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Article: Habitats
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- Space Sciences
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Habitats
One of the earliest designs for living in space was clearly a fantasy: an orbiting sphere, 200 feet (61 meters) in diameter, made of 12 million bricks and housing thirty-seven human inhabitants determined to create an ideal society. It was described by Boston religious leader Edward Everett Hale in a short story titled "The Brick Moon" in
Atlantic Monthly
magazine in 1869. It was written as a fable, never meant to be taken seriously. Later, Russian mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, after seeing France's Eiffel Tower in 1895, was at first obsessed with the idea of building a tower 35,786 kilometers (22,300 miles) into the sky. In his 1920 novel,
Beyond the Planet Earth,
a ...