Gerard K. O'Neill

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Gerard Kitchen O’Neill
Gerard K. O’Neill in 1977
Born	February 6, 1927(1927-02-06) Brooklyn, New York, United States
Died	April 27, 1992 (aged 65) Redwood City, California
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physicist
Known for	Particle physics Space Studies Institute O’Neill cylinder

Gerard Kitchen “Gerry” O’Neill (February 6, 1927–April 27, 1992) was an American physicist and space activist. As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented the particle storage ring and the mass driver.^[1] In the 1970s he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space. His space habitat design is 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 physics experiments at much higher energies than had previously been possible. In 1965 at Stanford University he performed the first colliding beam physics experiment.^[2]

While teaching physics at Princeton, O’Neill became interested in the possibility of humans living in outer space. He researched and proposed the O’Neill cylinder in “The Colonization of Space”, his first paper on the subject. He held a conference on space manufacturing at Princeton in 1975. Many who became post-Apollo-era space activists attended. O’Neill built his first mass driver prototype with professor Henry Kolm in 1976. He considered mass drivers critical for extracting the mineral resources of the Moon and asteroids. His award-winning book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space inspired a generation of space exploration advocates. He died in 1992 after a seven year fight against leukemia.

Contents 1 Birth, education, and family life 2 High-energy physics research 3 Space colonization 3.1 Origin of the idea (1969–1974) 3.2 NASA studies (1975–1977) 3.3 Private funding (1977–1978) 3.4 Opposition (1977–1985) 4 Writing career 5 Entrepreneurial efforts 6 Death and legacy 7 Publications 7.1 Books 7.2 Papers 8 Patents 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References

[edit] Birth, education, and family life

O’Neill was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 6, 1927.^[3][4] His father was Edward Gerard O’Neill, a lawyer, and his mother was Dorothy Lewis O’Neill (née Kitchen).^[3][5] He had no siblings. His family moved to Speculator, New York when his father temporarily retired for health reasons.^[5] For high school, O’Neill attended Newburgh Free Academy in Newburgh, New York. While he was a student there he edited the school newspaper and took a job at a local radio station broadcasting the news.^[3] He graduated in 1944, during World War II, and enlisted in the United States Navy on his 17th birthday.^[3][6] The Navy trained him as a radar technician, which sparked his interest in science.^[3] He was honorably discharged in 1946.^[6] O’Neill went to Swarthmore College for his undergraduate degree where he studied physics and mathematics.^[6][7] He enjoyed working on rocket equations in college and had discussed the possibilities of humans in space with his parents as a child. Even so, when evaluating a career path in physics, he did not see space science as an option. He opted to pursue high-energy physics instead.^[8] After graduating from Swarthmore in 1950 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, O’Neill attended Cornell University with the help of an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship. He received his PhD in physics in 1954.^[6]

O’Neill married Sylvia Turlington, also a Swarthmore graduate, in June 1950.^[3][9] They had a son, Roger, and two daughters, Janet and Eleanor, before their marriage ended in divorce in 1966.^[3][5]

One of O’Neill’s favorite activities was flying. He held instrument certifications in both powered and sailplane flight.^[5] He was also given the FAI Diamond Badge, a gliding award.^[10] During his first cross-country glider flight, he was chased on the ground by Renate “Tasha” Steffen. He had met Tasha, who was 21 years younger than him, previously through the YMCA International Club.^[5] They were married in April 1973.^[4]

[edit] High-energy physics research

After graduating from Cornell, O’Neill accepted a position as an instructor at Princeton University.^[6] There he started his research into high-energy particle physics. In 1956, his second year of teaching, his letter titled “Storage-Ring Synchrotron: Device for High-Energy Physics Research” was published in Physical Review. This two page letter theorized that the particles produced by a particle accelerator could be stored for a few seconds in a storage ring. The stored particles could then be directed to collide with another particle beam. This would increase the amount of energy involved in particle collisions over the method used at the time, which was to direct the particle beam at a fixed target.^[2] His ideas were not immediately accepted by the physics community.^[3] That year he became an assistant professor at Princeton and started to build his first particle storage ring.^[4] The work was funded by the Atomic Energy Agency and the Office of Naval Research.^[3] 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.^[2][3] His success prompted other physicists to build their own storage rings.^[3] In 1959 he was promoted to associate professor, and became a full professor of physics in 1965.^[2][4]

