When you look at space ships, capsules and stations, one thing that is lacking in space is… space. As in: pressurized volume a human can freely move in. Most are tiny tin cans.
So I was wondering, what is or was the largest single pressurized volume ("room") in space? By this I mean the undivided volume an astronaut/cosmonaut could move around in freely.
So far, I have found these candidates via Wikipedia, but the data seems incomplete/imprecise sometimes.
- The prime candidate is the Orbital Workshop module of Skylab. Wikipedia lists a habitable volume of 302 m³ (diameter 6.6 m, length 14.7 m). But it seems this was divided up, so the actual volume a human could move around in freely was smaller. How much?
- It seems no early russian space station came even close.
- Mir was a large station by pressurized volume (around 350 m³), but it was divided into small modules and it was very cramped.
- The ISS is the largest object ever put in space (AFAIK) and Wikipedia lists a pressurized volume of 931.57 m³ as of 2016-05-28. But again, it's divided into smaller modules.
- It seems the largest "room" on the ISS is the Kibō module with a pressurized volume of about 155 m³ (diameter 4.39 m, length 11.19 m).
So what was the volume an astronaut was able to move around in freely on Skylab? Was it the largest volume, is Kibō's volume actually large or did I miss a station/vehicle?
(Sidenote: I was thinking about the Space Shuttle at first, but while its cargo bay had a volume of about 260 m³, it wasn't pressurized.)