Our Future Habitat in Space

Starting to put some solid numbers on our first stepping stone in Earth orbit.

What I want to see in my lifetime, and what I think is doable sooner than most people realise, is humans living permanently in space. Not exploring or visiting - having a genuine home out there.

I support every reasonable endeavour that aims at this - building outposts on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids - but for my own part, and especially in the context of something the UK and Europe should be aiming for, I am aiming to get an Earth orbiting habitat established.

I’ve covered some of this in previous posts - but here I want to go into more detail on what exactly the habitat would look like. This is not intended as a definitive design. It is more of the start of the process of getting to that design. I hope that readers with relevant expertise will offer their suggestions to push it forwards.

Spinning Around

I have a definition I use for the difference between a space station and a space habitat - a space habitat is somewhere you can live in space, whereas a space station is somewhere where you won’t die.