Difference between revisions of "Space habitats"

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Stanford torus  space habitat

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

Certain plants are especially good at recycling air for human use. A few plants per person can be sufficient to provide space-dwellers with the fresh air they need. More information here. These plants could be grown aeroponically in space, as could food.

Further information

• Gerard O'Neill 
• O'Neill cylinder habitat 
• Resources in space
• Marshall T. Savage's The Millenial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in eight easy steps - employing known technology. (Forward by Arthur C. Clarke )