Welcome to Rana Station

Where did Rana Station Come From?

The first of the XK9 "Bones" Trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone, is now available on Amazon as a paperback or in Kindle format. It explores ideas I've been developing for a long time.

Its setting, Rana Station, is almost a character in its own right. That's partially because of the culture, partially because of the communities, and partially because of the incessant need to grow food everywhere possible.

I chose the classic Stanford Torus as the basis for my design, but--like many sf authors--I've adapted it.

The Stanford Torus space habitat design: In this 1975 painting by Don Davis, we see the single stationary mirror that would capture solar energy and reflect light to the secondary mirrors around the single torus.

For one thing, there isn't a single torus on Rana, but rather a series of eight tori, counter-rotating for better balance and stability, and linked by a long central "Hub," kind of like an axle linking the eight habitat wheels. For another, the tori are bigger, based on tech first extrapolated for a Bishop Ring.

I have tried numerous times and in numerous ways to visualize for myself how Rana would look on approach. The best way I've managed so far to approximate an exterior view is a "quick & dirty" extrapolation in Adobe Illustrator, using a PNG of a bicycle wheel with a transparent background.

It's still not right, because it doesn't recreate the space docks and the manufacturing structures. but if you think of the spokes as symbolic of all the elevators from various parts of the 1-G habitat to the Hub, it does give a general idea of what the "wheels" would kinda look like.

Admittedly, both quick and dirty, but it gives a general feel. The smaller wheels represent the ozzirikkians' habitat wheels. Never met an ozzirikkian? You can change that! Read the book! You'll meet several.

If you think this "wheel" structure looks familiar, that's because it does. Ever since the Stanford Torus was introduced, it's seemed to many the most earth-like, understandable, and workable of the space-colony habitat designs . . . at least, as far as movies and TV go.

Interior concept art for the Elysium space station shows a much less steep-sided valley than I imagined for Rana Station's habitat wheels. But it gives a glimpse of the inside of a wheel structure.

We aren't likely to be able to provide "artificial gravity" that works like magnetism and switches on or off, at least, not by using any laws of physics that we currently know. Therefore, the gravitation needs to be provided by centrifugal force, created by building rotating megastructures in space.

I've created several posts about space station designs that I considered and studied in the course of my "Space Station DIY" series, when I was trying to figure out what kind of space station design I would use for the setting.

I considered  space stations/colonies in general, Dyson structures, Bernal spheres, and O'Neill Cylinders. But the torus seemed to me the most likely to provide a reliable 1-G environment that was comprehensible to terrestrial human brains.  I liked it better, and I got to be the decider because it's my story.

I'm planning future posts about aspects of life inside those wheels, including a look at some of the maps and 3D elevations I've been creating as paper sculpture, to help me more realistically understand, develop and describe the settings inside this world I'm creating. Stay tuned.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Wikipedia for a good file of the painting by Don Davis  - NASA Ames Research Center (ID AC76-0525), of the original Stanford Torus, which is now in the Public Domain.
To my chagrin, I can't relocate the source of the PNG image I used to create my "quick & dirty" Rana Station visualization.  I apologize! 
Thanks also are due to Geeks of Doom, who provided the Elysium concept art. 

DIY Space Station: Farmers in the sky

As I've been designing a space-based habitat that is home to the characters in my "XK9" novels, one of the recurring questions is how will these people feed themselves?

On the eve of the US Thanksgiving holiday, it seems an especially apt question.

Space Farmer by Jay Wong: if we're out there, we'll have to eat.

As you may have picked up from comments I've made in several of my previous "DIY Space Station" posts, I have some rather pointed views about agriculture in a space-based habitat. I've lived in or near farm country all my life, and I've been an organic gardener (I was even a garden club president once!) for many years. Of course I have opinions. :-)

One thing's certain: space colonists will have to eat--and for their habitats to be sustainable, they'll have to produce food where they live. From Yuri Gagarin's first space meal on Vostok 1 in 1961 and John Glenn's first meal during the Friendship 7 mission in 1962 to contemporary experiments on the International Space Station, finding ways to fulfill this basic human need in space has been an ongoing concern.

An agricultural area in Kalpana One, as envisioned by Bryan Versteeg

The 1970s-era NASA project designers who created the Bernal sphere and O'Neill cylinder designs assumed that intensive farming, something like the industrialized agriculture that was beginning to become widespread at the time, would be most efficient for space. They designed a separate section for agriculture, the so-called "Crystal Palace" of the Bernal sphere. The same kind of structure was planned for the O'Neill cylinder.

