Considering the exciting vision of space colonies as put
forward by such writers as Gerard O’Neill and Thomas A. Heppenheimer, it’s
surprising that there are not more films or television series that feature
them. One of the best for a general or
family audience is L5 : First City in Space which was first released in 1996 in
IMAX format but has since been converted into 2d for a DVD release.
A short film at only 35 minutes long, L5 manages to fit in a
lot, a surprise given its gentle, unhurried pace. A film for the family, it features a family as its main
characters. In particular the film’s plot is told through the character of
Chieko, a young girl living on the space colony called L5, named after its
position in space. Casting children in
a production can be unpredictable but fortunately the role of Chieko is
charmingly performed in a beautiful, underplayed manner by the junior actor.
The film begins by
explaining the history leading up to the construction of L5 with a brief
overview of the Mir Space Station and the ISS.
L5, the film’s chronology tells us, was created around 100 years after
the ISS and a brief overview is given of the colony’s construction and
structure. We are shown vistas of a
lush, garden like interior much like the wonderful paintings from the 1970s
that are so well known to those interested in the subject.
A lot of the shots of the colony and other space scenes
appear to have been created by computer graphics and in comparison to the
creations of the latest Star Trek or Star Wars films, for example, some of them
may seem a little dated. Yet they still give a good understanding of the layout
of the colony and how the parts fit together.
L5 is a Stanford Torus design with a wide diameter for the actual
torus.
The positioning of the space colony at L5 refers to one of a
series of points in space known as the Langrangian points (also known as
Langrange, libration or L points). These are special points in a two body
system where the two combined gravitational pulls of the larger masses act in
such a way that a much smaller body placed at one of the points will orbit with
them. So, a space craft could be placed
at L5 and it would not need, comparatively speaking, a lot of energy to remain
stable at that point. L5 is a
particular point at the same distance as the Moon’s orbit from the Earth but
set at sixty degrees behind the Moon.
As a result, an equilateral triangle could be drawn between the three
points of the centres of the Earth, the Moon and the space craft at L5.
The construction of the colony notes the need to encase it
in a thick layer of Moon rock to protect the inhabitants from cosmic rays. Like most plans for the first space
colonies, a population of 10,000 is given and the colony is modelled on a small
town. Chieko enjoys visiting the
hydroponic farms that feed the colony and notes that compared to most farms
they do not have many cows. There are
some good shots of the interior of the colony which are again inspired by the
paintings from the seventies that we are familiar with.
The plot centres on the colony running out of water and an
audacious plan to harvest ice from a comet whose orbit has to be altered to
ensure it nears the colony sufficiently closely (albeit not too closely presumably
as this would entail the comet coming close to Earth as well, a potentially
very dangerous situation). Finally,
after all this is concluded we see some really wonderful shots of the whole of
the colony now in orbit in tandem with a second.
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