The concepts of space stations and habitats are common in modern culture. While space stations have become reality, there are as yet no true space habitats. Writers, filmmakers, and other artists have produced vivid renditions of the idea of a space station or habitat, and these iterations can be categorized by some of the basic scientific concepts from which they are derived.
Space stations
Space stations in science fiction can employ both existing and speculative technologies. One of the earliest images was the rotating wheel space station (such as the Stanford torus), the inertia and centripetal force of which would theoretically simulate the effects of gravity. Stations using artificial gravity are still purely speculative. Gary Westfahl's Islands in the Sky describes utopian possibilities of a space station. The first space station in fiction, The Brick Moon was also one of the most utopian as pointed out by Westfahl.
Space stations allow characters a relatively constrained setting, serving either as plot site or as safe refuge to which one can retreat. Since they are literary devices, there is no scientific imperative for their evolution to have followed the logical succession of scientific progress as it exists in reality; they may contain any artifact or device demanded by the plot, and can be provided by design or mere happenstance.
Space stations are often used as headquarters for organizations, which are thus linked to, but independent of, their place of formation, as research facilities in which experiments too dangerous for planetary settings can be carried out, and as the relics of lost civilizations, left behind when other things are removed.
A space station (or orbital station) is a spacecraft capable of supporting a crew, which is designed to remain in space (most commonly in low Earth orbit) for an extended period of time and for other spacecraft to dock. A space station is distinguished from other spacecraft used for human spaceflight by lack of major propulsion or landing systems. Instead, other vehicles transport people and cargo to and from the station.
In the Daniel Suarez novel Delta-v, a 560-tonne crewed mining habitat The Konstantin was constructed and tested in a lunar DRO approximately 40,000 km (25,000 mi) above the Moon, then folded the spin gravity arms in and flew on a low delta-v trajectory to intercept the asteroid Ryugu, where it redeployed arms for artificial gravity.[3]
Watcher's Nest - a massive space station with 10 million inhabitants in the anime series Divergence Eve[5][6]
Zeus Cannon - an Olympic-class assault space station equipped with an extremely powerful beam cannon orbiting the Earth in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within[7]
Orbitals from the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. Banks was engaged in the social implications of space colonisation, basing the politics of the Orbitals on his conclusion that the hostility and scale of space would inherently demand socialism within an Orbital but anarchism in its interactions with other settlements.[8]
