History




Early suggestions for future colonizers like Francis Drake and Christoph Columbus to reach the Moon and people consequently living there were made by John Wilkins in A Discourse Concerning a New Planet in the first half of the 17th century.

The first known work on space colonization was The Brick Moon, a work of fiction published in 1869 by Edward Everett Hale, about an inhabited artificial satellite.

The Russian schoolmaster and physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky foresaw elements of the space community in his book Beyond Planet Earth written about 1900. Tsiolkovsky had his space travelers building greenhouses and raising crops in space. Tsiolkovsky believed that going into space would help perfect human beings, leading to immortality and peace.

Others have also written about space colonies as Lasswitz in 1897 and Bernal, Oberth, Von Pirquet and Noordung in the 1920s. Wernher von Braun contributed his ideas in a 1952 Colliers article. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dandridge M. Cole published his ideas.

Another seminal book on the subject was the book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard K. O'Neill in 1977 which was followed the same year by Colonies in Space by T. A. Heppenheimer.

In 1977 the first sustained space habitat the Salyut 6 station was put into Earth's orbit eventually succeeded by the ISS, today's closest to a human outpost in space.

M. Dyson wrote Home on the Moon; Living on a Space Frontier in 2003; Peter Eckart wrote Lunar Base Handbook in 2006 and then Harrison Schmitt's Return to the Moon written in 2007.

As of 2013update, Bigelow Aerospace was the only private commercial spaceflight company that had launched experimental space station modules, and they had launched two: Genesis I (2006) and Genesis II (2007), both into Earth-orbit. As of 2014update, they had indicated that their first production model of the space habitat, a much larger habitat (330 m3 (12,000 cu ft)) called the BA 330, could be launched as early as 2017. In the event, the larger habitat was never built, and Bigelow laid off all employees in March 2020.

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