If you’ve seen the movie Elysium, then this rotating space colony concept probably is still fresh in your mind, but did you know that this concept was first brought up in the 1970s, by NASA? The Stanford torus is a proposed design for a space habitat capable of housing 10,000 to 140,000 permanent residents.
The Stanford torus was proposed during the 1975 NASA Summer Study, conducted at Stanford University, with the purpose of speculating on designs for future space colonies.