The Single-Family Space Colony, Part II

What's my own personal "Castle in the Sky" going to look like?

In last week’s post, I introduced the idea of frame innovation, suggesting that many complex, multi-sided issues can be resolved by reframing them. As an example, I looked at space settlement. Considering the question of why we don’t already have space colonies, we found that popular media only talks about two distinctly different models of life in space: the company town, or the O’Neill-cylinder style gigantic habitat. Any space structure where you cannot personally own and control your own homestead is a company town, and anything on the scale of an O’Neill cylinder requires you to buy into a giant collectivist project—something like the 21st-century equivalent of the multigenerational cathedral-building efforts in medieval Europe.

Neither of these models has succeeded in inspiring a mass, international effort to move to space. SpaceX’s successes in the past decade are promising, but there were many missed opportunities before they came along. Culturally, it seems like we just weren’t that interested.

There is a missing middle—both a middle class in space settlement economics, and an intermediate kind of community between the corporate-or-nationally owned space station, and the country-scaled O’Neill cylinder.

This missing middle suggests a way to reframe space settlement, as neither a corporate endeavour nor a national one, but through the lens of urban design. And this reframing might be inspiring in way that the other paradigms have not been.

The Frame We Painted Ourselves Into

In the nearly half-century since the publication of The High Frontier and Colonies in Space, Gerard K. O’Neill’s plans have occasionally been revisited, but his basic template for off-world settlement is unchanged. Some of his ideas don’t make sense; his Island Three design, for example, is a cylinder four or five miles across and twenty long, but fully half of its interior ‘land’ area is windows and it proposes hanging gargantuan mirrors deep into high centrifugal gravity under these plains of glass. That’s both wasteful and dangerous. Most recent designs for space colonies that contain Earthlike environments have been variants on the Stanford Torus, which is still gigantic. (Marshall Savage proposes giant weightless balloons in his brilliant book, The Millennial Project, but these lack the gravity we now know the human body needs.)

One clever, recent plan that’s not a megaproject is the Gateway Foundation’s SARGON machine. It’s basically a 3D printer that prints torus-shaped space stations out of standardized components. You feed its circle of ‘print heads’ aluminum plates and it welds them into one ring segment, then ratchets forward a step to weld the next one, and so on until it’s built a classic wheel-shaped station big enough to house thousands of people. The beauty of this design is that SARGON could build such a structure in a matter of weeks, and then immediately go on to do it again somewhere else.

I love the idea of SARGON. If the aluminum plates are mass-produced on the ground and launched using SpaceX’s Starship, space settlements could suddenly become a thing. Gateway’s wheel-shaped stations would be perfect as interplanetary cyclers, capable of repeatedly shuttling thousands of colonists between Earth, Mars, and Venus.

Great, sure, but these wheel habitats aren’t very Earthlike. At best, they’re the orbital equivalent of cruise ships. I can imagine owning a very pleasant set of rooms in one, and there might be a nice garden or two basking in the brilliant sunlight. But if my room has a view of the Earth or the moon, I’ll have to get used to that vista flipping over nauseatingly four times a minute. Despite how windows are portrayed in Star Trek, I won’t be able to see stars when the lights are on—the windows will just show a fathomless black. When I turn off the lights, the Milky Way is also flipping over at 4 RPM. Windows aren’t actually that great in a rotating habitat.

More to the point, my home wouldn’t be mine. Maybe I could buy in and there could be a condominium board, or I could be part of a collective, but the investment to build a station using SARGON is going to be far beyond the reach of an individual household. And while it might be like living on a cruise ship, it’ll be a largely windowless one where it’s impossible to ever go on deck.

I don’t want to spend my life indoors. I want to sleep with the windows open and a cool breeze moving the curtains, with crickets and owls for accompaniment, and wake to the sound of enthusiastic birdsong and the scent of a brief morning shower. And I wouldn’t give that up to live on Mars, or in a torus.

One of the first apartments I rented in Toronto was in a nice Polish Catholic neighborhood, next to a Hindu temple. On festival days some awesome procession would inch up our narrow street, and all the locals would sit on their porches to watch the grandeur unfold. That’s typical Toronto—and any space settlement is going to need the same level of mutual tolerance and recognition. Not all of that is just good manners; the architecture itself has to be able to accommodate a variety of cultural norms. It also has to remain safe, or at least minimally habitable, when those norms break down. You don’t want your life to depend on your neighbors not going crazy, or the company that owns your torus not going bankrupt. For a settlement in space to truly be a home, it must have a high degree of autonomy, and resilience at the family level in the face of economic, political, and cultural upheavals.

