Does space exploration, with its cutting-edge technology and aesthetics, capture a radical imaginary for the future of humanity? To this historian of 1960s art and architecture, today’s dominant visions of space civilizations appear increasingly retrograde. They continue to uphold 1950s ideals of pastoral suburban life, at a time when this model of habitability is no longer sustainable on Earth. If life in space was once a form of techno-utopia for a futuristic society, today it serves as a nostalgic promise to perpetuate a decomposing American dream, an escape hatch for the wealthy. This text will elaborate on the history and present state of these visions and point to possible alternatives.
Historian Kenneth Osgood has distinguished between the hard power of Soviet communism and the soft power of western capitalism. The two powers’ summer, 1959 exhibitions exemplified their distinct strategies: the Soviets showed off technological infrastructures in New York, while the Americans displayed consumer technologies for domestic convenience in Moscow. Perhaps most famous from the American exhibition are images of the Splitnik, a double-wide mobile home that hosted the kitchen debate between Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and US then-Vice President Richard Nixon, “the most unusual call to arms in diplomatic history.” Coming of age during the Cold War, American models of space societies also reflected the leisure and efficiency ideals of mid-century suburbia. If the Soviets were going to be first in space, the Americans would ensure that everyone could watch on their new family television. That is, the pursuit of space extended the ideological contest over hearts and minds off-world.
Once NASA was established in 1958, studies of lunar settlements gained momentum. In 1959, the engineer Rudolf Szilard and Dr. James Gaume developed prototypes for a lunar habitat, a closed-loop environment for five, for NASA contractor The Martin Company. Models and technical drawings of the habitat circulated in trade publications and conferences. However, NASA administrators recognized that the necessary public buy-in would not come easily. Illustrations by a genre of artists, some trained in landscape painting, others in architecture, transformed models like Gaume and Szilard’s functional lunar shelter into habitable worlds of leisure in space featuring, for example, a country-club atmosphere with athletic facilities. The subtext of such images, disseminated worldwide, was that American comforts and lifestyle were well-suited to life everywhere, even in outer space. The modern suburb appeared as a visual model ex-nihilo in space, obscuring the political-economic paradigm that generated it.
Defining Habitability
Following the 1969 lunar landing, interest in habitability grew at NASA on two fronts. For one, potentially longer stays in space necessitated better understanding of human psychological adaptation to closed-loop environments. Secondly, public enthusiasm for NASA research continued to fall after the successful lunar landing, and the agency strengthened its commitment to public utility. Habitability was one area of study of interests to American communities. In summer 1970, the agency sponsored the second mission in Tektite, an undersea habitat that studied groups of aquanauts for two to three weeks at a time. Experimental psychologist Ed Wortz ran the Tektite research program while planning a symposium on habitability in May 1970. The symposium intended to introduce a wide variety of disciplines to the concept. Participants included not only space scientists but planners, sociologists, artists, and other humanists. Instead of holding the conference in a generic hotel, Wortz and his friend, the light artist Robert Irwin, hosted the symposium at Irwin’s Venice Beach studio. Irwin, architect Frank Gehry, and artist Larry Bell turned the studio into an evolving environment that was to play an active role as participant in the symposium. Their goal was to make the discussion of habitability in a hostile environment tactile, rather than entirely abstract. For example, the studio was at times uncomfortably dark, or too echoey. Irwin broke a hole in the wall as an entrance; he did not provide seating so that people sat awkwardly on a busy street curb over lunch. In Irwin’s accounts of the event, the participants grinned and bore it, without fully realizing that the discomforts of the spaces had been manufactured.
Following the Tektite mission and the symposium, Wortz and his team concluded in a 600-page report that there are three key factors to habitability in contained environments: individuality, a sense of purpose, and a sense of choice. These reflect key American values considered by many necessary to fulfill our greatest destinies. It appears that habitability belied a particular ideology, which at mid-century was spatialized through the model of suburban development. In a paper addressing the growth of Orange County due to aerospace industries, historian of science Stuart Leslie detailed the suburban development patterns of mid-century modern homes, elementary schools, and upper middle class amenities that accompanied the engineers’ arrival. Parking lots lined the aerospace campuses to accommodate private vehicles. In comparison, the Soviet aerospace engineers that Stuart described inhabited communal blocks within walking distance from the offices and labs. How would the definition of habitability have looked if Soviets ran the tests?
Visions for space colonies continued to reflect a suburban ideal into the 1970s. In 1975, Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill conducted a landmark summer study at Stanford University and NASA’s Ames Research Center on the feasibility of permanent, large-scale human space habitats. O’Neill was a proponent of orbiting space settlements, which would influence Jeff Bezos, who attended his classes. During the summer session, the group of researchers worked out three options for orbital colony typologies for at minimum 10,000 residents: the Stanford torus, the Bernal Sphere, and the O’Neill Cylinder.
