In the 1970s, NASA held a summer workshop where people designed space settlements for colonies of around 10,000 people. So the images are really cool, but I’ve also got to say that the discourses of colonization and bourgeois fantasy lands thrown in there are pretty compelling. Here’s an excerpt and some images:
“Humanity has the power to fill outer space with life. Today our solar system is filled with plasma, gas, dust, rock, and radiation — but very little life; just a thin film around the third rock from the Sun. We can change that. These orbital space colonies could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades, and great wealth. In time, we may see hundreds of thousands of orbital space settlements in our solar system alone. Building these settlements will be an evolutionary event in magnitude similar to, if not greater than, ocean-based Life’s colonization of land half a billion years ago.”
See more at MAKE or NASA or NASA.
