This Was Your Daddys (Or Possibly Grand-Daddys) Space Station (1970)

Once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, in a place called the U.S.A., folks who cared about such things knew what space stations were meant to look like. If they werent big spinning wheels, they were fat drums with multiple decks. Radial and axial ports provided docking places for smaller specialized modules and reusable crew and cargo delivery vehicles.

Back in those days, they had big rockets that could put an entire 12-man space station up in one launch. Lest anyone worry about putting all our space station eggs in one rocket basket, those rockets were tough enough to shrug off lightning strikes and still launch men to the moon.

Alas, something went wrong and the tidy drums shrank and metastasized into elaborate, inelegant, multimodular monstrosities. The cargo and crew delivery vehicles grew and became frail and costly and the tough big rockets became lawn ornaments long before their time.

The neat thing, however, is that, when we mess up our technology choices, we can have a second chance if we decide that we want one. This is why I am excited about NASAs new big rockets. I hope they get them right. Big rockets = big opportunities. But I digress.

This post is made up of illustrations from a 1970-ish NASA brochure called Space Station: Key to the Future. Ive long been fond of this one NASA publication. The illustration style screams early 1970s, and there are other hints of those ancient days to be found as well.

The drum-shaped station was designed to be used for artificial-gravity experiments. In the image below, the spent Saturn V S-II rocket stage that boosted the station into Earth orbit is attached to the station by multiple cables. The 33-foot-diameter stage acts as a counterweight as the whole assemblage spins end over end. Spinning creates acceleration which the crew feels as gravity. Down is away from the center of rotation, which is about midway between station and stage.

This artificial-gravity capability is why in some of the images that follow men can be seen standing with their feet planted firmly on the floor. Artificial gravity was not meant to be a permanent feature of the drum-shaped space station, which was designed mainly to explore the possibilities and problems of weightlessness.

The following illustrations display station decks and compartments outfitted for various kinds of scientific investigations.

On NASAs drum-shaped space station, everyone got their own wood-paneled private cabin. Note the restraint bar extended across the bed above the station crewmans waist; presumably it is intended to keep him from floating out of bed. Note also the image on the cabin wall; it displays the only female we see in this 42-page NASA brochure. One would like to think that its a picture of the NASA Administrator or the President of the United States, but this was 1970, after all.

Apollo space suits relied on zippers and were made mostly of soft parts. Internal air pressure, combined with multiple layers of fabric and plastic, made getting around in one a real workout. NASA space suit engineers had in mind major improvements for the space station space suit. These would have included features such as articulated hard joints. The suit would have been less a balloon and more an exoskeleton.

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This Was Your Daddys (Or Possibly Grand-Daddys) Space Station (1970)