Bruce Dorminey opines that the modular tin cans that took us to the moon and back, and have kept us in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ever since, will eventually be superseded by full-scale space cities. A space architect and Program Manager for Solar System Mission Formulation at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Brent Sherwood, spends much of his time considering the scope of a permanent human migration into the solar system.
In terms of architecture and scale, arguably such a transition will be akin to the difference between setting up an isolated high-desert mobile home park and building a space city with the dynamism of the Las Vegas strip.
Although the field of space architecture is less than 50 years old, the NASA Skylab design is considered the first piece of space architecture, Sherwood says a hundred years from now the fundamental technology for keeping people alive and functioning in space are going to be very well understood.
Once past that pivotal point, he says space architecture can then apply itself to problems of developing space urbanism. Within a couple of hundred years, he predicts cities on and under the moon, settlements on Mars, and a free-floating space colony at the Earth-Moon L5 gravitational equilibrium point.
Two thousand years hence, Sherwood says hypothesized collections of asteroidal materials congregating at the Earth-Sun L4 and L5 gravitational equilibrium points would make for building materials to construct a large rotating pancake disk capable of housing thousands of people in the comfort of a free-breathing atmosphere and some form of artificial gravity.
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Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-