Author: Evan Nicole Brown / Source: Atlas Obscura
Earlier this year, California-based aerospace startup company Orion Span announced its plans to launch a “luxury space hotel” in 2021. Aurora Station, the commercial space getaway orbiting 200 miles above Earth, will accommodate four guests and two crew members at a time.
For $9.5 million, you too can stay there for 12 nights.Though the possibility of future housing in space is a shiny idea, it’s hardly novel. Scientists and engineers have been exploring how humans might permanently colonize space for decades. Rick Guidice, a NASA-affiliated artist during the 1970s, generated visuals of what space accommodation might look like.
In the summer of 1975, at NASA’s Ames Research Center located in Mountain View, California, a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers led by physicist Dr. Gerard O’Neill imagined a future world with space colonies. Could human beings survive living in permanent, free-floating structures away from Earth? O’Neill and his team could theorize about it, and calculate a cost-benefit analysis of leaving Earth for another fold in the universe, but they’d need to call on illustrators to truly see the possibilities.
NASA was a longtime commissioner of Guidice’s work, and during the 10-week summer study where participants worked on this space settlement project, Guidice was tapped to render images that would illustrate the feasibility of living in space. O’Neill had been studying space colonization for the past six years at Princeton, and according to Guidice, had “pretty much defined systems for how to build habitats in space on a large scale.
” In response to this research, NASA provided Guidice with technical information and simple diagrams of what these possible future settlements might look like, and then he interpreted the data into detailed pencil sketches.“Of course I realized this was a very important opportunity to really do something special,” he says. After several hours of research and revision, Guidice ended up with his first—and favorite—painting: the double cylinder space colony.
The team of scientists devised multiple approaches to space habitation, so Guidice (along with fellow illustrator…
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