In 1962. There — that answers the clickbaity title right away.
NASA had viable designs for rotating wheel space stations that could have given astronauts artificial gravity. Then, the Apollo program effectively killed them.
While NASA’s lunar focus delivered the historic moonshot, it dismantled a promising engineering effort at Langley Research Center that might have revolutionized human spaceflight. That decision set us on a half-century trajectory of small, zero-gravity stations that continue to plague astronauts with muscle atrophy, bone loss, and vision problems.
Had NASA maintained its parallel pursuit of artificial gravity, we might now have permanent orbital settlements supporting deep space missions rather than the limited outposts we’ve settled for. This historical pivot point matters today as commercial space companies contemplate artificial gravity again, potentially correcting a costly detour in humanity’s path to becoming a spacefaring civilisation.
James Webb, the former NASA administrator immortalised by the JWST, standing underneath a prototype of a von Braun Wheel
The need for artificial gravity
Early space visionaries, such as Werner von Braun, strongly believed that settling the solar system required developing technologies to generate artificial gravity within orbiting habitats as — rephrasing Heinlein — space is a harsh mistress. Modern-day astronauts exercise a few hours each day to overcome microgravity’s effects on the body. Von Braun was convinced that rotating wheel space stations prevented such physiological problems and were thus “as inevitable as the rising sun”. In these systems, humans live along the periphery of a wheel, within which they experience gravity due to the wheel’s rotation. Popularised by von Braun in his 1949 sci-fi novel, Project Mars, and the 1956 Disney piece, the concept actually traces back to Herman Potočnik’s 1929 book The Problem of Space Travel. Its legacy is perhaps why many felt that an operational spinning station was, at best, a couple decades away.
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Potočnik’s first conceptualised the rotating space station.
von Braun explaining the layout of his wheel-shaped station
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