By Jan S. Gephardt I love both real and fictional space stations. Anyone who’s read my books, or the blog posts I’ve devoted to this topic will probably roll their eyes and say, “No. Really?” Yeah, really. You got me. I love the whole idea, and I’m endlessly fascinated by the many visions of what a space station—or space habitat—could be. Why? I’ve enjoyed science fiction for decades. When I was a kid I thought of sf books as “the…
The Super Blue Blood Moon did not look like this from the second floor bedroom of our Westwood, Kansas home. There were branches. There were other houses. It was setting (at totality) about the time the sun was coming up on the opposite horizon, so we only got to see the Frog eat the Moon, but then he ran away with it, below the horizon. This moon looks way cooler than ours did–but I’m still glad we got up for it. It was still totally worth…
A I recently confessed, I’m a lifelong gardener. However, in the last few years Earth has had little need to “fear my botany powers.” After a couple of bad falls on the ice a few winters ago, it was hard for me to get low enough to garden. I needed some kind of raised bed for easier access. Signy and Pascal created a sturdy base for my project last May. Later, Ty filled it for me. Well, thanks to my…
My quest to find a plausible, space-based home for the characters in my novels continued. I needed a space-based habitat that would feel earthlike-enough for me (and my readers) to believe that humans could be comfortable there long-term. But it also must be believable, based on what we know or can reasonably extrapolate from physics, space, engineering, and technology. So far in this DIY Space Station series we’ve considered space stations/colonies in general, Dyson structures, and Bernal spheres. The next design I considered…
I needed a plausible space station for my fictional characters to live in. My research yielded such riches, I decided to share them with you in a series of “Space Station DIY” blog posts. Today, let’s consider the Bernal Sphere. It’s an idea originally cooked up by John Desmond Bernal in 1929. Bernal was primarily known as a pioneer in molecular biology, but his concept of a spherical habitat in space seemed plausible enough for NASA to launch a more…