O’Neill performed, with Burton Richter, the first colliding beam physics experiment in 1965. In this experiment, particle beams from the Stanford Linear Accelerator were collected in his storage rings and then directed to collide at an energy of 600 MeV. At the time, this was the highest energy involved in a particle collision. The results proved that the charge of an electron is contained in a volume less than 100 attometers across. O’Neill considered his device to be capable of only seconds of storage, but, by creating an even stronger vacuum, others were able to increase this to hours.^[2] In 1979, he, with physicist David C. Cheng, wrote the graduate-level textbook Elementary Particle Physics: An Introduction.^[4] He eventually retired from teaching in 1985, but remained associated with Princeton as professor emeritus until his death.^[2]

[edit] Space colonization

O’Neill became interested in the idea of space colonization in 1969 while he was teaching a freshman physics class at Princeton University. During this class he asked his students to write term papers about inhabiting outer space. They concluded that large structures in free space could feasibly be built and offered several advantages to living on the surface of the Earth. One advantage that they found was the availability of constant solar power. Shortly afterwards he designed a space habitat capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of people.^[2][11]

In the mid 1970s O’Neill began leading conferences on space colonization. The conferences attracted scientists like Eric Drexler and Freeman Dyson, who later became influential space activists.^[11] His first paper on the subject, “The Colonization of Space”, was published in September 1974. He also led several design studies of space habitats at NASA Ames Research Center. In 1977 he co-founded the Space Studies Institute (SSI) at Princeton. Its purpose was to organize private funding for research into space manufacturing and colonization. With grants from SSI he designed and built several prototype mass drivers. Mass drivers were critical to his plans because they could launch the raw material needed to build space colonies from the surface of the Moon. Starting in the early 1980s his plans were frustrated by insufficient funding from NASA and the limited and expensive options for launching equipment into space. As popular interest started to wane, he began looking into alternate applications of space science.^[2][12][13]

[edit] Origin of the idea (1969–1974)

O’Neill saw great potential in the United States space program, especially the Apollo missions. He applied to the Astronaut Corps after NASA opened it up to civilian scientists in 1966. Later, when asked why he wanted to go on the Moon missions, he said, “to be alive now and not take part in it seemed terribly myopic”.^[5] He was put through NASA’s rigorous mental and physical examinations. During this time he met Brian O’Leary, also a scientist-astronaut candidate, who became his good friend.^[14] O’Leary was selected for Astronaut Group 6 but O’Neill was not.^[15] This group, nicknamed the XS-11, trained for the Apollo Applications Program, which was cancelled two years later. O’Leary, without an opportunity to fly in space, grew frustrated and eventually left NASA.^[14]

O’Neill’s interest in space colonization started in 1969 while he was teaching a freshman physics class at Princeton.^[2][11] His students were growing cynical about the benefits of science to humanity because of the controversy surrounding the Vietnam War.^[16][17] To give them something relevant to study, he began using examples from the Apollo program as applications of elementary physics.^[2][5] O’Neill posed the question during an extra seminar he gave to a few of his students: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”^[11] His students’ research convinced him that the answer was no.^[11]

O’Neill was inspired by the papers written by his students. He began to work out the details of a program to build self-supporting space habitats.^[2][6] Among the details was how to provide the inhabitants of a space colony with an Earth-like environment. His students had designed “inside-out planets”, giant pressurized structures in free space. They would be spun up to approximate Earth gravity by centrifugal force. He found that pairing counter-rotating cylinders would eliminate the need to spin them using rockets.^[11] This configuration has since been known as the O’Neill cylinder.

Looking for an outlet for his ideas, O’Neill wrote a paper titled “The Colonization of Space”, and for four years attempted to have it published. He submitted it to several journals, 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. Many students and staff attending the lectures became enthusiastic about the possibility of living in space. Another outlet for O’Neill to explore his ideas was with his children. On walks in the forest they speculated about life in a space colony.^[11] 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:

It is important to realize the enormous power of the space-colonization technique. If we begin to use it soon enough, and if we employ it wisely, at least five of the most serious problems now facing the world can be solved without recourse to repression: bringing every human being up to a living standard now enjoyed only by the most fortunate; protecting the biosphere from damage caused by transportation and industrial pollution; finding high quality living space for a world population that is doubling every 35 years; finding clean, practical energy sources; preventing overload of Earth’s heat balance.

