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Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again?
This amazing video popped up in my twitter, sorry, X feed this past week and reminded me just how big Skylab really was. It was recorded in 1973, and shows Alan Bean reveling in weightlessness.
Astronaut Alan Bean enjoying weightlessness in the open space of the orbital workshop on the Skylab space station in 1973. pic.twitter.com/h3IniLVyXU
— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) October 22, 2025
Fans of the 1985 novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card may recall the vast battleroom used for training.
They filed clumsily into the battleroom, like children in a swimming pool for the first time, clinging to the handholds along the side. Null gravity was frightening, disorienting; they soon found that things went better if they didn't use their feet at all.
Much earlier, Murray Leinster describes an interior space sometimes used for recreation in his 1931 story The Power Planet:
The observation-room was vast. Two hundred feet across and high, and six hundred feet wide, and practically without a ceiling. All four walls were floor. Here was the center of the Power Planet. Here were the largest of all the ports which look out upon the appalling emptiness which surrounds it. Here, too, were the doors into the needle-like spires which show on all the pictures of the Power Planet — those two-thousand-foot shafts which jut out from its exact center. From the shaft on the sunward side, one may look out over the whole of the bright-side disk. And from the spire on the shadow side one sees exactly nothing, unless the monster searchlights are turned on. They will illuminate the dark side to its farthest edge, though, and are used in case of needed repairs to the outer skin. From the dark-side spire the only thing which shows that the blackness of the disk is not nothingness itself is that faintly luminous streak of pure Power, a hundred yards across, which goes stabbing across illimitable space to the spinning Earth, far-distant...(Read more about the Observation Room Recreation Center.)
George O. Smith describes a similar space in the center of the Venus Equilateral Relay Station in his 1942 story QRM: Interplanetary:
Channing looked up the little flight of stairs that led to the innermost level. He winked at Arden and jumped. He passed up through the opening easily. “Jump,” he commanded. “Don’t use the stairs!”
(Center space from 'QRM: Interplanetary' by George O. Smith)Arden jumped. She sailed upward, and as she passed through the opening, Channing caught her by one arm and stopped her flight. “At that speed you’d go right on across,” he said.
She looked up, and there about two hundred feet overhead she could see the opposite wall.
Channing snapped on the lights. They were in a room two hundred feet in diameter and three hundred feet long. “We’re at the center of the station,” Channing informed her. “Beyond that bulkhead is the air lock. On the other side of the other bulkhead, we have the air plants, the storage spaces, and several cubic inches of machinery.”
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