Perhaps the "Crystal Palace" made sense in the 1970s.

I don't know if you've ever been near a feedlot or hog farm and smelled the "atmospherics" produced by intensive livestock farming, or if you've ever studied the health risks, carbon footprint or water use of such projects, especially as regards beef, but if you have the "Crystal Palace" plan should give you pause.

As I explained in my post on Bernal spheres, we've learned a lot about the perils of such practices since then. There's also growing evidence that all beef, chicken, salmon, and other meat proteins are not equal: the intensively-farmed versions are markedly inferior. Why ever would we take those methods into space?

Not actually healthy for anybody: cattle on a large feed lot.

In a relatively small, enclosed system such as a space habitat, everything must be recycled. There'd only be room for highly efficient agricultural methods. Intensive livestock farming is still livestock farming--inherently inefficient, compared to many other protein sources.

Of course, there's a question of exactly what does "efficient" mean?

During the recent drought, for instance, California almond farmers have been taking tremendous criticism over their thirsty almond groves. But in general nuts are an excellent source of protein. In a smaller, closed system with a controlled water cycle, trees' value must be considered in terms of the nutrition and oxygen they produce, not only the water they consume.

Almonds ready for harvest.

Unfortunately, when you look at nutritional protein sources, animal-sourced protein (including eggs and some milk products) tends to be better-suited for human metabolisms than most vegetable sources. A balance of both sources is best, nutritionally--but how do you get meat, milk and eggs in a space habitat where there are no wide-open spaces for healthy animals to roam?

Aquaponics systems can sustain quite a variety of plant crops, but also can produce animal protein from fish, shrimp, prawns, etc. That might provide a partial solution. 

An aquaponics "family plot" grows a wide variety of plants.

Certainly ventures such as Sky Farms in Singapore are pushing the envelope on the potential to grow more food in a smaller "footprint," and they're doing it with aquaponics. But so far they're growing mostly salad greens, not almond trees.

The rotating towers of Sky Farms are designed to make sure all plants get adequate sunlight in a vertical planting scheme.

Sky Farms brings up another important point: the space station designers of the 1970s envisioned farming as something that happened in separate, "agricultural" areas. Yet contemporary trends are opening us to more urban agriculture options. "Farms" aren't just out in the country anymore. They're popping up in vacant urban lots and in greenhouses on urban rooftops. 

This community garden in Kansas City, KS is not far from my home.

SkyHarvest in Vancouver has located its rooftop greenhouse within biking distance of many of its regular restaurant clients. Their website has a great short video about how they operate.

Another recent trend in urban plantings are so-called "green walls," planted with a variety of species to create visual interest, produce oxygen, and help clean the air. I can't imagine those would be hard to adapt for edible plants. 

The company that makes this vertical planting system is called--appropriately enough--Greenwalls.

And of course, space-saving espaliered fruit trees have been around for centuries. 

An espaliered peach tree at historic Le Portager du Roi (Vegetable Garden of the King) at Versailles, France

Another idea gaining traction lately has been "green roofs." One has only to look at Bryan Versteeg's visualizations of Kalpana One to see that I'm not the first person to think of putting them on space habitats. 

Bryan Versteeg beat me to the idea of green roofs on a space habitat: this is part of his visualization of Kalpana One.

In addition to providing pleasant green spaces and oxygen, they'd make ideal garden plots if the soil was deep enough. Urban rooftops all over the world support similar green roofs and rooftop gardens.

This rooftop garden in Portland, OR supplies the Noble Rot Restaurant.

If agricultural efforts are integrated throughout the entire space habitat, that changes the picture and the potential. Food could grow anywhere! Why not on pergolas hung with grapevines, squash, or tomatoes, for example?

This is a squash trellis, but lots of food plants grow as vines, which means they can grow up walls and hang from trellises or pergolas--providing yet more vertical growing options.

And while we might not see cattle wandering freely through the streets, we certainly might find "backyard chickens" or other, smaller-scale livestock growing operations (Rabbits? Goats?) tucked in here and there all over the station--another potential partial solution to the "where do we get our protein?" question.

Beyond aquaponics: could small-scale chicken farming be another source of protein on a space habitat?

None of this discussion has so far wandered into the areas of genetically-modified plants, that might be specifically adapted for high yields in small amounts of space, but they are likely to be developed, whatever we may think of GMOs (a discussion for a different post). 

Another area that's still in its infancy is cultured meat. Yes, right now one tough, relatively tasteless patty recently cost about $263,000 to produce, but the Dutch lab that produced it from beef stem cells is anticipating its products could be commercially available and viable by 2020.

