Early Space Station Designs: The Rotating Wheel That Never Was

In the earliest years of human spaceflight, engineers reached for an elegant answer to a problem they had never yet lived: how to keep the human body whole in the weightless void. The rotating wheel station — a structure that would spin itself into a simulacrum of gravity — became the dominant vision of what orbital life might look like, appearing in technical papers and institutional studies as though physics itself had endorsed it. Yet the wheel was never built, overtaken by simpler designs, adaptive human bodies, and the relentless pressure of cost and time. It remains one of history's most