Hacker News Reader

Comment by rladd | Hacker News Reader

This NASA publication shows the plans in much more detail.

Space Settlements: A Design Study, NASA, SP-413 https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Conte...

The space shuttle was only the first step in a very ambitious program that culminated with a spinning cylindrical space community housing 10,000 people and growing its own food.

There are detailed discussions about construction (using moon rocks), shielding, what plants and animals to use for farming, etc. etc.

View on HN

Thanks for posting, that's an interesting resource. Table 3.2, laying out projections of community space usage in outer space (including churches!), could be good fodder for future historians writing about the mid-20th century cultural assumptions that structured early space travel.

Also this sentence is fascinating to me: "Whether space colonization is a unilateral effort on the part of the United States or a cross-national enterprise, it will most likely be sponsored by a public or quasipublic organization with a bureaucratic structure which permeates the early settlement." I've always thought the Alien movies strike the most realistic tone in this regard, with the Weyland Corp lurking in the background.

I'm mostly finished with the "Lady Astronaut" duology (The Calculating Stars/The Fated Sky) from Mary Robinette Kowal. Highly recommended. She started with predecessor works to these Shuttle-era dreams (such as Wernher von Braun's original treatise on colonizing Mars, most of which the science still holds up today, and was written prior to NASA's moon work) and posits a timeline to make that happen in the 50s/60s to eventually push humanity to Mars colonies by present day. (Via international cooperation in that case, sparked in large part by a meteorite hit that caused massively sped up global greenhouse effect/climate change on Earth.) The bibliography for the books has some other interesting early space travel reading that's worth revisiting with present day eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com