There are tens of thousands of pieces of debris currently orbiting Earth. Old satellites, spent rocket stages, thermal blankets, fragments from past collisions — each one harmless on its own, but together forming a high-speed cloud that threatens active spacecraft and space stations. Space debris is often seen as a problem. But what if it […]
On Earth, you wake up, sit up, walk to the kitchen, turn on the tap, pour coffee, take a shower, flush the toilet, and maybe water a plant or two. You don’t think about gravity. Or air pressure. Or heat transfer. Or fluid dynamics. They’re just there. In space, all of these things work differently. […]
Until recently, space transportation meant one thing: launch. A few companies, a handful of rockets, and an expensive ticket to orbit—if you were lucky. Today, that’s still true. Most transportation in space is about getting things to space: satellites, scientific payloads, the occasional astronaut. Launch is infrequent and capital-intensive. Once delivered, objects mostly stay put. […]
Space tourism was never modest in fiction. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, passengers travel aboard a silent spaceplane to a wheel-shaped orbital station, sipping drinks in artificial gravity. In Total Recall, vacations to Mars are sold as packages. More recently, The Expanse and For All Mankind imagine hotels in orbit, luxury shuttles, and lunar resorts. […]
Space architecture is a strange field. It deals with building environments for places where humans did not evolve and were never meant to live. It borrows from civil engineering, aerospace, psychology, biology, and sometimes speculative design. It’s not about skyscrapers or aesthetics first, but about survival — and then, perhaps, about making that survival more […]
I wake up to the soft sound of simulated birdsong and the sunrise reproduced by a strip of LEDs that gradually illuminates the capsule. The artificial gravity, generated by the slow rotation of the living ring, allows me to stretch out in my usual comfort, as if I were at home in Viseu. The mattress […]
