Vintage Nasa ‘space colony’ drawings reveal how scientists thought humanity would be living in the 21st century

A SPACE researcher has unearthed stunning Nasa pics which show how a futuristic space station could look.

The stunning illustrations don't show actual Nasa plans, but are imaginative depictions of a mini space colony complete with lakes, forests and grassland.

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They were drawn up in the 1970s and unearthed by The Public Domain Review.

The website wrote: "In the 1970s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, with the help of Nasa Ames Research Center and Stanford University, held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships.

"Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made."

The drawings show a space station called a "Stanford torus", which is a large, circular tube that could house up to 140,000 people.

These theoretical crafts would spin around a central axis, which would mimic gravity but end up sticking people to the sides using centrifugal force rather than pulling them towards the centre.

Sadly, building a Stanford torus would require about 10 million tonnes of mass that would have to be mined from the moon, meaning it's not likely to happen any time soon.

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Google recently launched a 360-degree tour of the International Space Station (ISS) to mark the 48th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon.

You can now visit humanity's only manned space base using Street View.