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Strange Forgotten Space Station Concepts That Never Flew

Astronauts living and working in space rely on the International Space Station as their port of call. The iconic ISS is a modern engineering triumph, zipping around the Earth every 90 minutes at a height of 200 miles above the surface.

Its construction required careful coordination between nearly a dozen countries working through five space agencies. Perhaps because of this, the ISS has a highly industrial look, with function certainly triumphing over form.

Yet the history of space station design is littered with concepts — some elegant, some strange, and some remarkably cute — that were passed over for one reason or another. Here, Wired looks at some space station ideas that didn’t quite make it off the drawing board.