Cylinder Endcap AC75-1883 1920

In the summer of 1975, the NASA Ames Research Center teamed up with Stanford University on "Space settlements: A design study" to brainstorm what life in space would look like. Two painters from the Bay Area were recruited, Don Davis and Rick Guidice, to provide realistic, though futuristic, takes on human life inside a space colony.

Cylinder Endcap AC75-1883 1920 is the first cylindrical design we've featured from this series (our previous editions were of toroidal, or donut-shaped, colony designs). The painter's inspiration for nature curving into a coastal city is easy to pinpoint: Don Davis lived in the Bay Area at the time of the study. He hoped that this romantic depiction of life in space would entice everyday people into wanting an orbiting home.

Space settlements: A design study was just the beginning of any number of creative, forward-thinking, though slightly oddball, money-making tech projects to come out of the Bay Area over the decades. In the 1970s, the space industry believed the cosmos could be harnessed as a potential real estate hub (just as the tech industry today continues to mine the depths of the web for more and more online real estate).