Space Settlements

by Fred Scharmen

In the summer of 1975, NASA brought together a team of physicists, engineers, and space scientists―along with architects, urban planners, and artists―to design large-scale space habitats for millions of people. This Summer Study was led by Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, whose work on this topic had previously been funded by countercultural icon Stewart Brand’s Point Foundation. Two painters, the artist and architect Rick Guidice and the planetary science illustrator Don Davis, created renderings for the project that would be widely circulated over the next years and decades and even included in testimony before a Congressional subcommittee. A product of its time, this work is nevertheless relevant to contemporary modes of thinking about architecture. Space Settlements examines these plans for life in space as serious architectural and spatial proposals.

Genres: Science, Space, Nonfiction, History

208 pages, Paperback

Published July 23, 2019

Reviews

[Frederick Gault · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent review of the work done about how to build a space habitat. Just as we design buildings on Earth, and consider waste management, livability, transportation, water management and so on, we must do the same with "space islands". This process is complicated by the fact that the environment must be controlled, and balanced to the extent possible because resupply is expensive and far away. All kinds of issues come up with you start to look at this, for example; in order to have soil suitable for crops and oxygen production will we need insects and what about "pest" insects that maybe important to the web of life? What kinds of soil bacteria will be needed? Can this all work in an enclosed space spinning for artificial gravity? Can Lunar material (by far the cheapest source of raw material) be sufficient to create the kind of soil needed? And that's just about the dirt. What about humans? What kind of shelters will they need? Parks? And, what kind of government and social restrictions will be required, when the unforgiving nature of space makes it imperative that certain rules are followed, and certain jobs are not neglected? Interesting reading. And it begs the question: why would people want to live there? What kind of economy is possible to support such a society? What is a space island good for?

[Dan Cooley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would probably give this 3.5 but its closer to 3 so that's that. I first saw this book in the shop at the Tate modern in London and thought it looked great. Lots of images of space stations, other interesting diagrams of related structures and spaceship insides etc. It has all this and that's great but reading through everything it was all just a bit to philosophical, like for example lots of talk about where certain phrases were first coined. I kind of wanted more practical details on how exactly they could build these things but there wasn't really any of that.

I guess at the end of the day this is all just a concept and as concepts go it is pretty far from becoming a reality, so therefore there really hasn't been that much thought gone into the actual details of how it would be constructed. Still this book sells itself on the idea that it has all come about from a conference where a lot of different people came together, architects, physicists, town planners, engineers etc to look at how a liveable space station could be created, yet there isn't much detail on this. There is a bit about how a space station with thousands of people living on it would be a closed system so things would need to be recycled but there isn't much more said. There is brief mention of asteroids being mined for raw material and how the space station could spin to create gravity but that is all you get, the rest is about peoples perception of future living and large objects.

Overall though I liked the book just because it is cool to look through and the idea of living in space interests me. There are some very nice concept paintings that were done for study which are interspersed throughout the book so it makes a nice kind of casual read book.

[Jack LaVigne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent examples of off-Earth architecture and empirically grounded imagination-borne “Big Dumb Objects” that serve as a stand-in for meaning in the currently Void public imagination of deep-space settlements. Perhaps Mars or even the Moon is less of a desire-able settlement than one that self-sustainably farmed itself into deeper and more complexity as it moved throughout the asteroid belt. Stability in a hostile environment is not just a moral necessity, but imperative to human survival on a biological basis. The space ship that fails to take the trees and dirt with it is a sorry cradle for humanity indeed.

[A.N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mediation upon the dialectic between identity and difference, interior and exterior, settlement and colony, this book is one in a burgeoning critical canon for anyone who calls themselves a biocosmist.

[k.]

I know exactly why I picked up this book: the beauty. Leave aside the textual contents, which are fascinating if fundamentally [evil and] misguided. The book itself is put together beautifully, with futuristic typology and arresting visual design utilising extensively artistic interpretations of our potential [near] future.

09.02.2020 「An entertaining and informative book, perfect for anyone interested in the settlement of space and the wider concepts involved in designing systems for human habitation.」