MORE PICTURES AVAILABLE PICTURE SHOWS: Exterior View of Toroidal Colony Exterior view. Art work: Don Davis. STORY COPY (MORE WORDS AVAILABLE): INFO@COVERMG.COM: With Monday’s (29 June) announcement that an iconic space suit from sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is to be auctioned; these jaw-dropping concepts show how the U.S. government pictured a life in space. NASA Ames and Stanford University conducted three space colony summer studies in the 1970s, and a number of eye-popping artistic renderings of the concepts were made. A design study as part of a 10 week program in engineering systems design, held in the summer of 1975, included professors, technical directors and students in a variety of disciplines from physical science and architecture to engineering and social science. The goal was to construct a vision of how people might sustain life in space in a large colony. Similar to Stanley Kubrick’s film, humans are envisaged to live in huge circular structures, complete with gravity. Seemingly wanting to replicate life on Earth, there are vistas of greenery, trees and lakes. When: 25 Jun 2012 Credit: NASA Ames Research Center/Cover Images **Editorial use only**