Space History News

From Brick Moon to the Habitation Wheel: The Dawn of Rotating Space Stations

From Edward Hale’s 1869 Brick Moon—an imagined 200‑foot brick satellite launched with people aboard—to Noordung’s 1929 Wohnrad and von Braun’s mid‑century wheel concept popularized by Collier’s and Disney, the article traces how early science fiction and theory shaped ideas for rotating habitats, the physics of artificial gravity (requiring large rings for Earth gravity and introducing Coriolis effects), and why real stations have not relied on spin for gravity.