Last time we found out the idea of space stations is surprisingly old. By the 1950s, everyone knew we’d be working in beautiful space stations that rotated like a wheel to give us the illusion of gravity. Of course, that didn’t happen. But we did get some practical space stations, even before the current crop. The road to get there, though, was predictably bumpy.
Convair: From TASSEL to MARS
Convair had been studying multi-person orbital stations under Krafft Ehricke since the late 1950s. One result was TASSEL, an acronym for the Three Astronaut Space System Experimental Laboratory. Proposed in 1960, TASSEL was a three-man laboratory intended for an Atlas-Centaur launch into a roughly 200-nautical-mile orbit and missions lasting two or three weeks.
Around the same time, the Air Force asked contractors for proposals for a Military Test Space Station, or MTSS. Convair was one of five companies selected for the study in 1960. The surviving record suggests that Convair’s TASSEL work fed directly into its MTSS proposal.
Then Convair did something unusual for an era overflowing with beautiful paintings of spacecraft that never existed: they built theirs. Well, sort of.
During late 1960 and early 1961, the company constructed a full-scale ground mockup called the Manned Astronomical Research Station, or MARS. The station itself was about ten feet in diameter and fourteen feet high, with two floors for working, cooking, housekeeping, and sanitary facilities. A Mercury-like reentry capsule beneath it brought the whole assembly to about 28 feet tall. You can see a contemporary video about the program below. There’s also a cache of photos and a post by [The Space Review] explaining it all.
MARS obviously wasn’t going to orbit, but that wasn’t the point. Engineers could use it to work on the less photogenic parts of putting people in orbit: life support, oxygen consumption, water regeneration, contaminant monitoring, controls, displays, and simply discovering whether people and equipment actually fit where the drawings said they would. Crews later spent as long as 30 hours inside the mockup.
Exactly where MARS fits among Convair’s various proposals is still being pieced together. Archival evidence indicates that it grew out of TASSEL and closely overlapped Convair’s submission for the Air Force MTSS program. Photographs in the San Diego Air and Space Museum archive are even identified as “MTSS/MARS.” Whatever name was on the proposal of the week, by 1961 Convair had progressed from drawing space stations to building a high-fidelity example on the ground.
Olympus and MOL
NASA wasn’t far behind. In 1962, Edward Olling at the Manned Spacecraft Center proposed Project Olympus. It would have been an 18-person station intended for launch around 1966 or 1967. It wasn’t the classic doughnut. Instead, three long arms extended from a large central hub, and rotation would provide different artificial-gravity levels at different distances from the center. The station would orbit about 300 nautical miles above Earth.
This is especially interesting because Olympus wasn’t a far-future colony study. It was being considered while Mercury was still flying. Then President Kennedy gave NASA a somewhat more pressing assignment involving the Moon.
Olympus joined the large pile of spacecraft that looked great in presentations.
The U.S. Air Force had another station that got considerably closer to hardware: the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL. Approved in 1965, MOL would have put two military astronauts into a polar-orbiting station attached to a modified Gemini spacecraft (Gemini B). Its actual classified purpose was high-resolution reconnaissance. You can see some silent footage of some of the hardware in the video below.
They selected astronauts. They built hardware. They modified a Gemini capsule with the unnerving idea of putting a hatch through its heat shield so the crew could crawl into the laboratory behind it. MOL was canceled in 1969 without a crewed station ever flying.
Meanwhile, docking — one of the basic tricks required to make stations useful — was becoming real.
Dock of the Bay
On January 16, 1969, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 docked in orbit. There was no pressurized tunnel connecting them. So Yevgeny Khrunov and Aleksei Yeliseyev put on spacesuits, climbed outside Soyuz 5, traveled across the docked spacecraft, and climbed into Soyuz 4. Two spacecraft had effectively become a tiny space station, but changing rooms required going outside.
Apollo 9 flew less than two months later and provides an interesting parallel. The command module and lunar module could dock, and crews could normally transfer internally. But what if the tunnel couldn’t be used? NASA planned to demonstrate a contingency EVA transfer from the lunar module to the command module.
Rusty Schweickart was supposed to perform the exercise, but space sickness caused NASA to shorten his EVA. He tested the lunar EVA suit and portable life-support backpack from the LM porch while Dave Scott partially exited the command module, but the complete external transfer was never performed.
