Castles in Space: The Road to Space Stations


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	Castles in Space: The Road to Space Stations By Robert Scott Martin Staff Writer posted: 11:13 am ET 15 October 1999

Castles in Space: The Road to Space Stations

The scientific foundations of the International Space Station are about a century old, but the dream of "islands in the sky" -- bubbles of earthly life held aloft far above the ground-- has been with us since our collective childhood.

Centuries before we even dared imagine that the upper reaches would ever be home to human beings, the clouds of our folkloric imagination were populated with gods and dragons, giants and angels. Back then, there was no distinction between myth and science fiction, but no way for men and women to make the sky realms their own.

We only dared think about building our own castles in the air in relatively recent decades. Edward Everett Hale is widely accredited as the first person to put that dream in print, with his tales of "The Brick Moon" and "Life on the Brick Moon" sparking public interest in 1869 and 1870, respectively.

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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, godfather of the modern orbital habitat.

The allure of space stations has continued into the present, as the cult appeal of Babylon 5 shows.

Viewed in the context of the space stations that were later actually built, Hale's vision looks somewhat humble, even quaint, as dreams often are in their earliest stages. The Brick Moon was, obviously enough, an artificial sphere -- or more accurately, a collection of spheres -- made of bricks. Decades before the dawn of modern rocketry, Hale had the inhabited structure launched into the atmosphere by a series of enormous fans.

It is, of course, too easy to point out that this would never work. Rather, it is more interesting to note that, while the Brick Moon was at best a flawed concept, it was still one of our first steps to permanent space habitation. Perhaps most significantly, Hale's radically anti-aerodynamic design would, in all its antique innocence, prefigure the classic wheels and linked spheroids of post-aerodynamic orbital constructs.

Science picks up the banner

However, the castle in space remained a topic for idle speculation and fantasy until the Russian "Father of Aeronautics," Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, first mapped the science that would sustain life in artificial orbital stations. In his labyrinthine treatise-novel Vne zemli ("Beyond Earth"), written and revised between 1896 and 1920, Tsiolkovsky outlined how human beings could feasibly build self-sustaining habitats in space.

Among Tsiolkovsky's innovations, only thinly veiled in the guise of fiction, were the idea of generating artificial gravity through spinning the station on its axis, hydroponic "space greenhouses" and solar power.

As rocketry advanced and the center of astronautic efforts moved westward, the mantle of space-station theory passed to German physicist Hermann Oberth -- himself influenced by the lunar fantasies of Jules Verne -- whose 1923 dissertation Rocket Into Planetary Space coined the term, "space station." Significantly, the book was rejected by Oberth's academic readers as being too "utopian."

Much of the credit for synthesizing all these ideas for U.S. scientists and voters should go to Oberth's pupil Wernher von Braun, whose efforts in advancing astronautics and rocketry after World War II would eventually culminate in the modern U.S. space program.

Clarke and Kubrick's spinning "2001" dream.

Beyond ISS

Meanwhile, von Braun's popularization efforts, like Oberth's earlier attempt with German science-fiction film, were not going unnoticed. Galvanized by the tantalizing possibility of the vision preached by Von Braun, Willy Ley and other scientists, SF writers quickly set about populating the solar system -- and then the galaxy -- with walled cities in space.

As the station became a member of the technocratic SF pantheon, dozens of books and hundreds of stories spread the idea that one day human beings would live away from the earth in "islands in the sky," a phrase that revealed its power over the imagination as the title of no less than three books.

With such explosive force of popular creativity behind it, the dream of space stations rapidly outpaced the reality of efforts to actually build them, and it is only recently that reality began to narrow the lead of decades of science fiction.

And the space station is still a leading motif in SF literature, as the direct lineage from Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's "Space Station One" to J. Michael Straczynski's "Babylon 5" demonstrates. In the meantime -- at the "Lagrange Points" of the space age, as it were -- novelists and imaginative physicists alike have filled the near-emptiness of space with castles having room enough for millions, billions of people.

Meanwhile, the International Space Station -- like Salyut, Skylab, Mir and the rest -- awaits us in the near future, an island in the deep that will serve as a stepping-stone to those great, unexplored continents of other planets.