—Gerard K. O’Neill, “The Colonization of Space”^[18]

He even 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 L₄ and L₅ Lagrange points. L₄ and L₅ are stable points in the Solar System where a spacecraft can maintain its position without expending energy.^[18] 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.^[11] The paper received a few critical responses. Some questioned the practicality of lifting tens of thousands of people into orbit and his estimates for the production output of initial colonies.^[19]

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.^[11] The conference, titled First Conference on Space Colonization, was funded by Stewart Brand’s Point Foundation and Princeton University.^[20] 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 William Sullivan.^[11] Representatives from NASA also attended and brought estimates of launch costs expected on the planned Space Shuttle.^[11] O’Neill thought of the attendees as “a band of daring radicals”.^[21] To everyone’s surprise, Sullivan’s article on the conference made the New York Times front page on May 13.^[22] As media coverage grew, O’Neill was inundated with letters from people who were excited about living in space.^[23] To stay in touch with them, O’Neill began keeping a mailing list and started sending out updates on his progress.^[11][24] 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.^[25] 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”.^[5]

[edit] NASA studies (1975–1977)

O’Neill held a much larger conference the following May titled Princeton University Conference on Space Manufacturing. At this conference more than two dozen speakers presented papers.^[11][26] Among those presenting papers were Keith and Carolyn Henson from Tucson, Arizona.^[12][27] After the conference Carolyn arranged a meeting between O’Neill and Arizona Congressman Morris Udall. Udall wrote a letter of support for O’Neill’s work and asked the Hensons to publicize it.^[12] The Hensons sent his letter with the first issue of the newsletter of the L-5 Society.^[28] It was sent to everyone on O’Neill’s mailing list and those who had signed up at the conference.^[12]

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.^[29] On January 19 the next year, 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.^[30] He returned to Ames in June 1976 and 1977 to lead studies on space manufacturing.^[31] During these “summer 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.^[32]

[edit] Private funding (1977–1978)

Although NASA was supporting his work with grants of up to US$500,000 per year, O’Neill became frustrated by the bureaucracy and politics inherent in government funded research.^[3][17] He thought that small privately funded groups could develop space technology faster than government agencies.^[2] In 1977 O’Neill and his wife Tasha founded the Space Studies Institute, a non-profit organization, at Princeton University.^[6][33] SSI began operations in early 1978, funding basic research into technologies needed for space manufacturing and settlement.^[31]

One of SSI’s first grants funded the development of the mass driver, a device first proposed by O'Neill in 1974.^[33][34] Mass drivers are based on the coilgun design, adapted to accelerate a non-magnetic object.^[35] 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.^[13][36] Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites. He took a sabbatical from Princeton to work on mass drivers at MIT. There he served as the Hunsaker Visiting Professor of Aerospace during the 1976–77 academic year.^[37] At MIT, he, Henry H. Kolm, and a group of student volunteers built their first mass driver prototype.^[21][31][33] The eight-foot (2.5 m) long prototype could apply 33 g (320 m/s²) of acceleration to an object inserted in its bucket.^[13][21][31] With financial assistance from SSI, later prototypes improved this to 1,800 g (18,000 m/s²), enough acceleration to launch material off the Moon’s surface with only 520 feet (160 m) of track.^[31]

[edit] Opposition (1977–1985)

In 1977 O’Neill saw the peak of interest in space colonization.^[12] In that year his first book The High Frontier was published. He and his wife were flying between meetings, interviews, and hearings.^[5] On October 9, the CBS program 60 Minutes ran a segment about space colonies. Later they aired responses from the viewers, which included one from Senator William Proxmire. Proxmire was chairman of the Senate Subcommittee responsible for NASA’s budget. His response was, “it’s the best argument yet for chopping NASA’s funding to the bone...I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy”.^[38] He successfully eliminated spending on space colonization research from the budget.^[39] 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”.^[40] When it became clear that a government funded colonization effort was politically impossible, popular support for O’Neill’s ideas started to evaporate.^[12]