Salyut and Almaz
On April 19, 1971, the Soviet Union launched Salyut 1, the first actual space station. The first crew failed to dock successfully. The second crew, Soyuz 11, spent more than three weeks aboard, but all three cosmonauts died during reentry when their Soyuz depressurized. There is some video from Salyut 1, but no audio.
The Salyut name also concealed a second program. Some of the stations were civilian Salyuts, while others were military Almaz reconnaissance stations similar in purpose to MOL. Salyut 2, 3, and 5 belonged to the Almaz line, although Salyut 2 failed before a crew could arrive.
Later Salyut stations gained a second docking port. That was a huge improvement because Progress cargo ships could bring supplies and fuel while a Soyuz remained attached as the crew’s ride home. Long-duration spaceflight was becoming practical rather than heroic improvisation. Of course, none of them rotated.
Skylab
The United States took a different route. Skylab was essentially an enormous converted Saturn V upper stage. Launched in 1973, it gave its crews something previous spacecraft had lacked: room.
Three crews occupied Skylab, staying as long as 84 days. They conducted solar astronomy, Earth observations, medical studies, and experiments designed to determine what happens when human beings spend months rather than days in weightlessness. After all, why build a giant rotating station if people could simply learn to live without gravity?
Then again, we learned that long-term microgravity isn’t free. Bones, muscles, cardiovascular systems, eyes, and assorted other bits of the human body complain when they don’t have proper gravity. Still, a nonrotating station was far easier to build, so rotating wheels stayed on the drawing board.
Freedom Isn’t Free
By the 1980s, NASA was ready to try again. In his 1984 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan directed NASA to build a permanently occupied space station within a decade. What eventually became known as Space Station Freedom was supposed to be a large modular facility assembled by the Space Shuttle.
It would support research, Earth observation, satellite servicing, and eventually serve as a staging point for missions beyond Earth orbit.
Freedom went through redesign after redesign as costs and requirements fought each other. It did not rotate. While NASA redesigned Freedom, the Soviets quietly launched something considerably more important.
Peace In Orbit
Mir seen from STS-89 (NASA).
" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/mir.jpg?w=641" class="size-medium wp-image-1139379" alt="" width="400" height="390" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/mir.jpg 3124w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/mir.jpg?resize=250%2C244+250w%2C+https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F08%2Fmir.jpg%3Fresize%3D400%2C390+400w%2C+https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F08%2Fmir.jpg%3Fresize%3D641%2C625+641w%2C+https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F08%2Fmir.jpg%3Fresize%3D1536%2C1497+1536w%2C+https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F08%2Fmir.jpg%3Fresize%3D2048%2C1996+2048w&ssl=1" sizes="auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px"/>On February 20, 1986, the Soviet Union launched the core module of Mir.
The name means “peace,” although the Russian word can also mean “world.” Unlike the earlier Salyuts, Mir was designed from the beginning as a modular station. Additional laboratory and equipment modules arrived over the years and docked around its core.
It looked nothing like Noordung’s wheel. It looked more like somebody had been assembling an enormous machine in a garage and kept finding useful places to bolt things on.
Mir represented decades of incremental Soviet experience: Soyuz, docking, Salyut, Progress, long-duration crews, orbital repairs, and modular construction. It demonstrated that a space station could become not merely a spacecraft but a place — one that crews could maintain, modify, repair, and inhabit for months at a time.
Where’s My Wheel?
That may be the most surprising thing about the history of space stations. The rotating station wasn’t some goofy 1950s science-fiction invention. Serious engineers were proposing artificial gravity before anyone had launched anything into orbit. Oberth discussed rotating stations in 1923. Noordung drew a remarkably complete wheel station in 1929. Von Braun made the concept famous in the 1950s. NASA seriously studied rotating stations in the 1960s. The physics works.
We’ve simply never needed artificial gravity badly enough to pay the cost.
If you can tolerate microgravity, a station can be a collection of pressure vessels, trusses, solar arrays, and docking ports. If you insist on one g at a comfortable rotation rate, suddenly you are contemplating a structure hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters across.
Still, Edward Everett Hale put people aboard an artificial moon in 1869. Noordung put them aboard a rotating wheel in 1929. Kubrick had airline passengers walking around one in 1968. So after more than a century and a half of talking about space stations, I have only one question: When do I finally get my rotating space station?