Space Station Exploding

The first mention of anything resembling a space station occurred in Edward Everett Hale’s 1869 “The Brick Moon”. The first to give serious, scientifically grounded consideration to space stations were Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth about two decades apart in the early 20th century. In 1929 Herman Potočnik’s The Problem of Space Travel was published, the first to envision a “rotating wheel” space station to create artificial gravity. Conceptualized during the Second World War, the “sun gun” was a theoretical orbital weapon orbiting Earth at a height of 8,200 kilometres (5,100 mi). No further research was ever conducted. In 1951, Wernher von Braun published a concept for a rotating wheel space station in Collier’s Weekly, referencing Potočnik’s idea. However, development of a rotating station was never begun in the 20th century.


As time passed, the region would have cooled down considerably and contracted--thus pulling away from its surroundings and forming fractures akin to the cracks that form in mud as it becomes dry--but on a considerably larger scale. Only recently have space missions begun to solve this beguiling Solar System mystery--that a small number of distant moons have been successfully hiding, from the curious eyes of astronomers, life-sustaining liquid water beneath secretive shells of ice. "For the smallest craters that we're looking at, we think we're starting to see where the Moon has gone through so much fracturing that it gets to a point where the porosity of the crust just stays at some constant level. You can keep impacting it and you'll hit regions where you'll increase porosity here and decrease it there, but on average it stays constant," Dr. Soderblom continued to explain to the press on September 10, 2015.