Other pressures on O’Neill’s colonization plan were the high cost of access to Earth orbit and the declining cost of energy. Building solar power stations in space was economically attractive when energy prices spiked during the 1979 oil crisis. When prices dropped in the early 1980s, funding for space solar power research dried up.^[41] 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.^[42][43] Eventual accounting of the full cost of a launch in 1985 raised this as high as $180 million per flight.^[44]

O’Neill was appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to the National Commission on Space in 1985.^[6] The commission, led by former NASA administrator Thomas Paine, proposed that the government commit to opening the inner Solar System for human settlement within 50 years.^[45][46] Their report was released in May 1986, one month after the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up on ascent.^[46] This disaster directed future policy away from the assumption made by the commission that space access had become inexpensive and reliable.^[45]

[edit] Writing career

O’Neill wrote the popular science book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. The book combined fictional accounts of space settlers with an explanation of his plan to build space colonies. When it was published in 1977, it established him as the spokesman for the space colonization movement.^[2] It won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science that year.^[47] The book also prompted Swarthmore College to grant O’Neill an honorary doctorate degree.^[4] The High Frontier has been translated into five languages and remains in print as of 2008.^[31]

His 1981 book 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future was an exercise in futurology. O’Neill narrated it as a visitor to Earth from a space colony beyond Pluto.^[48] 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.^[4]

In his book The Technology Edge, published in 1983, O'Neill wrote about economic competition with Japan.^[49] He argued that the United States had to develop six industries to compete: microengineering, robotics, genetic engineering, magnetic flight, family aircraft, and space science.^[36] 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.^[49]

[edit] Entrepreneurial efforts

On September 25, 1978, a friend of O’Neill boarded PSA Flight 182. Shortly before it was to land in San Diego, California, it collided with a light airplane. Everyone on board was killed when it crashed. Two years later, O’Neill filed for a patent on his invention for position determination by satellite.^[50] The main application of this technology was to track aircraft.^[36] After his patent was granted in 1982, O’Neill founded Geostar Corporation to develop the technology.^[3][50] The system was called Radio Determination Satellite Service, or RDSS. In April 1983 Geostar applied to the FCC for a license to broadcast from three satellites, which would cover the entire United States. Geostar launched GSTAR-2 into geosynchronous orbit in 1986. After two months of testing, the transmitter package permanently failed. Geostar began tests of RDSS by transmitting from other satellites. Eventually the system was put into service by eight transportation companies including Mayflower.^[50] With his health failing, O’Neill became less involved with the company at the same time it started to run into trouble.^[51] In February 1991 Geostar filed for bankruptcy and its licenses were sold to Motorola for the Iridium project.^[50] Although the system was eventually replaced by GPS, O’Neill made significant advances in the field of position determination.^[51]

O’Neill founded O’Neill Communications in Princeton in 1988.^[7][52] He introduced his Local Area Wireless Networking, or LAWN, system at the PC Expo in New York in 1989.^[53] 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.^[54] O’Neill Communications went out of business in 1993; the LAWN technology was sold to Omnispread Communications. As of 2008, Omnispread continues to sell a variant of his LAWN system.^[52]

On November 18, 1991, O’Neill filed a patent application for a high-speed train system. He called the system VSE, for velocity, silence, and efficiency.^[2] The trains, instead of running on tracks, would be propelled by electromagnetic forces through tunnels. He estimated that the trains could reach speeds of up to 2,500 mph (4,000 km/h)—about five times faster than a jet airliner—if the air was evacuated from the tunnels.^[6] He planned to build a network of stations connected by these tunnels, but he died two years before his first patent on it was granted.^[2]

[edit] Death and legacy

O’Neill was diagnosed with leukemia in 1985.^[51] He died on April 27, 1992, from complications of the disease at the Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California.^[6][7] He was survived by his wife Tasha, his ex-wife Sylvia, and his four children.^[6][55] A sample of his incinerated remains was buried in space.^[56] The vial containing his ashes was attached to the upper stage of a Pegasus XL rocket and launched into Earth orbit on April 21, 1997.^[57] It later re-entered the atmosphere in May 2002.^[58]

