Astropolis: the First Space Resort

It's New Year's eve, 1999, and a cheerful contingent of merrymakers has gathered together to wish one another a happy new century. The scene is rich with the familiar and the traditional—the drinks, the noisemakers, the paper hats, the laughter, the strains of Auld Lang Syne—only the locale is new. It's not an urban night club, not a private home, not a resort in Sun Valley or the Bahamas. It's not even on this planet.

It's a vast, variegated paradise, a pleasure palace floating in orbit far above the surface of the Earth. It's a city in itself, a city that looks out upon the stars and, for that reason, is named Astropolis. It is, in fact, the first space resort. Science fiction? Hardly. Rather, the first space resort is a completely attainable extension of the science fact of 1968. It can be realized as soon as the Government decides to employ the benefits of space research for individual pleasure.

Few people today associate space with enjoyment, except the kind derived from accomplishment or scientific research. But our oceans and our mountains, originally thought of as incompatible with pleasure, are now big business for recreation. We have become enlightened enough to enjoy ourselves almost anywhere on Earth. Our scientific knowledge and control have overcome the adversities of new environments that have challenged us. And now we use them for both practical and recreational purposes. Space need be no exception.

Extraterrestrial tourism will evolve quite naturally in the wake of explorative and applicative astronautics. As Earth's unspoiled natural habitats become fewer—and as the growing number of her children find fewer opportunities for seclusion or adventure—supervacations in Astropolis will offer far-out fulfillment and fun.

As you join your congenial companions on December 31, 1999, in ringing out the old century and ringing in the new, you may fleetingly reflect on the incalculable amounts of time, work, money and planning that went into the making of Astropolis. It took ten years to build, a year to assemble in space and $100,000,000 in private capital. (The cost may seem small—but it is based on an investment in space as a national resource that, by 1999, will have amounted to over 250 billion dollars. Astropolis is just one of the many returns on this investment in humanity's future.)

Circling Earth in a polar orbit, Astropolis is but 30 minutes from the launching pad via fast passenger rocket transport. Round-trip fare to Astropolis is $10 per passenger pound. Accommodations there average $80 per person per day, American plan.

Gigantic by space architectural standards, Astropolis is a self-sustaining, closed-system space city quartering 1000 guests and 100 personnel. It has four 12-story hotels, a varied array of restaurants, clubs and bistros, ballroom, two theaters, a casino and a shopping center. The theaters and casino feature top live entertainment from every country on Earth—jazz combos, symphony orchestras, stand-up comics, Shakespearean repertory—plus first-run films months before their release down home. Astropolis also has two Dynariums—enormous playrooms for sports unknown to the Earthbound.

For $80 a day, you will hardly want to live on algae and duckweed. The mouth-watering international cuisine is based on plants and livestock raised on board. The menu is varied and entirely Earthly. From the Astropolis farms come the raw materials for everything from filet mignon to ice cream, vichyssoise to apple pie, soda pop to vodka (though drinkers will be warned that the lower gravity conditions in orbit will produce tipsiness much more quickly than on Earth). The hydroponic farms boast a dazzling variety of plants. These fruits, vegetables and their derivatives are raised for the consumption of both the human and the animal populations. The animal farms—stocked with the most perfectly developed animals science can breed—provide the choicest poultry, pork and beef. All of these, in their various forms, are destined for the tempting hotel and restaurant menus. But nothing is wasted in Astropolis—not even waste. Residual matter (bones, skin, innards, shells, etc.) is finely ground, chemically processed and fed into the hydroponic farms with other transmuted waste materials, to serve as nutrient, thus coming full circle in this closed-cycle ecology.

The sanitation system and the menu of self-sustaining Astropolis are based on the use-reprocess-re-use cycle. The entire system is powered by electricity from nuclear reactors, monitored by sensors at all levels, controlled by computers and supervised by highly skilled personnel.

