Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (February 6, 1927 – April 27, 1992) was an American physicist and space activist. As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments. In the 1970s, he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space, including a space habitat design known as the O'Neill cylinder. He founded the Space Studies Institute, an organization devoted to funding research into space manufacturing and colonization.

O'Neill began researching high-energy particle physics at Princeton in 1954, after he received his doctorate from Cornell University. Two years later, he published his theory for a particle storage ring. This invention allowed particle accelerators at much higher energies than had previously been possible. In 1965 at Stanford University, he performed the first colliding beam physics experiment. He had no siblings. His family moved to Speculator, New York when his father temporarily retired for health reasons. The Navy trained him as a radar technician, which sparked his interest in science. As a child he had discussed the possibilities of humans in space with his parents, and in college he enjoyed working on rocket equations. However, he did not see space science as an option for a career path in physics, choosing instead to pursue high-energy physics. He graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1950. O'Neill then pursued graduate studies at Cornell University with the help of an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship, and was awarded a PhD in physics in 1954. They had a son, Roger, and two daughters, Janet and Eleanor, before their marriage ended in divorce in 1966. During his first cross-country glider flight in April 1973, he was assisted on the ground by Renate "Tasha" Steffen. He had met Tasha, who was 21 years younger than him, previously through the YMCA International Club. They were married the day after his flight.

High-energy physics research

After graduating from Cornell, O'Neill accepted a position as an instructor at Princeton University. The stored particles could then be directed to collide with another particle beam. This would increase the energy of the particle collision over the previous method, which directed the beam at a fixed target. His ideas were not immediately accepted by the physics community. This resulted in a collaboration between Princeton and Stanford to build the (CBX). With a US$800,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research, construction of the first particle storage rings began in 1958 at the Stanford High-Energy Physics Laboratory. He figured out how to capture the particles and, by pumping the air out to produce a vacuum, store them long enough to experiment on them. CBX stored its first beam on March 28, 1962. O'Neill became a full professor of physics in 1965. O'Leary was selected for Astronaut Group 6 but O'Neill was not.

O'Neill became interested in the idea of space colonization in 1969 while he was teaching freshman physics at Princeton University. His students were growing cynical about the benefits of science to humanity because of the controversy surrounding the Vietnam War. To give them something relevant to study, he began using examples from the Apollo program as applications of elementary physics. He submitted it to several journals and magazines, including Scientific American and Science, only to have it rejected by the reviewers. During this time O'Neill gave lectures on space colonization at Hampshire College, Princeton, and other schools. The Hampshire lecture was facilitated by O'Leary, by now an assistant professor of astronomy and science policy assessment at the institution; in 1976, he joined O'Neill's research group at Princeton. Many students and staff attending the lectures became enthusiastic about the possibility of living in space. His paper finally appeared in the September 1974 issue of Physics Today. In it, he argued that building space colonies would solve several important problems:

thumb|right|Diagram of the Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system

He explored the possibilities of flying gliders inside a space colony, finding that the enormous volume could support atmospheric thermals. He calculated that humanity could expand on this man-made frontier to 20,000 times its population. The initial colonies would be built at the Earth-Moon and Lagrange points. and are stable points in the Solar System where a spacecraft can maintain its position without expending energy. The paper was well received, but many who would begin work on the project had already been introduced to his ideas before it was even published.

While he was waiting for his paper to be published, O'Neill organized a small two-day conference in May 1974 at Princeton to discuss the possibility of colonizing outer space. Among those who attended were Eric Drexler (at the time a freshman at MIT), scientist-astronaut Joe Allen (from Astronaut Group 6), Freeman Dyson, and science reporter Walter Sullivan. Sullivan's article on the conference was published on the front page of The New York Times on May 13, 1974. As media coverage grew, O'Neill was inundated with letters from people who were excited about living in space. To stay in touch with them, O'Neill began keeping a mailing list and started sending out updates on his progress. A few months later he heard Peter Glaser speak about solar power satellites at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. O'Neill realized that, by building these satellites, his space colonies could quickly recover the cost of their construction. According to O'Neill, "the profound difference between this and everything else done in space is the potential of generating large amounts of new wealth". At this conference more than two dozen speakers presented papers, including Keith and Carolyn Henson from Tucson, Arizona.

After the conference Carolyn Henson arranged a meeting between O'Neill and Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, then a leading contender for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Udall wrote a letter of support, which he asked the Hensons to publicize, for O'Neill's work.

thumb|left|O'Neill testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on January 19, 1976

In June 1975, O'Neill led a ten-week study of permanent space habitats at NASA Ames. During the study he was called away to testify on July 23 to the House Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications. On January 19, 1976, he also appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Aerospace Technology and National Needs. In a presentation titled Solar Power from Satellites, he laid out his case for an Apollo-style program for building power plants in space. He returned to Ames in June 1976 and 1977 to lead studies on space manufacturing. In these studies, NASA developed detailed plans to establish bases on the Moon where space-suited workers would mine the mineral resources needed to build space colonies and solar power satellites.

