The Next Giant Leap
Not a cramped station. Not a hostile planet. A rotating cylinder where cities, forests, and lakes exist under Earth-normal gravity—permanently habitable, infinitely scalable.
The Vision
You step outside your home. Children are playing soccer in the park. A river winds through forests toward distant hills. The sun rises on schedule. Everything feels completely normal—except when you look up, you see more neighborhoods, more parks, more life curving overhead.
This is SpaceTube. Not a space station. Not a survival bunker. A city-scale world where millions can live, work, and raise families in perfect Earth-like conditions.
The Scale
"Our habitat has a diameter comparable to the CERN Large Hadron Collider—except instead of a tunnel underground, it's a livable world rotating in space."
Life Inside
Sports, forests, lakes, cities—everything you'd expect from a thriving civilization, engineered from first principles.
Soccer fields, hiking trails, and open meadows—all under 1g gravity with a sky that curves up, not down.
Built like a shipyard, not a spacecraft.
Full cities with long sightlines and natural light.
At 0.5 RPM, Coriolis effects are imperceptible. Sports, walking, and daily life feel completely Earth-normal.
Axial mirrors deliver real sunlight along the cylinder's length. Day/night cycles, seasons, and weather are all controllable.
2-3 km unobstructed views with gentle terrain, forests, and atmospheric haze create a convincing "outdoor" experience.
Regolith and water shielding provides full protection. The shielding mass is structural, not parasitic.
ISS-proven ECLSS backbone with bioregenerative modules. Compartmentalized so biology never becomes existential.
Once diameter is set for 1g, you add acres by extending length. Same RPM, same gravity, more world.
The Argument
Mars has gravity you can't change, an atmosphere you can't breathe, and dust that will kill you. SpaceTube gives you Earth-normal everything—without being trapped at the bottom of another gravity well.
The Physics
SpaceTube is a physics machine with controllable dials: gravity, sunlight, air, shielding, and redundancy. The trick is treating habitability and safety as first-order design requirements.
Spin at 0.5 RPM with a 3.6 km radius delivers exactly 1g at the floor. Centrifugal force points "down"—always away from the axis. Low RPM means minimal Coriolis effects.
External heliostats track the Sun and feed light through axial windows. Internal louvers control day/night, crop cycles, and emergency blackout for radiation storms.
Not a single shell—a system: primary tension structure, pressure liner, then shielding mass. At this scale, shielding dominates, not rotational stress.
Physicochemical backbone (ISS-style ECLSS) for survival. Bioregenerative modules for closure improvement. Compartmentalized so biology is never existential.
Interior divided into districts with bulkheads. A leak or fire affects one district, not the whole habitat. "Station lost" becomes "district offline."
Once diameter is set for 1g, you add acres by extending length. A 3km tube is San Francisco. A 10km tube is Paris. Same RPM, same gravity, more world.
The Numbers
Reference parameters for a 1g habitat at 0.5 RPM. Every number is derived from physics, not aspiration.
The Plan
Treat SpaceTube like a manufacturing scale problem: validate the physics with prototypes, build the mass-throughput supply chain, then assemble at industrial cadence.
Lock geometry, pressure, daylight architecture, compartmentation, and safety case. Create a digital twin for operations and failure modes.
→ "SP-413 style" brief + hazards analysis + redundancy mapBuild a smaller rotating habitat to de-risk human factors, rotating utilities, seals, and long-duration maintenance.
→ Crewed AG testbed with weeks-to-months operationsDeploy robust ECLSS backbone first, then integrate bioregenerative modules under tight control and compartment limits.
→ Proven life support with closure improvement pathEstablish mining + processing + transport for bulk shielding mass. This is the gating item for deep-space permanence.
→ Tonnes/day pipeline, measured like a commodity industryModular assembly: primary structure → pressure liner → shielding → interior buildout. Run it like a shipyard that never stops.
→ 11k–17k acre 1g habitat, compartmented into districtsOnce the manufacturing line is stable, scaling becomes straightforward: extend length to add acres and people without increasing RPM.
→ Archipelago of tubes with shared industrial backboneFeasibility
The hard parts are well-known: pressure loads, shielding mass, MMOD, leak response, and closed-loop reliability. The knobs are known too.
SpaceTube is a program, not a poster: prototypes, throughput, then shipyard assembly. If you have launch, robotics, mining, life support, or megastructure experience—let's talk.