How To Build An Orbital Hive: TESSERAE Project

Dyson sphere, the space elevator, the construction of a space station inside an asteroid - all such ideas seem feasible in the foreseeable future, as we are accustomed to extrapolating the successes already achieved in the construction of space stations. The era of inhabited space orbital stations began in 1971.

Today, we will touch on an automatic assembly and docking of orbital modules to create space habitats of arbitrary shape. In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the TESSERAE project, described as “self-assembling space architecture.” I will post a promotional video for this program below, but first I would like to note that dreams of such space architecture were formulated in Japan as early as 1988.

Background. Adaptive farms.

In 1988, Hiroshi Furuya of Nagoya University and Korio Miura of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency suggested how the assembly and superstructure of space stations could ...