A space habitat (also called a space settlement, space colony, spacestead, space city, orbital habitat, orbital settlement, orbital colony, orbital stead or orbital city) is a more advanced form of living quarters than a space station or habitation module, in that it is intended as a permanent settlement or green habitat rather than as a simple way-station or other specialized facility. No space habitat has been constructed yet, but many design concepts, with varying degrees of realism, have come both from engineers and from science-fiction authors.
The term space habitat sometimes includes more broadly habitats built on or in a body other than Earth—such as the Moon, Mars or an asteroid. This article concentrates on self-contained structures envisaged for micro-g environments.
A space habitat, or more precisely a space settlement, is any large-scale habitation facility in space, or more particularly in outer space or an orbit. A space habitat is typically designed to rotate so as to prevent long-term exposure of its residents to the peril of weightlessness or microgravity; studies have shown rotation to be a healthy substitute for gravity.
While not automatically constituting a colonial entity, a space habitat can be an element of a space colony. The term ’space colony’ has been viewed critically, prompting Carl Sagan to propose the term space city.
The idea of space habitats either in fact or fiction goes back to the second half of the 19th century. "The Brick Moon", a fictional story written in 1869 by Edward Everett Hale, is perhaps the first treatment of this idea in writing. In 1903, space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky speculated about rotating cylindrical space habitats, with plants fed by the sun, in Beyond Planet Earth. In the 1920s John Desmond Bernal and others speculated about giant space habitats. Dandridge M. Cole in the late 1950s and 1960s speculated about hollowing out asteroids and then rotating them to use as settlements in various magazine articles and books, notably Islands In Space: The Challenge Of The Planetoids.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Space manufacturing is the production of tangible goods beyond Earth. Since most production capabilities are limited to low Earth orbit, the term in-orbit manufacturing is also frequently used. There are several rationales supporting in-space manufacturing: The space environment, in particular the effects of microgravity and vacuum, enable the research of and production of goods that could otherwise not be manufactured on Earth.
Space architecture is the theory and practice of designing and building inhabited environments in outer space. This mission statement for space architecture was developed at the World Space Congress in Houston in 2002 by members of the Technical Aerospace Architecture Subcommittee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The architectural approach to spacecraft design addresses the total built environment.
Private spaceflight refers to spaceflight developments that are not conducted by a government agency, such as NASA or ESA. During the early decades of the Space Age, the government space agencies of the Soviet Union and United States pioneered space technology in collaboration with affiliated design bureaus in the USSR and private companies in the US. They entirely funded both the development of new spaceflight technologies and the operational costs of spaceflight.
Data-driven approaches have been applied to reduce the cost of accurate computational studies on materials, by using only a small number of expensive reference electronic structure calculations for a representative subset of the materials space, and using ...
Data-driven approaches based on high-throughput capabilities and machine learning hold promise in revolutionizing human-centred materials discovery for sustainability and decarbonization. This Review examines the strengths and limitations of different trad ...
NATURE PORTFOLIO2022
We characterize the photochemically relevant conical intersections between the lowest-lying accessible electronic excited states of the different DNA/RNA nucleobases using Cholesky decomposition-based complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF) al ...