The $263,000 burger, before cooking. Is cultured meat the future of protein in space?

While the question of how many resources such "cellular agriculture" might require is still open, it seems likely that the field will have evolved considerably by the time we're building habitats in space. So maybe our descendants who venture forth to live on the Final Frontier won't have to forego eating their favorite Kobe steaks after all.

IMAGES: Many thanks to Jay Wong's website, for his Space Farmer image, to Bryan Versteeg's Spacehabs Gallery for the Kalpana One farm and green roofs images; and to Wikipedia and NASA for the "Crystal Palace" image (sorry--couldn't find the artist's name). 
I'm indebted to "Johnny Muck" for the beef feedlot photo, to Grow Organic for the photo of the ready-to-harvest almonds, and to Friendly Aquaponics for the photo of varied crop-plants in an aquaponics system. 
Many thanks to Urban Growth for the image of the Sky Farms tower, to Kansas City Community Gardens for the photo of the urban garden in KCK, and to SkyHarvest via Pinterest for the photo of their rooftop greenhouse. 
Thanks greatly to Greenwalls Vertical Planting Systems for their photo of a contemporary "green wall." Go to their website for more beautiful examples. 
Thanks also to Paully and Growing Fruit for the photo of the espalliered peach tree at Versailles, to Noble Rot of Portland, Oregon, for the rooftop garden photo, to Organic Authority for the squash trellis photo, and to the Denver Library's website, for the photo of urban chickens. And finally, thanks to the Daily Mail for the photo of the cultured meat patty.

Space Station DIY: Should we go Tubular?

NASA artist Don Davis gave us a vision of how
it might look inside an O'Neill cylinder with
reflected sunlight.

My quest to find a plausible, space-based home for the characters in my novels continued.

I needed a space-based habitat that would feel earthlike-enough for me (and my readers) to believe that humans could be comfortable there long-term. But it also must be believable, based on what we know or can reasonably extrapolate from physics, space, engineering, and technology.

So far in this DIY Space Station series we've considered space stations/colonies in general, Dyson structures, and Bernal spheres. The next design I considered was the O'Neill Cylinder, a design developed by one of the founders of this area of engineering and design, Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, of Princeton University. 

The idea for this design evolved out of O'Neill's work for NASA and at Princeton. His Island One and Island Two designs were Bernal spheres, but the larger Island Three design proposed a paired-cylinders design that sought to solve several problems with the Bernal sphere design.

His 1976 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space described the "Islands," and developed the concept of the paired cylinders. Why paired cylinders? So they can  cancel out a gyroscopic effect that would make it difficult to keep them aimed at the sun. Each cylinder was to be four or five miles in diameter and up to 20 miles long, with six sections: three "window" areas, interspersed with three "land" areas. Each cylinder could provide habitat for several million people.

There would be a separate section for agriculture, designed much like the so-called "Crystal Palace" of the Bernal sphere design. As I pointed out in my Bernal sphere post, today we know far more about the pitfalls of industrial-style agriculture than we did in the 1970s. I'll go into more detail about space-based agricultural issues in a future post.

O'Neill cylinders utilize a shape identified by the creators of Kalpana One as the most efficient for a space habitat (more about Kalpana One in a different future post), but I ultimately found it difficult to imagine living in one, for many of the same reasons as the Bernal sphere.

Also, I didn't like the slight Coriolis effect that would occur if the habitat was built the size O'Neill originally proposed. There were economic reasons for that size: O'Neill was trying to get the US Government to consider funding one of his "Islands." Their size was dictated by 1970s-based calculations. Unfortunately, the head of the Senate subcommittee that handled NASA's funding considered a large-scale space habitat a "nutty fantasy," and the project was killed.

Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) thought Gerard K. O'Neill's space-settlement ideas were a "nutty fantasy." Proxmire was famous for identifying government programs he thought were silly, and awarding them the Golden Fleece Award. Fear of his wrath led NASA to kill O'Neill's project.

Of course, there's no reason to think a larger version couldn't be built, if the economics of the builders supported it. Rama, the space habitat described by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama, is about 50% larger than the classic O'Neill cylinder, but as I understand it, it's based in part on O'Neill's design. I found a video that offers a 3D-animated "tour" of Rama. I enjoyed it, and I hope you do too.



Side note: yes, my own Rana Station's name was chosen with a nod to Rama, although I ultimately chose a different design configuration for my space habitat. The name "Rana" (with an n) means "attractive, eye-catching, elegant," which is what cinched the choice for me. I'm an artist: it had to appeal to my eyes, too!

