Discussion on:

NASA's 1975 vision of space colonization (pictures)

Rendezvous with Rama. It was a book about a passing cylinder that contained an entire world. Arthur C Clark, August 1973. I was an adult when I read it. Oh my! I am getting old.

See Larry Niven's "Ringworld", 1970.

At the time, I remember reading a book by Gerard K. O'Neill, an astrophysicist from Princeton, that went into some detail about the design of a space colonization system in the form a huge rotating cylinder. But because of our political leadership, the US is now unable to do what we could do 50 years ago - put a human in orbit. The Space Shuttle program - a museum piece. NASA's Constellation program canceled in favor of some ill-defined, lightly funded future manned program. In a few short years the US has gone from being the leader in manned space exploration to a distant third behind the Chinese and Russians. Very sad.

Or perhaps earlier space stations in the "Babylon Project". Not sure if that was where JMS got his ideas for B5 or not, but it definitely looks like it.

The first couple of pics look like the station from 2001.

I'm reminded of Larry Niven's 'Ringworld' and 'Ringworld Engineers'. I think he pre-dated the NASA summer conference.

The Exploration of Space. In it he talks about a timeline for colonizing the solar system and the first 100 years are mostly robotic missions. So we seem to be about on track considering he wrote it in 1951.

http://archive.org/details/TheExplorationOfSpace

...sure look like scaled down version of Larry Niven's Ringworld!