Inflatable structures are maybe the way to the future .
Certainly when it's a station on a world with some gravity like the Moon or Mars. Volume is quite appreciated.
But about weightlessness, I wonder, especially after reading Cooper's "A House in Space" about Skylab.
In 0G, any room is instantly more voluminous than on Earth as we'd live in a 3 dimensional world, while under any gravity, we live on a 2 dimensional world. In space, the roof becomes the floor and so on..
The Skylab astronauts were quite disturbed by the front part of the Orbital Workshop which remains the most voluminous room ever in space. The astronauts could find themselves floating in the middle of that volume without being able to grasp anything and literally having to swim through the air to get somewhere. Much smaller volumes or at least long tubes like the MDA or the Spacelab or the Spacehab modules were prefered to the wide room.
Raoul
Inflatable outposts in vacuum