Grade-one (drinking) water is of the highest purity. Grade-two water, still bacteriologically pure, is used for washing, cleaning, cooling and for animal consumption. Grade-three water is used in the hydroponic farming. The air in Astropolis closely resembles the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere we breathe on Earth—but it is purer. The ecological air-cycle system removes poisonous gases, humidity and pollutant particles. Air pressures compare with those in a-1968 jet liner flying at 6000 feet.

Fully supplied and occupied, Astropolis would weigh about 2,200,000 pounds on Earth. Its facilities are mounted on a 1200-foot-long central axis and four 600-foot extensions. The entire complex spins around its central axis at about two revolutions per minute, for precise gravity control. Vacationers come and go through docking facilities at the outer ends of the spin axis. Entering through the hollow central axis, they reach their staterooms by turning into one of four wings.

Each hotel complex comprises six 12-story cylinders. Each floor has a 12-foot-high ceiling and an inner diameter of 30 feet. Complete floors are available as four-bed suites; others are halved into two-bed rooms. Staterooms combine the usual terrestrial conveniences—music, television, custom air conditioning—with those peculiar to an orbiting space resort. Gravity levels vary from .5 g—g being the force of surface gravity on Earth—on the first floor (which is closest to the spin axis) to .7 g on the 12th. On special observation screens, you can watch the action in the Dynariums or switch to views of Earth at a variety of magnifications. Via synchronous-orbit switchboards, you can videophone Earth or even chat with an intrepid crony on the moon.

The most relaxing effect of an orbital vacation lies in the removal and/or reduction of that constant stress upon the body and heart: the force of gravity, from which there is little escape on Earth. Depending upon where you are in Astropolis, the artificial gravity climate varies from 0 to .8 g; the farther from the center, the higher the g level. It follows that there is a scintillating spectrum of physical things you can do, ranging from innovative fun and games to weightless rock 'n' roll. The wildest dance on Earth is a drag compared with three-dimensional dancing on the ceiling and the walls, or gyrations in the space between.

If weightless dancing isn't paradise enow, you can work out in a Dynarium. Astropolis has two—each combining space environmental effects that permit many activities that are impossible to duplicate on Earth. In one Dynarium—a zero-gravity, 200-foot-diameter sphere—you are dwarfed in what may be likened to a three-dimensional swimming pool filled with air instead of water. Its low-pressure oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere provides a swimsuit environment. Here, you can dart from padded wall to padded wall; or you can float, tumble and roll with the circulating air currents. To those who enjoy weightlessness, the Dynarium is as irresistible as the breakers are to the surfer, the dizzying precipices to the mountain climber, breakneck speed to the race driver, air currents to the glider pilot and great heights to the sky diver. Forgetting the difference in dimensions for a moment, imagine yourself jumping from the top of the Empire State Building to the top of the Chrysler Building. Next you aim yourself at a small target—a window on the ninth floor of the General Dynamics building—and land softly on the glass. Now you decide to get artistic. You descend to the 45th Street floor, jump over to the United Nations Building, rebound and land back on top of the Empire State Building. Superman and the Flying Nun have nothing on you.

The other Dynarium contains a large sphere of water within its Teflon-lined walls: the Null-Gravity Aqua Pool. Because water will not cling to Teflon, under zero-g conditions the water assumes a free-floating, spherical shape. You can hurl yourself from a wall, approach the water globule at high speed and dive through it without completely breaking it up. The splash effect upon impact and egress causes small quantities of water to split off, forming a cluster of spherical "satellites." The swarm of bubbles finally forms into a single sphere, which you can bat around or push back into the main water globule. You can swim around inside the globule or approach it slowly, cause a shallow depression upon its surface with your body and just float there.

Other air-filled enclosures at moderate g levels reduce your weight to one sixth (concluded on page 222) Space Resort (continued from page 98) to one third of what it is on Earth. Here, you cannot float freely, as in the zero-g Dynariums. But you are light enough to fly under your own muscle power—another un-Earthly experience that only Astropolis can give you. Current developments as dissimilar as psychedelic, noise-jammed discothèques and the new West Coast centers for training in sensory awareness indicate that the pursuit of individual, physical joy will soon be a major part of our lives. Dancing, swiming and flying in near weightlessness with electronic light and sound effects richer than anything now imagined will make Astropolis a frontier of unearthly hedonism.

