You may have seen images of NASA’s 1970s space colony artwork. But you’ve never seen them like this, in full size, high resolution scans.

Note: These are fairly large images, they may take a moment to load. So read through the text, or grab a cup of coffee, and they should be ready for you.

In the 1970s, NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) conducted space colony summer studies on Toroidal Colonies and Bernal Spheres which could hold population of up to 10,000 humans living in space, and on Cylindrical Colonies which could hold a population of 1,000,000.

These are the artistic renderings of those concepts. Grouped together into the three kinds of space settlement concepts they illustrate:

I. Torus Colony — II. Bernal Sphere — III. Cylindrical Colony

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”

-Carl Sagan (Cosmos)