Private funding (1977–1978)

Although NASA was supporting his work with grants of up to $500,000 per year, O'Neill became frustrated by the bureaucracy and politics inherent in government-funded research. SSI received initial funding of almost $100,000 from private donors, and in early 1978 began to support basic research into technologies needed for space manufacturing and settlement.

thumb|right|[[Henry Kolm|Kolm (left) and O'Neill (center) with a mass driver]]

One of SSI's first grants funded the development of the mass driver, a device first proposed by O'Neill in 1974. Mass drivers are based on the coilgun design, adapted to accelerate a non-magnetic object. One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space. At MIT, he, Henry H. Kolm, and a group of student volunteers built their first mass driver prototype. He successfully eliminated spending on space colonization research from the budget. In 1978, Paul Werbos wrote for the L-5 newsletter, "no one expects Congress to commit us to O'Neill's concept of large-scale space habitats; people in NASA are almost paranoid about the public relations aspects of the idea". When it became clear that a government-funded colonization effort was politically impossible, popular support for O'Neill's ideas started to evaporate. His plan had also been based on NASA's estimates for the flight rate and launch cost of the Space Shuttle, numbers that turned out to have been wildly optimistic. His 1977 book quoted a Space Shuttle launch cost of $10 million, but in 1981 the subsidized price given to commercial customers started at $38 million. A 1985 accounting of the full cost of a launch in 1985 raised this as high as $180 million per flight.

O'Neill was appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to the National Commission on Space in 1985. Their report was released in May 1986, four months after the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up on ascent. The High Frontier has been translated into five languages and remained in print as of 2008. The book explored the effects of technologies he called "drivers of change" on the coming century. Some technologies he described were space colonies, solar power satellites, anti-aging drugs, hydrogen-propelled cars, climate control, and underground magnetic trains. He left the social structure of the 1980s intact, assuming that humanity would remain unchanged even as it expanded into the Solar System. Reviews of 2081 were mixed. New York Times reviewer John Noble Wilford found the book "imagination-stirring", but Charles Nicol thought the technologies described were unacceptably far-fetched. He argued that the United States had to develop six industries to compete: microengineering, robotics, genetic engineering, magnetic flight, family aircraft, and space science. He also thought that industrial development was suffering from short-sighted executives, self-interested unions, high taxes, and poor education of Americans. According to reviewer Henry Weil, O'Neill's detailed explanations of emerging technologies differentiated the book from others on the subject. The system, primarily intended to track aircraft, was called Radio Determination Satellite Service (RDSS). With his health failing, O'Neill became less involved with the company at the same time it started to run into trouble. In February 1991 Geostar filed for bankruptcy and its licenses were sold to Motorola for the Iridium satellite constellation project. Although the system was eventually replaced by GPS, O'Neill made significant advances in the field of position determination. The LAWN system allowed two computers to exchange messages over a range of a couple hundred feet at a cost of about $500 per node. O'Neill Communications went out of business in 1993; the LAWN technology was sold to Omnispread Communications. As of 2008, Omnispread continued to sell a variant of O'Neill's LAWN system.

On November 18, 1991, O'Neill filed a patent application for a vactrain system. He called the company he wanted to form VSE International, for velocity, silence, and efficiency. A sample of his incinerated remains was buried in space. The Celestis vial containing his ashes was attached with vials of other Celestis participants to a Pegasus XL rocket and launched into Earth orbit on April 21, 1997. It re-entered the atmosphere in May 2002.

O'Neill directed his Space Studies Institute to continue their efforts "until people are living and working in space". After his death, management of SSI was passed to his son Roger and colleague Freeman Dyson.

O'Neill's work informs the company Blue Origin founded by Jeff Bezos, which wants to build the infrastructure for future space colonization.

Henry Kolm went on to start Magplane Technology in the 1990s to develop the magnetic transportation technology that O'Neill had written about. In 2007, Magplane demonstrated a working magnetic pipeline system to transport phosphate ore in Florida. The system ran at a speed of 40 mph (65 km/h), far slower than the high-speed trains O'Neill envisioned.

All three of the founders of the Space Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to opening the space frontier to human settlement, were supporters of O'Neill's ideas and had worked with him in various capacities at the Space Studies Institute. One of them, Rick Tumlinson, describes three men as models for space advocacy: Wernher von Braun, Gerard K. O'Neill, and Carl Sagan. Von Braun pushed for "projects that ordinary people can be proud of but not participate in". Sagan wanted to explore the universe from a distance. O'Neill, with his grand scheme for settlement of the Solar System, emphasized moving ordinary people off the Earth "en masse".

As of November, 2013, Gerard O'Neill's papers and work are now located in the archives at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Publications

Books

Papers

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Patents

O'Neill was granted six patents in total (two posthumously) in the areas of global position determination and magnetic levitation.

  • Satellite-based vehicle position determining system, granted November 16, 1982
  • Satellite-based position determining and message transfer system with monitoring of link quality, granted May 10, 1988
  • Position determination and message transfer system employing satellites and stored terrain map, granted June 13, 1989
  • Position determination and message transfer system employing satellites and stored terrain map, granted October 23, 1990
  • High speed transport system, granted February 1, 1994
  • High speed transport system, granted July 18, 1995

See also

  • Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) wrote about humans living in space in the 1920s
  • J. D. Bernal (1901–1971) inventor of the Bernal sphere, a space habitat design
  • Rolf Wideröe (1902–1996) filed for a patent on a particle storage ring design during World War II
  • Krafft Ehricke (1917–1984) rocket engineer and space colonization advocate
  • John S. Lewis, wrote about the resources of the Solar System in Mining the Sky
  • Marshall Savage, author of The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
  • Spome
  • Space architecture
  • Space-based solar power

Notes

References

Books

Articles

  • (Archive link)

Videos

The Vision of Gerard K. O'Neil 30 min testimony about what ordinary people can do about space

5 min presenting space habitats and solar power satellites

Other references

Further reading

  • McCray, W. Patrick. The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton University Press; 2012) 328 pages; Focuses on O'Neill and the MIT-trained engineer Eric Drexler in a study of exploratory science.
  • Life of Gerard O'Neill at Space Studies Institute
  • The High Frontier: The untold story of Gerard K. O'Neill documentary film (2019)
  • Paul R Marcano dedicated his album Islands in Space to Gerard K. O'Neill vinyl record (1981)