In particular the interior should have a general plan so that the finishing and details can be left to the choice of the colonists themselves. Emphasis in the design of living area of a space colony should not be on specifics, but on the range of options. Colonists need access to both large and small, private and community spaces, to long vistas and short ones, but with a flexible, manipulatable architecture. They need to be able to exploit and to change these spaces according to individual wants. The initial design must permit the colonists to reshape the interior by developing and altering the spaces.
To these ends a building system must be developed which is fairly flexible, light weight, easily mass produced, capable of fast efficient erection, and yet allows a variety of spaces to evolve. It must also provide a sufficient esthetic quality, both materially and spatially. These criteria suggest a system that is built from modular components; that is, panels and structural elements that are uniform in size but when stacked or laid horizontally allow any combinations of shapes to be achieved.
There are ways to offset the undesirable effects of artificiality other than by facilitating individual variation. One is to provide large-scale vistas, that is, to make the habitat large enough to lessen the sense of its being manmade. To this end it may be desirable to limit a colonist's view so that the entire structure cannot be seen in a single scan by designing it so that some parts are always out of sight of others. Natural objects might also be simulated, but such simulation is usually recognized as being false. It then exaggerates the sense of artificiality, although it is possible to represent the natural environment by miniature design with a high degree of perfection and satisfaction, as in Japanese gardens. A better idea is to provide contact with the actual environment of space. Convenient access to regions of zero gravity and to views of the Earth, the Moon, and stars would provide stimuli taking full advantage of life in space; it also would provide panoramic vistas, long lines of sight, and awareness of reality beyond the human scale.
On a smaller scale the artificiality of the interior would be reduced by the presence of live, growing things such as vegetation for eating or for decoration, children playing and exhibiting the chaos of youth, or animals such as pets or livestock. Living things should be provided as an integral part of the interior architecture of the colony. The desire here is to have an environment that is not completely regimented. To that end, it might be desirable to have some random variation in the climate, but the politics of producing fluctuations in temperature and humidity are probably best left to the colonists themselves.
Space Needs Within the Colony
To design a human habitation in space, a criterion must be set for area available, most conveniently expressed in terms of area per person. The amount of area allocated per person has two important consequences: it determines the population density of habitation on which depends the sense of crowding; it limits services and facilities provided to the inhabitants.
TABLE 3-1 — AVAILABLE LAND PER CAPITA IN SELECTED CITIES AND TOWNS
| City or Town | Population | Land Use (m²/person) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | New York, N.Y. | 7,895,000 | 103 | | Washington, D.C. | 757,000 | 237 | | San Francisco, Calif. | 716,000 | 164 | | Boston, Mass. | 641,000 | 185 | | Madison, Wis. | 173,000 | 447 | | Manhattan (Borough) | 1,539,000 | 37 | | St. Pierre (Village), France | 450 | 38 |
A brief survey of the literature (refs. 40-43) indicates that there should be at least 40 m² of projected area per inhabitant. Projected area means area projected onto the largest plane perpendicular to the direction of the pseudogravity. Thus a three-story house with 60 m² of floor space occupies only 20 m² of projected area. Actual usable area can be made larger than projected area by constructing levels within a habitat, or several stories within a building. As table 3-1 shows, 40 m² per person is rather less than the area per person in most U.S. cities, although it is more than in some small French villages. It is an important task of space colony architects to organize this space to minimize the sense of crowding, while still providing needed services.
Based upon experience with Earth cities, the needs of a community of 10,000 for living area and volume are categorized and a land-use plan is developed together with quantitative estimates of the volumes and areas needed. Some of the major spaces that must be provided are:
- Residential — dwelling units, private exterior space, pedestrian access space
- Commercial business — shops, offices
- Public and semipublic enclosed space — government offices, hospitals, schools (with community multimedia center), churches (which may also serve as community and assembly halls), recreation, and entertainment
- Public open space — parks, outdoor recreation (swimming, golf, playgrounds), zoo
- Light service industry — personal goods, furniture, handicrafts, etc.
- Wholesaling and storage
- Space for mechanical subsystems — electrical distribution and transformer substations, communication and telephone distribution, air movement and distribution, water treatment (supply, return, recycling), sewage treatment
- Transportation
- Agriculture
To estimate the area and volume required for these various purposes, it is helpful to consider the organization and distribution of space within cities on Earth. Environmental psychologists and planners have long realized that sufficient area must be provided so that an individual can escape at least temporarily from the pressure of crowds. Parks and open spaces near high density neighborhoods are as important in space as on Earth (ref. 43). Space offers some possibilities for reducing apparent population density that are not easily available on Earth, such as by stacking areas in widely spaced levels or having within the same habitat different communities working and sleeping on different schedules so that their inhabitants could use the same recreational area but at different times (ref. 44). Less unusual would be to use certain areas for more than one purpose; for example, churches could also serve as assembly halls, and orchards could double as parks. In appendix B a detailed examination is made of areas and volumes required for these various functions, assuming some multipurpose usage. The results of this study are summarized in table 3-2. They suggest that, to meet community needs, 47 m² of projected area and 823 m³ of volume are needed for each inhabitant. Agriculture requires an additional 20 m²/person and 915 m³/person. The justification of these last two numbers depends on how the design criterion of providing sufficient quantities of nutritious food is met; a topic discussed further in the next two chapters.
