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Space Colonies Are Back (Actually They Never Left)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 27, 2013
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Inspiring Creative Thinking About Space Settlements
“Over the last 26 years, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Calif., has organized a global Space Settlement Design Contest to encourage students around the world to tackle the many challenging issues critical to designing habitable space colony environments and transportation systems.”
Space Colonies – Retro Idea – Suddenly Hip Again
“So as you study your work, your yard, your watershed, your bio-community and human community, your weather, your access to tools, your night sky, and your prospects in Space, be aware that they are studying you.”

Be like Steve Jobs. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
“I eventually caught up with Stewart Brand in the hallway at the Starship conference. We re-connected for a moment and I then pulled out my copy of “Space Colonies” and asked for an autograph. He chuckled in agreement with my observation that the things people were saying at the Starship conference resonated with what “Space Colonies” set forth some 30 years ago. When I started to recite a quote by Anne Herbert from “Space Colonies” – he cut me off mid-sentence and finished it. “The Sky begins at your feet, think how brave you are to walk around”.
Keith’s note: Several years ago on a cold snowy day I found myself walking from a Metro stop to the Tesla showroom in Washington for a reception featuring a SpaceX capsule. My walking companions were Eileen Collins and Esther Dyson. At one point i had to confess a story about my one encounter with Esther’s father, Freeman Dyson. It was in 1977 at Princeton when he, I, Gerard O’Neill, his wife, and a bunch of other space geeks sat on the floor drinking cheap wine out of plastic glasses. This was the time that Stewart Brand’s “Space Colonies” book was just coming out. “Yea, there was a lot of that going on when I was growing up” Esther chuckled.
The notion of Space Colonies has been around for quite some time as an collective idealized meme of what we all should be doing – and perhaps what we could have done by now if the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was seen as an actual starting point. I have seen the new film “Elysium” and was a fan of “District 9”. Elysium has graphics that are simply stunning – and turbocharged with Syd Mead’s designs, such that your brain tells you that everything you see is quite real. But the story (a very thin one) serves only as a sequence of pretty things that happen interspersed by other things that inevitably blow up – and this continues until the movie is over. But it sure was nice to live (albeit momentarily) inside a giant space colony – just like the ones we recall from those 1970s illustrations.
With a resurgence in interest in off-planet activities, it is good to see that the old space colony paintings NASA commissioned that had wandered from office to office at Ames are now getting the proper visibility that they deserve. Curiously, some of these paintings by masters of the genre such as Don Davis look as if they were created yesterday. A good meme is like that. It just keeps coming back, self-reinforcing itself each time, until we make it real.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

7 responses to “Space Colonies Are Back (Actually They Never Left)”

  1. catlettuce redux says:
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    Freeman is still wonderful. I live in Winchester (UK), where he still visits many summers. Heard a wonderful lecture from him on Operational Research and WW2. If only that man had been given his head then, never mind with other projects later.

  2. Natalie says:
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    Here is another (similar) International Space Settlement Design Competition that is run by folks at JSC: http://www.spaceset.org/

  3. James Lundblad says:
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    I really liked Elysium. I think great Science Fiction frequently is social commentary on today’s society, and I think Elysium really did a good job in this respect. One of my all time fav science fiction novels when I was a kid was “Farnham’s Freehold” which could be a very interesting film with the right director.

  4. TheBrett says:
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    The perverse thing about space colonies is that they need easier manned access to space in order to make them possible, but easier manned access to space also makes it easier to do manned space activities without colonies. Colonies make the most sense when you need people on site somewhere and it’s quite expensive to send them there and back.

    That said, it shouldn’t prevent something like Elysium: a space colony created for people who want to live in space, or at least away from Earth. If the colony got big enough, then it would become its own economic rationale for continuing to exist.

  5. Bernardo de la Paz says:
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    Glad to see not everyone has given up on the dream! Too bad so few really understand this as the long range goal and how to plan the steps to get there.

  6. Alan Ladwig says:
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    If if recall, there is a great letter from Payload Specialist Charlie Walker regarding his dreams in that issue.

  7. mfwright says:
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    Space colony art from the 1970s by Don Davis and Rick Guidice,
    http://settlement.arc.nasa….