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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

How 'serious' were these pictures?

Was this something they were seriously expecting in the coming years?

I'm mindful of the fact that man had basically gone from just achieving orbit, to landing on the moon in a decade, so anything could have seemed possible at that stage.

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> Was this something they were seriously expecting in the coming years?

I started high school a few months after the last time anyone walked on the moon. If you'd told me then that no-one would ever again walk on the moon in the following fifty years, I'd have told you you were nuts. The general mood in the 1970's was that humankind would start to inhabit space over the following decades, and space colonies like these would be orbiting the Earth. Instead, the only humans publicly known to be in space right now are the 3 aboard the International Space Station.

Until Kennedy radically accelerated the schedule for the first moon landing and set that as a singular goal, the plans for the space program involved almost as much infrastructure building as exploration. Here's a 1955 television program where Wernher von Braun presents an earlier, more complicated plan for a Moon mission, complete with a nuclear-powered toroidal space station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIDFx74aSY

That's a great find. A noteworthy (to me) feature was the height of the orbit -- they're at ~1000 miles above the Earth's surface. This indicates that they were unaware of the Van Allen belts, which makes sense, in 1955, no artificial satellites had yet been launched.

Edit: Also noticed the dramatized mission has a "free-return" trajectory, no maneuver required at the moon to get back to Earth.

They also had a lot of enthusiasm for nuclear energy. Apollo itself used fuel cells and the later space stations all used solar power.

I suspect no less serious than the various other projects that had concept artwork. Seemed like the 70s and 80s TV news regularly had plans, including an aspirational artist's impression, for a NASA moonbase, orbital ring space station, or Mars mission etc. Couldn't say how serious or not, but serious enough to have made it to UK media back then, fairly regularly. The obvious question after 1972's Apollo 17, was "what's next?".

We got Skylab, the Space Shuttle, lots of fascinating probes to other planets, and satellites themselves of course, but those were rather less "grand" in scope. No doubt budget driven.

To be fair though, if NASA can't dream big, who can? :)

I think they were serious, and very much a product of the malthusian ideas that dominated that era. I remember reading futurist books with these images in the 6th grade in the early 90s.

Back in the 80s and 90s Malthusianism was the dominant thing. Most people believed the global population would keep expanding beyond what the world could sustain giving the impetus for things like space stations and ocean colonies. And population graphs in the 70s and 80s and even the 90s suggested that this was true.

Also in the 70s the idea of the green revolution wasn't fully cemented in the public consciousness. Nobody had any idea that it would double wheat yields between 1970 and today so people were projecting slow linear growth, or worse static farm yields and available resources against a growing population. The projection for the future was a dark one back then, and things like these space stations, along with things like ocean colonies were seen as a desperate way to prevent that fate.

Alas, the graphs from the 2010s continue to suggest that Malthusianism is true. Except that instead of running out of natural resources, we're running out of GHG budget.

Fortunately, nobody seriously believes that wasting trillions of dollars on moving a few people off the Earth is a serious solution to this problem. Unfortunately, nobody is actually pursuing any serious solutions to this problem.

Reasonably serious (for some definitions of "reasonably"). The illustrations were commissioned for a book published by NASA describing a design study on permanent space habitats at L5 creatively called "Space Settlements: A Design Study". I got this book as a kid in the late 70's and it was one of my favorites. I pored over each page oh so carefully for years. The study went into a fair amount of detail about what would be required to support 10,000 people in a stanford torus at L5. Everything from radiation shielding to sewage systems. From construction techniques to creating day-night cycles.

An online version HTML of the book is here:

    https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html

and one with proper layout (and a link a PDF) is here:

    https://archive.org/details/SpaceSettlementsADesignStudy1977/page/n11

Well, riding on the tails of literally landing on the moon, the future must've looked bright and amazing. It probably would've been if the same amount of work and money continued to pour into the space programs. Space - the final frontier and all.

Yes. In the eighties, we seriously expected that such space habitats might be built in the next few decades. It was a reasonable extrapolation from the rapid progress that had occurred in recent decades.

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