NASA Space Colony Art from the 1970s

It's always intriguing to look back and see what our ancestors thought the future might look like. Looking at this amazing 1970's NASA space colony concept art, it seems we didn't quite live up to their expectations. These toroidal and spherical colonies were designed to house up to ten thousand people, spinning on an axis to produce artificial gravity approximating Earth's.

I sometimes wonder what happened to our collective desire to explore space. Man made it to the Moon in 1969 amid near-hysteria; 40 years later we've barely ventured any further into our own solar system (except for missions undertaken by unmanned spacecraft). Was it the expense and the fact that the money is needed elsewhere in these harsher economic times, or just that the novelty has worn off?

Via The Wormholes