Space Habitat designs
Date Created: 2021/09/24
For the foreseeable future we would want to have access to plenty of space with full Earth gravity, so we need to have colonies on the inside of something rotating.
O’Neill proposes 3 designs:
- A Bernal sphere
- A stanford torus
- two O’Neill cylinders
He identifies that getting natural sunlight into the habitat is a major feature of the design.
The O’Neill cylinders have large angled mirrors, and the axes of the cylinders have to point to the sun, which means that it has to be turned during the course of a year. How does that work?
I also don’t like the angled mirrors which rotate with the cylinder and therefore would be subject to very high g-forces, up to 2g or even 3g.