O’Neill directed his Space Studies Institute to continue their efforts “until people are living and working in space”.^[59] After his death, management of SSI was passed to his son Roger and colleague Freeman Dyson.^[31] SSI continued to hold conferences every other year to bring together scientists studying space colonization until 2001.^[60]

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.^[61][62]

One supporter of O’Neill’s ideas was Rick Tumlinson, who worked under O’Neill at the Space Studies Institute.^[63] Tumlinson co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, an organization that supports O’Neill’s concepts of large-scale space colonization. In 2004 Tumlinson held up three men as opposing 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”.^[64] 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”.^[64]

The National Space Society (NSS) gives the Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award for Space Settlement Advocacy to individuals noted for their contributions in the area of space settlement. Their contributions can be scientific, legislative, and educational. The award is a trophy cast in the shape of a Bernal sphere. The NSS first bestowed the award in 2007 on lunar entrepreneur and former astronaut Harrison Schmitt. In 2008, it was given to physicist John Marburger.^[65]

[edit] Publications

[edit] Books

• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1977). The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. New York: William Morrow & Company. ISBN 0962237906. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (ed.); O’Leary, Brian (1977). Space-Based Manufacturing from Nonterrestrial Materials. New York: American Institute of Aeronautics. ISBN 0915928213. 
• Cheng, David C.; O’Neill, Gerard K. (1979). Elementary Particle Physics: An Introduction. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0201054639. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1981). 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0671447513. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1983). The Technology Edge: Opportunities for America in world competition. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0671447661. 

[edit] Papers

• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1954). "Time-of-Flight Measurements on the Inelastic Scattering of 14.8-Mev Neutrons". Physical Review 95 (5): 1235–1245. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.95.1235. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (April 1956). "Storage-Ring Synchrotron: Device for High-Energy Physics Research". Physical Review 102 (5): 1418. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.102.1418. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (August 1963). "Storage Rings". Science 141 (3582): 679–686. doi:10.1126/science.141.3582.679. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (May 1968). "A High-Resolution Orbiting Telescope: New techniques would lead to orbiting an optical telescope 25 times the diameter of Palomar's". Science 160 (3830): 843–847. doi:10.1126/science.160.3830.843. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (September 1974). "The Colonization of Space". Physics Today 27 (9): 32–40. ISSN 0031-9228. Bibcode: 1974PhT....27i..32O. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (Fall 1975). "The High Frontier". CoEvolution Quarterly (7): 6–9. ISSN 0095-134X. Retrieved on 2008-08-18. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (December 5, 1975). "Space Colonies and Energy Supply to the Earth". Science 190: 943–947. Bibcode: 1975Sci...190..943O. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (October 1976). "Engineering a Space Manufacturing Center". Astronautics and Aeronautics 14: 20–28, 36. ISSN 0519-2366. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (March 1978). "The Low (Profile) Road to Space Manufacturing". Astronautics and Aeronautics 16 (3): 18–32. ISSN 0519-2366. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K.; Driggers, Gerald; O'Leary, Brian (October 1980). "New Routes to Manufacturing in Space". Astronautics and Aeronautics 18 (10): 46-51. ISSN 0519-2366. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (November 1980). "High acceleration mass drivers". Acta Astronautica 7 (11): 1229-1238. doi:10.1016/0094-5765(80)90002-8. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1981). "Where is everybody? Some new answers". Nature 294 (25). doi:10.1038/294025a0. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (March 1981). "Satellite Air Traffic Control". Astronautics and Aeronautics 19 (3): 27–31. ISSN 0519-2366. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1981). "Recent developments in mass drivers". Space manufacturing 4: 97-104. OCLC 8112602. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (July 1982). "Satellites Instead". AOPA Pilot 25 (1): 51–54, 59–63. ISSN 0001-2084. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (September 1983). "Geostar". AOPA Pilot 26 (9): 53–57. ISSN 0001-2084. 
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (1988). "Radiation Shielding to Solar Power Satellites: Results of the January 1988 SSI/Princeton Lunar Systems Study". Lunar Bases 2: 185. Bibcode: 1988LPICo.652..185O. 

