Fresh off the Apollo 11 Moon landing and aching to get some of those sweet avocado-colored refrigerators into space, NASA held a couple summer camps focused on designing space colonies. Artist’s renderings of some of the designs are truly spectacular–predating digital imaging, they’re all hand-painted works of Aquarian Age science fiction.

The perspective in the painting of a cylindrical colony featured above (in cut-away view) is striking, but perhaps a fancier shape is more your style…

The gallery also showcases designs for toroidal colonies (donut-shaped, as above) and Bernal spheres (below), with interior and exterior views for each.

And because astronauts always smile while assembling the future home of 10,000 exoplanetary colonists, here’s a painting of NASA’s finest living it up in the void.

Check out the rest of the gallery!

Also, if you’re interested in attending a NASA Space Colony Summer Camp, details for current opportunities are available on the official NASA site.

All photos courtesy NASA Ames Research Center.

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