The British Interplanetary Society design for a station owes a lot to
Noordung for it's basic design, though the designer H. E. Ross did
away with the nightmarish free-floating modules. with a crew of
twenty four, this
cats-cradle design has a much smaller habitat ring than Noordung's . It's building materials come from
cannibalising other spacecraft; a favourite
dodge of early designers, who imagined that
spaceships would be simple affairs with lots of easily reusable
plating and other gear. Ultra-specialised gear that have one and
only one purpose in a spaceship? What are the odds? A far cry from today when the only
recycling of spacecraft structural members is to fill museum halls.