[edit] Patents

O’Neill was granted six patents in total, some posthumously, in the areas of global position determination and magnetic levitation.

• US patent 4359733 Satellite-based vehicle position determining system, granted November 16, 1982
• US patent 4744083 Satellite-based position determining and message transfer system with monitoring of link quality, granted May 10, 1988
• US patent 4839656 Position determination and message transfer system employing satellites and stored terrain map, granted June 13, 1989
• US patent 4965586 Position determination and message transfer system employing satellites and stored terrain map, granted October 23, 1990
• US patent 5282424 High speed transport system, granted February 1, 1994
• US patent 5433155 High speed transport system, granted July 18, 1995

[edit] See also

• Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (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^[66]
• 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

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Bateman, Selby (August 1984). "Interview: Gerard K. O’Neill". COMPUTE! (51). Retrieved on 2008-08-07. 
• Brand, Stewart (1977). "Interviewing Gerard O’Neill", Space Colonies: A CoEvolution Book. Whole Earth Catalog. ISBN 0140048057. Retrieved on 2008-08-07. "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" 
• Daniels, Lee A. (April 29, 1992). "Gerard K. O’Neill, Professor, 69; Led Studies on Physics and Space", New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. 
• Davis, Don (March 2006). "Space Settlement: The Call of the High Frontier". Ad Astra. Washington DC: National Space Society. ISSN 1041-102X. Retrieved on 2008-08-28. 
• Dickson, Ellsworth (October 2007). "Magplane Technology developing unique mineral transportation system". Resource World Magazine: 80-81. Retrieved on 2008-10-27. 
• Dyson, Freeman J. (February 1993). "Gerard Kitchen O’Neill" (PDF). Physics Today 46 (2): 97–98. ISSN 0031-9228. Retrieved on 2008-08-07. 
• Brandt-Erichsen, David (November–December 1994). "The L5 Society". Ad Astra. Washington DC: National Space Society. ISSN 1041-102X. Retrieved on 2008-08-24. 
• Ferris, Timothy (May 3, 1981). "Nonfiction in Brief", New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. 
• Gray, Jerry (ed.) (1977). Space Manufacturing Facilities: Proceedings of the Princeton/AIAA/NASA conference, May 7–9, 1975. New York: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. OCLC 3146607. 
• Grierson, Bruce (April 2004). "Beyond NASA: Dawn of the Next Space Age". Popular Science. ISSN 0161-7370. Retrieved on 2008-09-04. 
• Hanushek, Eric. "Testimony on Space Shuttle Pricing Policy" United States Senate, Washington DC (March 27, 1985). Retrieved on 2008-08-28.
• Henson, H. Keith; Henson, Carolyn (March 1977). "An Interview with Gerard K. O’Neill". L-5 News 2 (3): 8–10. Retrieved on 2008-08-23. 
• Honan, Patrick (May 25, 1990). "LAWN: For a Simple, Wireless LAN". Personal Computing 14 (5): 174. ISSN 0192-5490. 
• Hoyt, David (December 14, 2006). "X PRIZE Foundation: Revolution Through Competition". Stanford Graduate School of Business. Retrieved on 2008-10-19.
• Kolm, Henry H.; Snow, William R. (1992). "Electromagnetic Launch of Lunar Material", Space Resources 2. Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 117–135. NASA SP-509. ISBN 0160380626. Retrieved on 2008-09-16. 
• Lovell, Robert (November 1977). "Letters to L-5". L-5 News 2 (11): 1. Retrieved on 2008-08-26. 
• McDowell, Jonathan (April 22, 1997). "Jonathan’s Space Report" (319). Retrieved on 2008-09-02. 
• Meinel, Carolyn (2008). "MIT Professor and Students Build Mass Driver Coilgun". How to Build Railguns and Coilguns for Superweapons and Space Launchers. The Happy Hacker. Retrieved on 2008-10-09.
• O’Neill, Gerard K. (September 1974). "The Colonization of Space". Physics Today 27 (9): 32–40. ISSN 0031-9228. 
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Persondata
NAME	O’Neill, Gerard Kitchen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Physicist, author, and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH	February 6, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH	Brooklyn, New York, United States
DATE OF DEATH	April 27, 1992
PLACE OF DEATH	Redwood City, California, United States