The Fantastic and Banal Dreams of 1970s Space Colonies

"It's possibly the last and highest frontier – the space beyond Earth." So says the narrator in this incredible 1975 NASA advertisement for the future of space colonization. The idea has been around since we were young – and long before that – but in terms of research it may have reached its apex in the 1970s, when, as Alexis Madrigal recently reminded us, concerns over natural resources married the burly ambitions of Big Engineering to the progressive dreams of Appropriate Technology, in the hope of offloading some of our heavy footprint on Earth to other places.

The oft-mentioned goal of the space colony research based at NASA Ames back then – and outlined in a 1975 paper, was a 10,000-person orbiting community. With a rotating spherical design that echoed that of the space station in Kubrick's 2001, the Bernal sphere space colony would have been a fully self-contained structure reliant on solar transmission and advanced nuclear reactors.

We never came close, and feel farther away from that dream than ever. But to sell the idea to the public in the 1970s, as Tim Maly notes, the artists that illustrated the visions of NASA's engineers sprinkled scenes familiar to 20th century Americans throughout these futuristic spacescapes. "The yuppies and motorboats on the artificial river are trojan horses and reference points to help us grasp the sublime scale of a half-kilometre glass ball that traverses the heavens with people inside," writes Maly. "The interior has to be banal. It makes the future seem more believable for a time. It makes the future easier to accept."

More promising news of water on Mars aside, we're not talking about colonization much these days. But in 2005, NASA chief Michael Griffin described it as the long-term goal of human spaceflight:

See some great space colony art at the Atlantic and The Utopianist.

• A Futurist Perspective For Space by Dr. Kenneth J. Cox), June 2001 (pdf file)