Space stations

In a story of 1869, thirty-seven people jump up and down together on a small brick ball circling the earth, to spell out a message in Morse code. The story was "The Brick Moon," by the Boston minister Edward Everett Hale. Signals from the Brick Moon, in Hearth Library, is a passage from it. Hale's sphere was meant to help ships find their longitude, but it was flung into orbit early with its builders inside, and they made a life there.

Later writers made the idea more exact. In 1895 the Russian teacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote about artificial satellites as bases for rockets, and about spinning a station to give its crew a kind of gravity. In his novel Beyond the Earth (finished 1917, printed 1920), travelers in orbit grow their own food in a glass greenhouse; Greenhouses in Orbit gives those chapters. In 1923 Hermann Oberth wrote briefly of "observation stations" for watching the earth and refueling rockets. In 1929 Herman Potočnik, writing as Hermann Noordung, published a detailed engineering plan, with a turning "habitat wheel" for living quarters. A NASA historian finds it hard to say how far his book shaped later designs.

Wernher von Braun described a large station for American readers in Collier's magazine on March 22, 1952, and the article helped fix the popular picture of one. After NASA was founded in 1958, many of its planners saw a station as the natural next step. But when President Kennedy made a Moon landing the national goal in May 1961, station plans were set aside. His speech We choose to go to the Moon (1962) gives his reasons for that goal. Engineers at NASA's Langley center still studied a large rotating station, a six-sided wheel for 24 to 36 people.

The first real station was Soviet. Salyut 1 was launched on April 19, 1971. Its crew, Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev, arrived on June 6 and stayed a record 24 days. They died on the way home when their spacecraft suddenly lost its air. Salyut 1 was brought down over the Pacific on October 11, 1971.

The United States launched Skylab, built inside an empty rocket stage, on May 14, 1973. Its three crews stayed 28, 59, and 84 days; the last left on February 8, 1974. Among other work, the crews studied how weeks without weight changed their own bodies.