Dynariums are also used for ballet or acrobatic exhibitions and as sports arenas where guests can participate in, or witness, competitive games such as Cori-olis golf or zero-gravity baseball. The space resort's setup for tennis is in the spherical Dynarium, which is divided in two by a net with a hole in its center. The ball is a soft, featherweight plaything that must pass through the hole instead of over the net. You move up and down and back and forth—often dozens of yards at a time—to get the ball to your opponent. The trick, of course, is not just the hole but your ability while weightless to keep from traveling too far in pursuit of the ball.

If you feel adventurous, you can get suited up and go for a tethered walk outside in space; or take a space-excursion boat trip. Or, if you'd rather just take it easy, you can take in the lunar, celestial and terrestrial scenery from the transparent terrace of your stateroom, or from one of the medium-to-low-g observation lounges. Here, motion-compensated optical sensing equipment brings real-time color views to giant screens.

Your home planet, revolving beneath you, has 15 sunrises and sunsets daily. You can be synoptic, viewing Earth on a continental or an oceanic scale; or you can switch to any level of detail—even to individual buildings. You can roam the wild ridges, valleys and peaks of the Himalayas, the dry expanses of the American Southwest, the snow-capped peaks of the Andes. You can see the shimmering blue surrounding the Australian coasts, the fantastic colors of Africa, the brilliant reflections of sunlight on the polar caps (in season). You can study the infinite variety of cloud patterns above your living Earth and face the awesome eye of a hurricane from the serenity of your vantage point.

Space travel—just as land, sea and air travel—occasionally encounters dangerous environmental conditions, such as radiation storms and micrometeorite hits. In Astropolis, you are well protected from it all. The entire complex is equipped with automatic early-warning alarm systems and an emergency air supply; and the basic load-carrying structure—aluminum honeycomb—minimizes micrometeorite penetration. Inside is a heavy layer of polyethylene radiation shielding with an inner lining of incombustible fluorocarbon plastics. Hotels and other continuously inhabited areas are made primarily of fiberglass honeycomb. This minimizes the generation of secondary radiation from captured primary space radiation, which is a characteristic of metals.

Each stateroom has its own shelter—a central polyethylene tube that you enter if the decompression alarm tells you that a large micrometeorite has punctured an outer wall. Such shelters are not needed in other areas of the resort nor in its interconnecting tubes. The volume of these enclosures is so large that a puncture causes only very slow decompression, which, via a pressure-sensitive detection system, can be located and stopped in ample time.

The solar-flare alarm system signals several hours in advance the advent of a solar radiation storm. In the unlikely event of a severe storm, you may have to don a water-filled jacket and take to the shelter in your stateroom. (Water and polyethylene are excellent radiation shields, since they effectively absorb high-speed elemental particles.) In the rare case of a long-lived storm—24 to 48 hours—water jackets are sufficiently protective to permit you to leave your shelter for brief periods of time. Thus, in Astropolis, everything has been done to assure you of maximum safety and comfort, as well as out-of-this-world relaxation.

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Astropolis exceeds our present technological capabilities, to be sure, but there are no theoretical problems still to be solved, so the needed technology is merely a matter of time. Today's space program and other advances now under way are laying the foundations on which space tourism can become a reality. Possibly one of the biggest obstacles to the achievement of that reality is a purely psychological one, with which the public-relations experts of 1999 will have to do battle. "Space" is a forbidding word, connoting emptiness and darkness and eternal cold—unappealing images at any time, and especially so at vacationtime.

PR men of the future would be well advised to draw inspiration from the works of the late scholar and novelist C. S. Lewis, who painted an infinitely more attractive picture. In Out of the Silent Planet, the first volume of his great trilogy, he put these thoughts into the mind of his interplanetary voyager: "A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of 'Space': At the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? ... No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the 'happy climes that ly where day never shuts his eye up in the broad fields of the sky.'"