Besides Clarke's Rama, other famous O'Neill cylinders in science fiction include the space station Babylon 5 and the space habitats (sides) in the Gundam Universe.

Babylon 5--but where are the windows? And are those solar panels, or heat exchangers?

Animators of the Mobile Gundam series paid close attention to the design of O'Neill cylinders. This is an interior view of Loum (Side 5).

IMAGES: Many thanks to Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons and Don Davis for the upper image of the cylinder interior; for the High Frontier first edition cover featuring art by Rick Guidice; for the 1970s rendering of an exterior view of paired cylinders, also by Guidice; and for the photo portraits of Senator William Proxmire and Gerard K. O'Neill. 
I am indebted to the Maveric Universe Wiki for the GoetzSheuermann image of Island One. 
Many thanks to YouTube and Eric Bruneton for the Rama animation, to Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange for the image of the Babylon 5 Space Station, and to The Universal Century, for the interior image of Loum (Side Five) a space colony from the Mobile Gundam universe.

Space Station DIY: Bernal Spheres?

I needed a plausible space station for my fictional characters to live in. My research yielded such riches, I decided to share them with you in a series of “Space Station DIY” blog posts.

  

John Desmond Bernal

Today, let’s consider the Bernal Sphere. It’s an idea originally cooked up by John Desmond Bernal in 1929. Bernal was primarily known as a pioneer in molecular biology, but his concept of a spherical habitat in space seemed plausible enough for NASA to launch a more in-depth study in 1975-76.

Gerard K. O'Neill

That study led to Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposal for Island One, a relatively small Bernal Sphere. This was followed by the larger Island Two (which, it was hoped, would provide a more practical industrial base). By the time O’Neill got to Island Three, he’d evolved to a different shape, the O’Neill Cylinder (we’ll discuss that design in a future post). Other research rooted in the Bernal Sphere eventually led to a toroidal design, often called a Stanford Torus. 

The wine-tasting party doesn't seem to mind if the world is inside-out.

What would it be like, to live in a Bernal Sphere? Artwork from the mid-1970s gives us a glimpse of an inside-out world, in which you could see the other side of the colony “up in the sky.” I don’t know about you, but I think that would give me terrible vertigo.

Recreation at the poles: nets and micro-gravity sex?

The artificially-generated centrifugal gravity would fall to nothing at the poles, which some have thought would make those good recreational areas. The illustration above envisions “Zero gravity honeymoon suites,” but doesn’t seem to consider the problems of space-sickness caused by microgravity, or the realities of Newton’s Third Law. Perhaps people would be better advised to enjoy their marital bliss in the 1-G areas, and play Quidditch at the poles. 

Perhaps people could play Quidditch at the poles of the Bernal Sphere.

The outside view shows a series of rings on one end, stacked next to the sphere. This would be the so-called “Crystal Palace” for agriculture to feed the population of 10,000 (on Island One). 

External view of Island One, with agricultural "Crystal Palace" tori at one end.

Unfortunately, scientists and engineers in the 1970s were not much concerned about the issues involved in intensive farming, so they followed contemporary ideas, and designed their Crystal Palace to be a cow-, pig-, and chicken-hell. I wonder how much concern they had about overuse of antibiotics and methane production (perhaps they could use the latter as a fuel, but what about the smell?), as well as the relative economies of growing plant crops versus livestock. Maybe they just couldn't imagine life without steak?

Livestock Hell in space? Maybe not such a good idea after all.

Ultimately, I decided the Bernal Sphere was not the design for my fictional space station. If I didn’t want to imagine living there, why would I try to make my characters do so? Might recall O'Neill apparently moved away from the original sphere-focused idea, too, once he looked into it more. But although my fictional Rana Habitat Space Station didn't turn out to be a Bernal Sphere, the design gave me some interesting ideas. I hope you've enjoyed this exploration. 

Earlier posts in this series have discussed space stations in popular culture and conjecture, and the idea of Dyson spheres. 

IMAGES: Many thanks to the ever-invaluable Wikipedia, for the photos of John Desmond Bernal and Gerard K. O'Neill; to the NASA Ames Research Center for the 1970s-era artwork of the Bernal Sphere interior, exterior, and "Crystal Palace" cutaway detail; to the National Space Society, for the artist's rendering of the Bernal Sphere recreational area; and to Entertainment Weekly for the Harry Potter Quidditch image. I appreciate all of you!