When it comes to building space station, we're still trying to invent the wheel. Today's state-of-the-art space station Mir is more like a heap of orbiting junk than the vast gyrating structure envisioned in the film 2001. Kubrick and Clarke's creation generated its own gravity, containted dozens of rooms and had enough space for separate Soviet and US sectors - plus a lobby for passport control. Today, no more than a handful of US and Russion astronauts can bump heads in Mir, the human race's sole place in space.