Inflatable Space Stations
Concept Led By: N/A
Those Involved: N/A
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we did not really understand outer space as well as we do today. In the early 1960s, no one had exited our atmosphere successfully. It was not until the Russians did so that the United States became serious about going as far as the Moon. Yet many dreamed of the idea of a space station in orbit once we landed on the Moon. The thought back then was that if we can get to the Moon, soon we’ll do much bigger things. Oh how funny we were back then, eh? While we’d eventually have the International Space Station decades later, engineers began thinking about a space station long before.
Many thought of space as being without any gravity at all, therefore, you could probably just inflate a space station and send it up into space. This is sort of true, for if this inflatable space could make it through the atmosphere (though unlikely), it would eventually reach low orbit. However, gravitational pressures get pretty immense. People seem to think of space as lacking gravity. While true, planets and even moons have gravity and a space station needs to be able to handle this plus things like solar flares and space debris. Inflatable space stations could never handle this, so most were never made. That has not stopped “some” from trying though.