemed like a non-starter to me.
Yes, I was also inspired by O’Neill’s ideas as a teenager, but not enough to actually become an engineer and go to work in the industry, alas.
I still have my copy of the NASA publication referenced in the article: “Space Settlements: A Design Study”.
GOODSTUFF’S CYBER WORLD LUNAR DECLARATION
Our home is on the northern edge of Goodstuff’s lunar crater and we are claiming squatters rights. We are also claiming mineral and ice rights on the northern ridge and slopes of Goodstuff crater. Furthermore, we have the right of surface and space access to our home.
Goodstuff’s crater is located in the highlands close to the Lunar North Pole, near three large impact craters called Peary, Hermite and Byrd.
more details – http://goodstuffsworld.blogspot.com/2012/09/goodstuff-lunar-squatting-declaration.html
Take it by possession and you’ve got something.
I was inspired by O’Neill’s colonies and a few years ago thought I’d try to set a story in one. It all went haywire when I started crunching engineering numbers on the big windows, since a window blowout was part of the plot I had in mind. Given the ASM standards for windows in human occupied pressure vessels (where they must not blow out), either the cost would exceed O’Neill’s entire budget – even if we could make them out of cheap glass at bulk Earth-surface prices and could ship them into orbit for free, or most people on the space colony would just do window inspections, all day long, all year round, since each window needs to be inspected annually. Big windows have to be thick (and thus heavy), and small thin windows require more seams to inspect and maintain.
Lighting the inside with LED’s works out a lot better and vastly simplifies the design, with the added benefit that the internal open area no longer has to be devoted to crops.
But you assume the windows ‘must not blow out’.
If I remember correctly, even O’Neill’s smallest design could survive a blown out window panel for several hours before the loss of pressure became serious. Replacing that lost atmosphere with new oxygen might be a pain, but not bad enough to kill anyone on board.
Edward,
If I recall that was because the steep gravity gradient resulting from the rotation would keep most of the atmosphere near the floor.
Edward,
What happened when a window blew out was going to be a key part of the action my character was supposed to deal with. So I had to put some thought toward how we’d rationally replace a blown out window, especially when it’s sucking flying objects toward the hole in a mini-tornado.
I limited my thoughts to the huge O’Neill cylinders where the windows were mounted on the equivalent of the floor (acting as the “ceiling” for a section of the station opposite the axis). In his designs the light would always be coming through vertically, which would allow me to construct a large steel hatch that could automatically close over the window opening (like an open missile door on an ICBM). Handily, such doors could be balanced on their hinges and just sit there, and if the window they guard shattered then the winds from the outgoing air would slam them shut without human or automated intervention, a huge plus.
You could also use two or more windows in series (like airliner windows), which in the case of a station might be many feet apart, giving a worker access to areas in between for repair or inspection. The key point is that there’s no way to replace a window until you stop the airflow rushing through it. It’s a fairly easy problem to solve, but it does add mass.
Oh, and while a window is out the airflow would probably form a tight vortex (like model tornado generators), especially given the rapid rotation of a space colony. But I’m not sure if the vortex would reach out to the opposite side of the station or whether it would bend over and touch down locally. It’s easy to imagine such a situation snowballing into a pretty good plot device.
George,
Yes. There was also the problem that the windows needed to be transparent to see through, but in order to do that they would need be too thin to protect from radiation. And there would be the possible psychological effects of seeing the constant curve and objects spinning through the windows which were never really addressed.
“There was also the problem that the windows needed to be transparent to see through, but in order to do that they would need be too thin to protect from radiation.”
At least in the smaller designs, I seem to remember the windows were behind mirrors and the agricultural areas, so they should have had plenty of shielding between them and incoming radiation.
Yup, mirrors arranged so there was no direct path between windows and deep space. Would help with both radiation shielding and micro meteoroids.
The mirroring allows you to break the direct radiation path, as would light pipes. It also makes a whole lot of sense (and saves mass) to concentrate the light and bring it in through far less window area, then redistribute it once inside the hulll. I looked into using fiber optics in a concentrated (focusing) system, which isn’t too bad but very expensive, but solar panels and LEDs is even easier and already almost as efficient in a square-meter per light output basis. As solar panels and LEDs get more efficient they’ll surpass the plant growth efficiency of direct sunlight (because plants only use a small selection of the available wavelength).
It sidesteps so many structural, optical, and safety issues, directly simplifying the construction, operation, and maintenance, that I can’t see us going any other way.
’70s space geeks weren’t the only people inspired by the O’Neill idea…
I remember those illustrations and they reminded my of Heinlein’s description of ‘Ship’, in his “Orphans of the Sky”, book.
I didn’t see the Davis illustrations until about ten or fifteen years ago. What got my imagination going as a kid in the 70s was a two-volume set called “A treasury of great science fiction”, edited by Anthony Boucher. It included such gems as Alfred Bester’s the stars my destination, Poul Andersen’s Brain Wave, John Wyndham’s the Chrysalids (under the title “Re-Birth”), Heinlein’s the Man who sold the moon and Waldo, and other stories.