Aerospace Projects Review Blog

This 1969-era NASA painting depicts a space station that does not seem to make much sense. For starters: it would seem to be a single-launch station, but how would it fold up for launch? If the two arms were to fold “down,” the large pressure vessels would try to pass through each other. And it has what appear to be Apollo capsules at the ends of the arms. If this is so, it would not only mean that separating one capsule would throw the space station far off balance, it also means that an incoming capsule would be incapable of docking unless the station stopped rotating.

NASA artwork from 1962 depicting a single-launch space station. Launched by a Saturn V, this space station would be folded up, then would unfold once on orbit to form something of a torus. Rotation would then supply a measure of artificial gravity. With a design like this, much of the inner volume would not be very efficiently used… as the straight cylindrical segments diverge further from a circular centerline for a hypothetical truly circular torus, the more the inner surface of the segment would seem to slope “uphill.” Thus the interior would probably be stepped so that the floor would be “flat” from the acceleration vector point of view, to keep everything from rolling or sliding “downhill.” In this case the central hub appears to be rotationally decoupled.

Image is related to this radial-arm concept, and was scanned at the NASA HQ history archive.