Kalpana One Space Settlement


Free space settlements are man-made, hollow planetoids in orbit. The colonists live permanently on the interior.

Kalpana One is intended to improve on the free space settlement designs of the mid-1970s: the Bernal Sphere, Stanford Torus, and O'Neill cylinders, as well as on Lewis One, designed at NASA Ames Research Center in the early 1990s. These systems are intended to provide permanent homes for communities of thousands of people. The Kalpana One structure is a cylinder with a radius of 250m and a length of 325m. The population target is 3,000 residents.

Kalpana Chawla The Kalpana One design is named after NASA astronaut Kalpana Chawla. Born in India, she was one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The name "Kalpana-1" was first coined by an entry to the NASA Ames Student Space Settlement Design Contest in 2005 by a team from New Delhi, India.

Click on the images below for larger versions. All of these art works are copyright by Bryan Versteeg/spacehabs.com and are used with permission. Links to additional art works and videos of Kalpana One are below.

space settlement image Exterior view.
space settlement image Closer view of exterior.
space settlement image Cutaway view of interior.
space settlement image Interior view from near the hub of the settlement.
space settlement image This and the following two images show successively closer interior views.
space settlement image  
space settlement image  
space settlement image Automated robotic farming.

Additional images and video of Kalpana One by Bryan Versteeg can be found at spacehabs.com.

An introductory Kalpana One video by fragomatik may be found here.

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Author: Al Globus

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