A Speculative Design: The Single-Family Colony

If that’s the life we want in space, then let’s design it! In science fiction this kind of activity is called worldbuilding; in strategic foresight, this would be a design fiction and this whole article a piece of speculative design.

I’ll talk more about speculative design in my upcoming review of a recent book on the intersection of free artistic creativity and strategic planning, The Nexus.

My first assumption in reframing space around the idea of urban design is that there is some kind of manufacturing infrastructure being built on the moon. Regolith is being mined, smelted, and turned into pure metals. In early 2023 Blue Origin revealed a process to do this efficiently in essentially a single step. The products can be shipped to orbit very cheaply using electromagnetic mass drivers.

Much of this material could be used to build solar power satellites. That was part of O’Neill’s vision, but other urgent priorities have come up since the 70s. It’s more likely that the space infrastructure will be built to serve the creation of a Solar radiation management system located at the Sun-Earth L1 point. This system will be capable of stopping global warming dead in its tracks (although it does not remove atmospheric CO2 nor solve the equally urgent issue of ocean acidification caused by that gas). The sunshade is designed to return Earth’s average temperature to pre-industrial levels within a decade or two. It is the essential lifeline that Earth’s biosphere needs as we decarbonize our civilization. For the species that we share our planet with, deploying it is a literal matter of life and death. That is why we’ll be industrializing space.

So the metals will be there; large systems will be built. There will be a need for workers, but not for millions of them; most of this new industry will be automated. For this reason alone, O’Neill’s idea that we would start with the demand for living space for millions at a time is a non-starter. And though the moon may end up being a very attractive place to work, you can’t raise kids in 1/6 gravity. (You can build spinning neighborhoods and even whole rotating cities on the moon, but it’s a considerably bigger engineering challenge than doing the equivalent in orbit.)

Once they get going, lunar mining systems will be able to produce vastly greater amounts of useful commodities than are needed, long before we can start building O’Neill colonies. The materials and machines capable of building space structures will be proliferating in a Sorcerer’s Apprentice sort of way. Once this gets going, the cost of building things in space will keep coming down, regardless of whether the price to fly there from Earth is reduced. Companies and governments that are smelting megatonnes of aluminum to build solar power satellites will find they’ve made megatonnes of oxygen as a byproduct, and they’ll need to dispose of it. It’s likely to be illegal to vent oxygen on the moon--doing that will create a temporary artificial, highly reactive, and unstable atmosphere. You can use oxygen as rocket fuel, but even if you do, those rockets need destinations, and you’re still likely to have excess.

What better way to sell it—and your metals—than as part of a housing project? You can use SARGON to make lots of company towns, and those will be okay. Really big investors might well jump straight to building an Island Three—but that’s a generational project. It’ll take centuries, if not thousands of years for all the species brought into a large colony to find their ecological balance. We’re not talking about a park in a shopping mall here, we are booting from scratch island ecologies where every living thing has some impact on every other one. It’s the mother of all systems problems to manage, and ‘managing’ it will often mean culling (killing) exploding populations of innocent creatures. It’ll mean waiting decades for forests to grow if they even do. (You might be able to buy in cheaply during the generation-long ‘fungus paradise’ phase, as the imported regolith is slowly transformed into arable topsoil.) It’ll mean the penalties for importing granola that might accidentally drop a fertile seed will be higher than for smuggling, say, drugs (which only affect the human population). Colonists moving into a brand-new O’Neill cylinder will be buying mortgages inside a giant climate-change-catastrophe theme park.

The place’ll be spectacular, someday. Meanwhile, why not offer mortgages at reasonable rates for people to move to space, with the promise of life in their own duplex? A mansion in the sky, with no land or material scarcity to drive the prices up as more people move in?

In what follows I’m going to freely borrow and adapt ideas from some people who are much smarter than I am. Back in 2007, Devon G. Crowe, Edward A. Reitman, Prakash B. Joshi, and Kophu Chiang published the final report of an immensely cool project they’d done for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. The title of the report only hints at just how innovative it was: Self-Deployed Space or Planetary Habitats and Extremely Large Structures is all about blowing bubbles. Really, really big bubbles.

Crowe’s team tested an idea that O’Neill describes on page 245 of The High Frontier. They verified that you can blow bubbles in a vacuum with certain kinds of resin. In space, free of the influence of gravity, these bubbles can be gigantic—over a kilometer in diameter, by their estimates. Once blown, they are ‘cured’ by the ultraviolet light of the sun. If you’re far enough away from a gravity well, these bubbles can be almost perfectly round and symmetrical. This makes them perfect pressure vessels if you can reinforce them. Once again, O’Neill suggested a way to do that using a process called vapor deposition.

