U:UTOPIA :: Space Colonies

In 1977, NASA's Ames Research Center summer program focused on Space Settlement. They devised a number of prototype communities for how space settlement was feasible. Below are excerpts from their findings. For more images and the entire article, click here.

Each colony houses around 10,000 people. Click on images above to enlarge.

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.

Who? You. Or at least people a lot like you. Space settlements will be a place for ordinary people.

Why? Why build space settlements? Why do weeds grow through cracks in sidewalks? Why did life crawl out of the oceans and colonize land? Because living things want to grow and expand. We have the ability to live in space, therefore we will. The key advantage of space settlements is the ability to build new land, rather than take it from someone else.

What? A space settlement is a home in orbit. Typical space settlement designs are roughly one half to a few kilometers across. A few designs are much larger. Settlements must be air tight to hold a breathable atmosphere, and must rotate to provide psuedo-gravity. Thus, people stand on the inide of the hull.

Enormous amounts of matter, probably lunar soil at first, must cover the settlements to protect inhabitants from radiation. On Earth our atmosphere does this job, but space settlements need about five tons of matter covering every square meter of a colony's hull to protect space settlers from cosmic rays and solar flares. Each settlement must be an independent biosphere. All oxygen, water, wastes, and other materials must be recycled endlessly.

A few features of orbital real estate are worth mentioning:
• Great Views
• Low-g recreation
• Environmental Independence
• The ultimate gated community
• Custom living

Survival Someday the Earth will become uninhabitable. Before then humanity must move off the planet or become extinct.

U:UTOPIA :: The Human Drift

Plan for an ideal city by King Camp Gillette.

"Under a perfect economical system of production and distribution, and a system combining the greatest elements of progress, there can be only one city on a continent, and possibly only one in the world. "

In Gillette's plan, all of North America's inhabitants would live in one huge city, Metropolis, in upstate New York.  The entire continent's population would be concentrated in thirty to forty thousand buildings rising twenty-five stories into the air and powered by the energy from Niagara Falls.  

Left, exterior view of a building of Metropolis.  Below left, a cross section of the building.  As King Camp Gillette describes it:

"In this view, also, the three underlying chambers of the city are shown. A, being the lower or ground chamber, is utilized for sewage, water, hot and cold air, and electric systems; B, the middle chamber, is utilized for the transportation system; and C, the upper chamber, fifty feet in height, is for the purpose of giving additional room and facilities for the people in moving about, and would be especially desirable in inclement weather.

"In the plate the location of dining room in central part of court is shown. Food would find its way to these dining rooms from the building where it was prepared, by an electric transfer system, something on the same principle as now employed in the transfer of money in our large emporiums. This system need take up but little room, and could be laid close to the ceiling of middle chamber. The time of transit of food carrier from the building where food would be prepared to the dining rooms, a distance of about one thousand feet, would probably be less than ten seconds.

"Galleries ten feet wide surround the court at each story, from which access is had to the different apartments.


"Imagine for a moment the possibilities in light and color when these immense courts were brilliant with thousands of electric lights and the interior of the large domes decorated with exquisite paintings that would be the result of inspiration. Of all the thirty to forty thousand buildings in the city, no two need be alike in artistic treatment."


King Camp Gillette's text and illustration here.