From early designs, it seems people sure wanted to live in wheel- and ring-shaped space habitats. While that hasn't quite come to be yet — Mir, Skylab, the International Space Station and China's forthcoming Tiangong space station are all capsule-based — it's still interesting to see what space habitation looked like when engineers and artists only had their imaginations, hopes and dreams to guide them.

Wired's Adam Mann has a fantastic write-up on some of the most interesting and forgotten space station concepts to ever be imagined, and he's dug up quite a bit of information on each — it's well worth the read.

Most of these are downright silly looking at first, but at least some of them might have influenced the design for the real ISS. Some of these concepts date back as early as the 1960s.

Any artists up for imagining what tomorrow's space stations will look like? Or is that already assumed it'll be in Death Star in size and shape?

Via Wired