Excerpt
Astronauts living and working in space rely on the International Space Station as their port of call. The iconic ISS is a modern engineering triumph, zipping around the Earth every 90 minutes at a height of 200 miles above the surface.
Its construction required careful coordination between nearly a dozen countries working through five space agencies. Perhaps because of this, the ISS has a highly industrial look, with function certainly triumphing over form.
Yet the history of space station design is littered with concepts -- some elegant, some strange, and some remarkably cute -- that were passed over for one reason or another. Here, we look at some space station ideas that didn’t quite make it off the drawing board.
Just 2 of several examples
(2001 A Space Odyssey)
(1977 design, designed with the shuttle in mind)
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