Cooper Station is a Space Colony that resembles an O'Neill cylinder. It is located in orbit of the planet Saturn and near the wormhole and is named after Murphy Cooper (her father Joseph Cooper believed it was named after himself until corrected). It possibly possesses a largely American national identity.
History[]
Cooper is found by the Rangers while on patrol along with TARS. Cooper awakens in a hospital bed and discovers that he is on a rotating space station near Saturn. An administrator introduces him to the world that Murph helped create. Cooper is shown his farm, which Murphy had requested be moved to the station and turned into a museum. The Administrator presumably gives him the farm to live in until Murphy's arrival a few weeks later. Upon meeting his elderly daughter, she tells him she always knew he would come back, and endorses Cooper's search for Brand. Cooper escapes in a next-generation Ranger with TARS, bound for the wormhole and Brand on Edmunds.
Design[]
Cooper stations spin to generate artificial gravity for its inhabitants, from what could be seen in the film, most of Cooper station's land is used for agricultural purposes. At the end of the station is a massive light that can also dim to create a day and night cycle. There are residential, recreational, healthcare, historical, and agricultural areas in Cooper station.
In the film, spaceports are seen housing Futuristic Ranger spacecrafts and astronauts for space travel.
Speculation[]
An administrator introducing Cooper to Cooper Station.
In the film, a station was being constructed underground and in secrecy. The success of Plan A, getting people off a Blight infested Earth and therefore saving humanity, required Professor Brand's gravity equation to be solved. In the film, it is implied that everyone on Earth was saved from the Blight. This may have required fleets of stations - hundreds, if not thousands of stations to be built in order to evacuate everyone.
Global famine and resource wars drastically contracted Earth's population to numbers far less than today. Given that at one scene in the film, Grandpa finds the fact that there used to be 6 billion people on Earth almost unbelievable. At that time, there may have been only a couple billion or a few hundred million people living on Earth during the events of the film. An exact population cannot be ascertained; however, stations like Cooper station may be one in a vast fleet of hundreds of other stations in the solar system.
There is a possibility that some refused to leave. Tom insisted on keeping his family on the farm, even in the face of sickness and massive dust storms and crop failures. With the blight finally putting corn on the road to extinction, people would have no other choice but to move into a station.
2008 script[]
In the original 2008 script, Cooper Station was named after Joseph Cooper, not Murphy Cooper; it was also more of a stanford torus design. Unlike the final film, the script described how humanity was evacuated from Earth: "massive circular ships were constructed on the entire face of the Earth, filled with the entire human population of Earth. " It was also stated, "at a given moment, the gravity of the Earth is dropped to nothing and the massive ships, filled with the entire population of the Earth, lift gently off of the planet in search of greener pastures." - Pg. 131-132. This event was implied in the 2014 film as Plan A, soon after gravity was solved by Murph with the help of Cooper and TARS. However, unlike the 2008 script, this scene was not shown in the film. In the 2008 script, Earth's distant future is described to be completely devoid of plant life with little to no oxygen, a consequence of the blight.
Trivia[]
- Cooper Station's ability to enable people to walk on walls and on the ceiling shares similarities with dream worlds in the film Inception, another film directed by Christopher Nolan that also involve differences in the passage of time.
- It is possible Cooper Station is the capital of the space community.