Kalpana One Space SettlementKalpana One Space SettlementFree space settlements are man-made, hollow planetoids in orbit. The colonists live permanently on the interior.
Kalpana One is intended to improve on the free space settlement designs of the mid-1970s: the Bernal Sphere, Stanford Torus, and O'Neill cylinders, as well as on Lewis One, designed at NASA Ames Research Center in the early 1990s. These systems are intended to provide permanent homes for communities of thousands of people. The Kalpana One structure is a cylinder with a radius of 250m and a length of 325m. The population target is 3,000 residents.
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The Kalpana One design is named after NASA astronaut Kalpana Chawla. Born in India, she was one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. She worked in the office next to mine for a few years in the 90s. I helped her with a few visualization issues and she explained a bit of computational fluid dynamics, her specialty, to me. The whole lab was very excited when she became an astronaut. The name "Kalpana-1" was first coined by an entry to the NASA Ames Student Space Settlement Design Contest in 2005 by a team from New Delhi, India. |
Click on the images below for larger versions. All of these art works are copyright by Bryan Versteeg/spacehabs.com and are used with permission. Links to additional art works and videos of Kalpana One are below.
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Exterior view. |
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Closer view of exterior. |
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Cutaway view of interior. |
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Interior view from near the hub of the settlement. |
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This and the following two images show successively closer interior views. |
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Automated robotic farming. |
fragomatik also produced an Introductory video.
To the space settlement home page.
Author: Al Globus