The “High Frontier” Concept in Perspective

Abstract

G.K. O’Neill’s pioneer studies and hypotheses on XXIst century space colonies still seem the stuff of science fiction dreams to many. His space colony has the shape of a cylinder with round-off ends. Large mirrors, angling out from one end, reflect sunlight into the interior through window panels which constitute half the surface area of the cylinder; people live in the cylinder interior. Cables extending to outer space can connect this colony with another one. The cylinders would be rotating to provide gravity and would act as gyroscopes. With two of these structures spinning in opposite direction and linked together, the resulting system would behave as if there were no spinning at all and could easily be made to track the sun. The first colony, according to this concept, should be 600 feet in diameter, rotating at 3 revolutions per minute to give normal gravity. The colony would then be a cylinder a mile long. But since there could be trouble if the spin were faster than one rpm, this meant the colony could not be a cylinder but had to be redesigned into the shape of a torus over a mile in diameter with people living on the inside of it, 400 feet wide: a sort of replica of the classic space station in Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A SPACE 0DISSEY. In any case, as O’Neill commented on, when he testified in the U.S. Senate hearings on January 19, 1976, “it is natural for most people, and particularly for reporters and art directors, to become preoccupied with two features of orbital manufacturing. .. One is, ‘Where is it (the space colony) going to?’ and the other is, ‘what is it going to look like?’.