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 Main Page > Colonising Space > Space habitats
 A pair of O'Neill cylinder habitats  Inside a large landscaped cylindrical habitat (credit: Eric Bruneton) Space is a very harsh environment and it may be hard to imagine wanting to live in such a seemingly bleak place, but taming it is only a matter of some (admittedly fairly serious) engineering and is entirely within our current technical capability.
There are many challenges to enable building these towns and cities off-Earth. Two prominent ones are raw materials and gravity. A colony of any size will have to be self-sufficient in materials as it will not be practical to ship them up from the surface of the Earth due to the enormous energy required to climb against its pull. Escaping this pull long-term also causes major problems for the human body. Muscles get very weak, including the heart, and bones de-mineralise. The only real solution is to generate artificial gravity by rotation – even for Moon-bases if people are going to stay for any length of time.
There have been many studies over the past thirty years to understand what kind of habitats could be built and what size constraints there are based on current engineering knowledge. Surprisingly in the 1970s the answer was that using bridge and ship-building techniques it would possible to build cylindrical mega-structures up to 30 kilometres long and 6 kilometres in diameter, with a single one able to comfortably house several million people.
Being mega-scale engineering projects, it is not hard to see that similar techniques used in the habitat's construction could be used to make the interiors of these habitats be like beautiful places on Earth, such as rolling green English countryside. Some designs even have enough atmosphere inside them to make the sky appear blue.
Material
 Lunar mass driver which could be used to launch mined material from the moon into lunar orbit using solar power It would be far too inefficient to built these huge structures from material brought up from the surface of the Earth, so for orbiting colonies near Earth it has been proposed to use material mined from the moon or near-Earth objects  (particular asteroids and comets) and transported to where it needs to be using solar powered mass-drivers .
Food, water and oxygen
Areca palm, Snake plant and money plant are exceptional for their ability to create clean, fresh air for people [1]. A human can survive in a sealed environment with just four plants like these. The application of this to space habitats is obvious.
Aeroponics, as discussed here, can be used to grow plants in space. An aeroponic greenhouse could easily provide all the air and food space-dwelling humans need. Conservatively, this would require 20m2 per person, perhaps as little as 10m2.
Further information
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