SMALL SIZE AND ISOLATION
The vastness of space and the smallness of the colony strongly affect the social, physical and governmental organization of the colony. Like any other human community, the colony has to specialize in exploitation of peculiar features of its environment to optimize its productivity. The fruits of this exploitation must be exchanged for the products of other specialized communities; trade with Earth is essential. The importance of trade is magnified by the small size of the colony which forces it to depend on Earth for many services and goods which are essential to modern society but often taken for granted. Furthermore, given that travel times among the components of the colony and to Earth may be of several days and also very expensive, it is clear that the transportation system is exceedingly important and that unusual emphasis must be placed on electronic communications and on trade in intangible goods and services.
Trade is Essential
It has been empirically demonstrated that self-sufficiency grows with size in modern high-energy societies. For communities of 10,000 people there is little hope of achieving self-sufficiency as measured by lack or absence of trade. There have been studies of sociology, economics, and geography which indicate the degree to which various specialities can be sustained. Colin Clark, one of the world's distinguished students of economic organizations, reports (ref. 45) that cities need populations of 100,000 to 200,000 in order to provide "an adequate range of commercial services. . . ." Moreover, populations of 200,000 to 500,000 are required to support broadly-based manufacturing activity.
A small settlement in space, of less than 100,000 people, would necessarily require continuing support from Earth. There is little possibility that such a settlement can be sustained without a steady and sizable movement of materials and information between Earth and the colony. Because of high demands on material productivity, ordinary business services such as banking, insurance, bookkeeping, inventory control, and purchasing would very likely remain on Earth. Management of the transportation system, and sales and delivery of products would be Earth based. The highly technological and specialized services of medicine, higher education and even of those branches of science and engineering not used in the day-to-day life of the colony would come from Earth. A community of 10,000 cannot conceivably support a large research university or a large medical center. Communities of this size on Earth do not encompass much social and cultural variety, and their major productive activities are usually limited in kind and number. To point up the lack of diversity that may reasonably be expected, consider how many and what variety of religious organizations and sects might be expected in a space colony of size 10,000.
Economies of scale for communities suggest an optimal size well above that of the early settlement in space.
Isolation: Offset by Transportation and Communications
While the small size of the colony exaggerates its dependence on Earth, the vastness of space and the long times and expense of travel tend to isolate the colonists from the home planet. A good design must attempt to anticipate and offset the effects of such isolation.
Travel from the colony to Earth is expensive, and takes a number of days. Given the need for trade and for the importation of many items of high technology that a small community cannot supply itself, the transportation system is exceedingly important. It seems essential to provide for "return migration" of persons and families to Earth who strongly wish for it, although it might be necessary to devise ways to discourage commuting.
The difficulty of physically transporting goods or people leads to a strong emphasis on electronic communication. Direct lines of sight from the colony to the Earth make radio, television, and facsimile transmission easy. Many of the special services mentioned earlier could be supplied remotely, for example, accounting, education, and even many medical diagnostic services can be performed electronically. Consequently a colony in space is expected to have highly developed electronic communications for commerce, education, entertainment and community activities. These should be designed to be easily accessible to the members of the colony, probably with two-way capability and linked to computers. The network is of such importance that it should have a high degree of redundancy for reliability, and be designed to assure privacy. It is likely that both the physical and social organization of the community will be shaped around the communications system.
Governance and Social Order
Distance and isolation also affect the governance and social order. Whether space colonization is a unilateral effort on the part of the United States or a cross-national enterprise, it will most likely be sponsored by a public or quasipublic organization with a bureaucratic structure which permeates the early settlement. The sense of isolation may stimulate the organizational development of communities away from the organizational form of the sponsor as the interests and life circumstances of a rapidly growing population change and develop. The form of governance depends very much on the preferences of the settlers, in much the same way as allowances for individual choice have been emphasized in other considerations of life in space.
Maintenance of order and of internal as well as external security initially falls to the Earth-based sponsoring organizations and then to the organized community which is expected to rise early in the colony's history. The small size of the settlement, combined with a rather precarious manufactured environment, may emphasize a concern for internal security. Any individual or small group could, in prospect, undertake to destroy the entire colony by opening the habitat to surrounding space, by disrupting the power supply, or by other actions which have few corresponding forms in Earth-based settings. Whatever organizational form the colonists evolve, it must be able to assure the physical security of the habitat and its supporting systems, and this need for security may infringe upon other desirable features of the colony and its operation.