Space habitats

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Stanford torus space habitat

A pair of O'Neill cylinder habitats

There are many suitable places to site a habitat in space, especially within the orbit of Jupiter. 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. Surprisingly the answer in the 1970s was that based on bridge and ship-building techniques it is possible to build orbiting megastructures up to 30 kilometers long, and a single one able to comfortably house millions of 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, like rolling green English countryside for example. Some designs even have enough atmosphere inside them to make the sky appear blue.

Material

It would be far too expensive to built these huge structures from material brought up from the surface of the Earth, so for colonies near Earth it has been proposed to use material mined from the moon or near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets.

Places

Low Earth orbit

The easiest place to get to from Earth is low earth orbit, although due to the Earth's strong gravitational pull it requires enormous amounts of energy to bring material up from the surface and one could not be classed as self-sufficient here, however the views are pretty good.

Geosynchronous orbit

In a geosynchronous orbit the habitat would hover the same spot on Earth which would mean that one would have the same day / night cycle as on the surface which is an important consideration with human physiology.

Lunar orbit

In lunar orbit the moon is within easy reach but the habitat will be subject to the moons two-week long day / night cycles which might not be to everyone's taste, although of course the normal light rythms can be replicated internally with lighting.

Surface of the moon

The surface of the moon provides a continent-sized area to inhabit and somewhere to 'get outside'. However it is not clear that the one-sixth of Earth's gravity here is enough to stop degredation of the human body over extended periods, but this could be overcome by having large circular habitats that rotate to simulate a 1G environment.

Asteroid Belt

Ceres

(Water ice)

Other moons

Many to choose from

Types of habitat

• Stanford torus
• O'Neill cylinder
• Crater bubble
• Rotating moonbase for 1G
• Hollowed out asteroid
• Zero-G station
• Rotating dumbell