The roughly thirteen images of space settlements painted by Rick Guidice and Don Davis for the summer study remain some of the most iconic representations of space habitats to this day. Their interiors feature a typology centered on hinterlands and suburbs, with cities suggested in the distance: there would be no need, the paintings assure us, to adjust our normative frameworks of ‘the good life’ for inhabiting space. A lush landscape is dotted with white picket fences amidst pastoral natural features, and familiar comforts like shopping centers and golf courses are within reach. The techno-scientific supports the socially aspirational in the depicted scenography: a well-heeled outdoor cocktail party tended by a server shows the looming infrastructure of an orbital cylinder in the background, while a hang glider underscores the variable gravity in the extra-planetary setting.
Two years after the study, O’Neill published a book summarizing its findings. The book opens with a fictional letter from two colony residents, who narrate an idyllic, comfortable and familiar life in space. The governance model describes was a sort of benevolent technocratic corporatism: centralized corporate oversight with local autonomy for each colony. The emphasis is on comfort and leisure for a workforce that supports energy manufacturing and industrial mining. It details a fully managed nature, from agriculture to forests, and a lifestyle of easy pleasure and fulfilling work. O’Neill’s protagonists claim that “we could build space communities with a total land area 3,000 times that of Earth.” Following the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, designers and scientists worldwide were alarmed by earth’s dwindling ability to meet the needs of its exploding population. Rather than transform our lifestyles and resource use, O’Neill’s answer was that we could simply generate more space and material off-world.
Yet O’Neill’s vision was not the only speculative response to 1970s alarm over earth’s environment and rising pollution levels. While he promoted closed worlds inside a fully man-made system, maturing counter-cultural artists and architects were envisioning ways of living that more closely engaged with the planet’s human and non-human entities. For example, a project by the architectural collective Ant Farm, Dolphin Embassy, envisioned an interspecies flotilla laboratory in international waters, where humans and dolphins might communicate and study each other using newly available sensors, cameras, and other technologies. Ant Farmer Doug Michels reimagined the project for space through Bluestar, a proposed human-dolphin space station comprised of a 250-foot diameter sphere of water surrounded by an orbiting torus. Compared with such alternative models for co-inhabiting, O’Neill offered a fairly conservative, traditional social agenda for off-earth habitation.
However, O’Neill’s space studies and their visualartifacts have had a lasting impact on our capacity to envision future possibilities of human habitation, whether in space or on earth. Today, climate change demands that we rethink idealized models of habitability on earth. But the same territorial patterns continue to underpin the predominant imaginaries of life in space. In 2019, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin recommitted to O’Neill’s vision in an image in which rapid rail traverses a landscape that shifts from rural (complete with an iconic red barn and athletic fields) through the suburb to a skyscraper-filled downtown. In 2026, the Aurelia Institute, a group born of the MIT Media Lab that is equally dedicated to space technology and culture, ran a space settlements competition that situated itself in reference to O’Neill’s summer study.
While Bezos, inspired by O’Neill, promotes orbital settlements, another model with many proponents is that Mars is the next frontier. The astronautical engineer Robert Zubrin, whose ideas inspired Elon Musk’s agenda with SpaceX, argues that humans should reproduce the global warming effect enough to thicken Mars’s atmosphere to make it habitable. The issues with this plan are vast and have been explored in multiple critiques. For one, seeing as we have not managed to build an ‘off’ button into global warming on earth, we might well end up with two exhausted planets. Has space become a nostalgic repository to preserve ‘traditional’ Western ways of life in perpetuity, within fully enclosed and predictable worlds? In Space2.0, it appears that the space colony becomes a time capsule for an imaginary that no longer fits on earth.
While we may argue that space remains irrelevant to most of humanity’s pressing concerns, the larger question is how tacitly accepting Western urbanization patterns as a model for space settlements constrains our imaginaries for maintaining habitability on our warming planet. It may be time to update the utopian register, to aspire toward more sustainable social models: how can visions for space societies provide the critical distancing that More’s island once offered as a limit attitude or an aspirational horizon? Religion scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein argues that the likes of Musk and Bezos perpetuate a Christian model of salvation in a new world, now through the exploitation of space. Can we do better?
Some scholars are bringing the conversation about the ethics of social practices in space environments to civic discourse, a promising exercise in the imagination of alternative possibilities on earth. For example, unless we are willing to throw people out of the space colony, jail is a costly way to address transgressions in space. Astrophysicist Erika Nesvold is examining how models of restorative justice, a rare but proven model, might operate in the context of space. Can demonstrating its utility and public benefit in a space environment support efforts to hinder the American prison-industrial complex? Growing commitment to anti-colonial ethics in the planetary sciences was captured by a white paper on decolonizing planetary protection policies submitted for the Planetary Science Decadal Survey 2023-2032. Space settlements are opportunities to imagine less extractive, more entangled ways of living in a resource-limited environment if we curtail the ingrained normative aspects of predominant spatial models and residential typologies. Space can serve as a key utopian horizon through which to experiment with new imaginaries for habitability that we then might work backwards to adapt on our planet.
Image credit: Bernal Sphere, 1975. Rick Guidice/NASA Ames Research Center.
