Strange Forgotten Space Station Concepts That Never Flew

Astronauts living and working in space rely on the International Space Station as their port of call. The iconic ISS is a modern engineering triumph, zipping around the Earth every 90 minutes at a height of 200 miles above the surface.

Its construction required careful coordination between nearly a dozen countries working through five space agencies. Perhaps because of this, the ISS has a highly industrial look, with function certainly triumphing over form.

Yet the history of space station design is littered with concepts -- some elegant, some strange, and some remarkably cute -- that were passed over for one reason or another. Here, we look at some space station ideas that didn’t quite make it off the drawing board.

Above:

Spider Space Station

After NASA announced the Space Shuttle program in the 1970s, it needed a place for the new, reusable launch vehicle to go. This 1977 design, known as Space Station “Spider,” was designed with the shuttle in mind.

The concept looks sort of like a ballpoint pen floating below a saucer with its bottom missing. It uses a spent shuttle fuel tank pushed into low-Earth orbit as the main body, with a circular solar array for power. It was thought that the station could house astronauts as a stop-over to other destinations.