A permanent settlement in space could be a very comfortable place to live. There would be tennis courts, swimming pools, zero-gravity recreation areas and, of course, several playing pitches.
Satisfying golfers would be more of a problem, but they could be catered for using virtual golf systems, "driving bays" where a ball could be hit and the distance and lie displayed on a computer screen.
Much of the food would be grown locally and there would be systems to control oxygen, heat and humidity. Needless to say, there would be plenty of parks with grass, trees and flowers so the formerly earthbound residents wouldn't get homesick.
Such an existence in space may sound fanciful, but all the technical requirements were worked out in meticulous detail by a group of Irish students who entered their proposals in an international competition organised by NASA's Ames Research Centre in California.
Participants were asked to design living quarters in space in a facility large enough to accommodate 10,000 people, more than the population of Athlone.
There were 151 submissions from 569 students and 31 teachers, with entries from Austria, Canada, Ireland, Macedonia and the US. The top award was won by the five Irish students, with their doughnut-shaped space station project called DaedalusaL4.
The Irish team included three students from Blackrock College, Dublin: Mark Cummins, a fifth-year pupil, and two sixth-years, Stuart Redmond and Cian Wilson; and two fifth-years from St Joseph of Cluny School, Killiney, Lorraine Murphy and Alison Squire. Two science teachers supported their work, Mr John Daly, of Blackrock, and Ms Joanna Dullaghan, of St Joseph of Cluny.
The team put together a comprehensive proposal for a space settlement to be placed in orbit between the moon and Earth. The members provided information about how DaedalusaL4 would be built, its design, construction materials, residential accommodation, the location of shops and parks and where heavy industry would be located.
They detailed how food would be grown and what crops would be cultivated and how the life-support, waste-processing, power and communications systems would be catered for.
They went into remarkable detail, right down to the provision of a police force, educational system, hospital and healthcare and a government and judiciary.
"The boys here were interested in doing the project but thought that with one that had such a social dimension they couldn't do it themselves," explained Mr Daly. "They wanted a male and female point of view coming through because they were planning for a community."
They went to great lengths to think things through, he said. "The view to the horizon was important to them and where they put industry as opposed to settlement. They went into the psychology of the thing, trying to avoid a sense of isolation for the residents.".
The students, who will travel to California and tour the Ames centre as their prize, spent more than 12 months on the project.
Their design calls for the construction of a torus, a doughnut-shaped ring, connected by four spokes to a central sphere. The sphere was where construction would begin and where heavy industry would later be placed. The spokes give access to the main accommodation in the torus.
Its diameter would be almost 2,000 metres, and there would be about 1.5 million square metres of floor space. Their plan calls for DaedalusaL4 to spin on its axis at one revolution per minute, enough to produce centrifugal force at the torus perimeter to create an artificial "gravity" comparable to that on Earth.
The space station would be positioned in one of the five Lagrangian points associated with the Earth and moon. These are where the gravitational pull of the two bodies matches so that anything at a Lagrangian point will not fall towards either.
DaedalusaL4 would be nearly self-sufficient for food and energy. There would be a number of parks for walks and recreation, but there would also be intensive agriculture, and the students have specified the crops. Their menu would include poultry and rabbit, but there would be no cattle on board.
Vegetarians would have a field-day, and the greengrocers would sell squash, apples, aubergines, blackberries, broccoli, courgettes, corn, Swiss chard, potatoes, spinach, soybeans and dozens of other varieties. To keep their plants happy, there would be earthworms, bees, insects and birds.
The plain of the torus would lie in the Earth's orbital plane so a scheme was needed for getting sunlight into the station. The students planned for the deployment of a huge "mirror" with a 4 sq km surface.
This would provide a range of services. During the DaedalusaL4 "day", the mirror would reflect light on to the torus, bathing it in sunlight and providing light for its solar cells.
The mirror would orbit the torus and so eventually swing its back towards the sun, resulting in a "night" for the station residents.
The mirror's back would be covered in solar cells, providing another source of electricity that would be transmitted as microwave energy to the DaedalusaL4 sphere.