So let’s say I want my own personal space colony. I’ll hire a contractor to blow me a simple sphere, one hundred meters in diameter. He can do that really cheaply because a little resin goes a long way. Then, using aluminum or steel shipped up from the moon, the contractor builds up layers of metal on the inside of my sphere using vapor deposition, until we have a shell that’s strong enough to hold a breathable atmosphere.

People have proposed such spherical habitats before, but as far as I can tell, they’ve always been conceived of as stations: multi-floored buildings, essentially. I’m talking about something a little different.

Before they inject air into this reinforced sphere, I’ll get the contractors to make a few alterations to it. The biggest one is to cut a big round window in one half of one hemisphere. Think of the Earth, then cut out North America and replace it with a glass oval.

The builders attach a very strong set of cables, or girders, to the sphere’s ‘North pole.’ These lead off a few hundred meters to the North pole of a second sphere, or to a bag of trash (such as slag from lunar mining) that will act as a counterweight to the mass of my family’s sphere. If it’s a second house sphere that’s being built in tandem with ours, you can think of the whole unit as a duplex.

When this pair of weights is spun, like a bolo, centrifugal gravity is created in each of the spheres. If the cable is attached to the North pole of our sphere, then down is South.

Now I have a lot of options. One is to build a flat floor across the bottom curve of the inside of the ball (the south end). Layer a few centimeters of soil derived from carbonaceous asteroids across this level circle, add air, and spin the whole thing up. My family can move in, seeding grass, planting trees, and if we want, building a traditional Earthly house or cottage on the land. Maybe near one wall, with a nice view into the bowl-shaped bower that holds your gardens and trees. (Alternatively, we can live in apartments in the space under this level field.)

We could paint the inside surface of our Northern Hemisphere movie theater screen white, and diffuse some of the incoming sunlight at it through a blue filter. If we don’t look too closely, it’ll glow like a blue sky. Rain will be artificial, via sprinklers, but we can have it whenever we want. To simulate clouds, a gray filter can be slid across the window.

When the contractors put in the big window, they also installed a large mirror inside the sphere, opposite it. The family sphere rotates around its north pole once every 24 hours, just like the Earth (the difference being that our North pole has a hook on it). The sun peeks in as the window turns toward it, then the light broadens and floods the sphere as full daylight for twelve hours (depending on the width of the window). As the window turns away from the sun, night falls, and the mirror shows the stars.

A flat-floored deck built just below the sphere’s equator will be nearly a hundred meters across. That’s big enough to contain several buildings, a grove of trees, grass, ponds, gardens, or even a tropical lagoon if we can afford the water. It’s big enough to be home to a few clans of birds, some rabbits, fish, and corals, or other small friends. In the substantial space underneath this level are the water reclamation systems, power management (from the panels that cover the outside of the sphere), heat radiation through radiators dangling off the South Pole, and so on. We can also add a few rental properties for students or tourists.

From the inside, the combination of trees, local animals, sunlight, and a virtual sky, gives me and my family the experience of living in our own little valley:

The view from space that we actually want (illustration by Midjourney)

Because real estate of any size can be built in space, there is no argument from scarcity against every person having as much land as they can afford, and no argument for pricing basic habitats like this out of people’s reach (provided you’re not shipping your furniture up from Earth, but are having it built in orbit too). On the contrary, you want these habitats to be affordable because building, populating, and furnishing them will kickstart the rest of the space economy.

Space is not the colonialist fantasy of the ‘untamed frontier.’ Neither need populating it be a vast megaproject overseen by huge bureaucracies. Instead, it can be about building neighbourhoods.

This is how you inspire the settlement of space.

---

In my next installment, which will be for my paid subscribers, I’ll answer objections (such as radiation protection); expand on the idea of space development as urban design; talk about how to easily travel, for free, between Single Family colonies and how practical neighbourhoods and towns can be constructed out of the basic building block I’ve just described; and I’ll include more images including (I hope) some 3D renders I’m working on of what the inside of such a habitat will look like. So, paid subscribers, stay tuned.

For everyone, next week’s public entry will be about our unconscious theories of change—the beliefs we have about how and why change happens in the world. I’m going to use examples from science fiction to illustrate what I mean, in a piece called Who Paints the Dew On the Daisy?

Stay with me; it’ll all come together and make sense, I promise.