What does an outer space colony look like that can accommodate 10,000 people? At what altitude is it built? How is the colony structured? What nanomaterials is the colony built out of? Are these nanomaterials self-assembling? How do communities gather on the colony? What types of public spaces exist?

In the 1970s, NASA’s Ames Research Center gathered artists and tasked them with designing space colonies able to accomodate 10,000 people. Many of these images were based off the work of Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University. Together they showed how real the possibility was of building giant orbiting spaceships that we could inhabit. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been converted to jpegs and are available as thumbnails, quarter page, full screen and publication quality images on NASA’s Space Settlements webpage.

How close are we today to living in outer space?