Hello, SFIA audio listeners, in this month's Nebula exclusive, Big Alien Theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, plus hours of bonus content, check out

go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

Our future lies out among the stars, but to get there, we are going to need gateways.

Space stations are ubiquitous in science fiction and almost all discussions of our future,

and yet with the ISS having already exceeded its planned lifetime, and no

successor yet built, or even formally planned and funded, I thought it might be nice to ask

what we're looking for in our next space station and what might accommodate those needs.

It's easy to forget that the ISS, or International Space Station, is actually our ninth

inhabited space station, since

only Mirr operated for a long time, for 15 years from 1986 to 2001. Skylab and the various

salute space stations had mixed successes as long-term orbital facilities in the 1970s and 80s,

and while we often discuss bigger and border stations on this show, we tend

to skip over the gap between a successor to the ISS and truly mass affairs, like the

Burner Sphere, O'Neill Cylinder, or the more modest Carpana design, which we'll discuss

toward the end of the episode along with the Lunar Gateway.

The eponymous Brick Moon, appearing in Edward Everett-Hale's 1869

sci-fi novella of the same name, is the first known depiction of an inhabited artificial

satellite, serving the role of a navigational aid Lomford GPS had been imagined. Since then, there

have been hundreds of station designs conceived, with some predating even the famous Von Braun

wheel design.

...