Early Concepts
The Austro-Hungarian rocket engineer Herman Potočnik proposed a set of three space stations in his 1928 The Problem of Space Travel -- the first book to provide detailed technical descriptions of space stations and spaceflight.
This three-unit space station, as seen from the window of a spaceship, includes a habitat, machine room, and observatory, all tied together with umbilical cords. It would have been placed 26,000 miles above the Earth, in a geosynchronous orbit above Berlin. The round shape of this design is supposed to have inspired the later rocket pioneer Werner Von Braun's penchant for ring-shaped space stations.
