New ideas in space exploration come from all corners, and, by and large, the community welcomes anybody interested in the field. Having just read "A City on Mars," it seems that even people who disagree with the idea that the age of space settlement is imminent will be accepted into the fold by enthusiasts. Now, a new entrant has joined—Daniel Akinwumi is a Nigerian graduate student at the University of Strathclyde who recently posted his master's thesis to ResearchGate detailing the design of the "intergalactic hub," or I-HUB.

The introductory section of the thesis lays out many of the challenges familiar to those interested in space habitats. These include the importance of robots, a completely closed-loop recycling system, and novel radiation shielding. Mr. Akinwumi also provides a thorough literature search and mentions several other design concepts similar to the I-HUB.

One crucial design choice is how to get the system into space.

Ever want to play a game of cosmic billiards? That's commonly how the DART mission was described when it successfully changed the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid last year. If you want an idea of how it works, just Google it and an Easter egg from the search giant will give you a general idea. But DART was more like trying to brute force a billiards break—there are many other things you can do with a set of asteroids and impactors on the galactic stage. One of the more interesting is to try to force two asteroids together to form a "contact binary"—the goal of a mission design put forward by a group of scientists from Cornell in a recent paper in Acta Astronautica.

Colby Merill and his colleagues at Cornell's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department first explain why such a mission would be a good idea.