- O'Neill, Gerard K.
The High Frontier.
Mojave, CA: Space Studies Institute, [1976, 1977, 1982, 1989] 2013.
ISBN 978-0-688-03133-6.
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In the tumultuous year of 1969, Prof. Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton
University was tapped to teach the large freshman physics course at
that institution. To motivate talented students who might find the
pace of the course tedious, he organised an informal seminar which
would explore challenging topics to which the basic physics taught
in the main course could be applied. For the first topic of the
seminar he posed the question, “Is a planetary surface the
right place for an expanding technological civilisation?”. So
fascinating were the results of investigating this question that
the seminar never made it to the next topic, and working out its
ramifications would occupy the rest of O'Neill's life.
By 1974, O'Neill and his growing group of informal collaborators had
come to believe not only that the answer to that 1969 question was a
definitive “no”, but that a large-scale expansion of the
human presence into space, using the abundant energy and material
resources available outside the Earth's gravity well was not a goal
for the distant future but rather something which could be accomplished
using only technologies already proved or expected in the next
few years (such as the NASA's space shuttle, then under development).
Further, the budget to bootstrap the settlement of space until the
point at which the space settlements were self-sustaining and able
to expand without further support was on the order of magnitude of the
Apollo project and, unlike Apollo, would have an economic pay-off
which would grow exponentially as space settlements proliferated.
As O'Neill wrote, the world economy had just been hit by the first of
what would be a series of “oil shocks”, which would lead to
a massive transfer of wealth from productive, developed economies to
desert despotisms whose significance to the world economy and
geopolitics would be precisely zero did they not happen to sit atop
a pool of fuel (which they lacked the ability to discover and
produce). He soon realised that the key to economic feasibility of
space settlements was using them to construct
solar power
satellites to beam energy back to Earth.
Solar power satellites are just barely economically viable if the
material from which they are made must be launched from the Earth,
and many design concepts assume a dramatic reduction in launch
costs and super-lightweight structure and high
efficiency solar cells for the satellites, which adds to their
capital cost. O'Neill realised that the materials which make up
around 99% of the mass of a solar power satellite are available on
the Moon, and a space settlement, with access to lunar material at
a small fraction of the cost of launching from Earth and the
ability to fabricate the very large power satellite structures in
weightlessness would reduce the cost of space solar power to well
below electricity prices of the mid-1970s (which were much lower
than those of today).
In this book, a complete architecture is laid out, starting with
initial settlements of “only” 10,000 people in a
sphere about half a kilometre in diameter, rotating to provide
Earth-normal gravity at the equator. This would be nothing like
what one thinks of as a “space station”: people
would live in apartments at a density comparable to small towns
on Earth, surrounded by vegetation and with a stream running around
the equator of the sphere. Lunar material would provide radiation
shielding and mirrors would provide sunlight and a normal cycle
of day and night.
This would be just a first step, with subsequent settlements much
larger and with amenities equal to or exceeding those of Earth. Once
access to the resources of asteroids (initially those in near-Earth or
Earth-crossing orbits, and eventually the main belt) was opened,
the space economy's reliance on the Earth would be only for settlers
and lightweight, labour-intensive goods which made more sense to
import. (For example, it might be some time before a space settlement
built its own semiconductor fabrication facility rather than importing
chips from those on Earth.)
This is the future we could be living in today, but turned our backs
upon. Having read this book shortly after it first came out, it is
difficult to describe just how bracing this optimistic, expansive
view of the future was in the 1970s, when everything was brown and
the human prospect suddenly seemed constrained by limited resources,
faltering prosperity, and shrinking personal liberty. The curious
thing about re-reading it today is that almost nothing has
changed. Forty years later, O'Neill's roadmap for the future
is just as viable an option for a visionary society as it was when
initially proposed, and technological progress and understanding of
the space environment has only improved its plausibility. The
International Space Station, although a multi-decade detour from
true space settlements, provides a testbed where technologies for
those settlements can be explored (for example, solar powered
closed-cycle Brayton engines as an alternative to photovoltaics
for power generation, and high-yield agricultural techniques in
a closed-loop ecosystem).
The re-appearance of this book in an electronic edition is timely,
as O'Neill's ideas and the optimism for a better future they
inspired seem almost forgotten today. Many people assume there
was some technological flaw in his argument or that an
economic show-stopper was discovered, yet none was. It was more
like the reaction O'Neill encountered when he first tried to
get his ideas into print in 1972. One reviewer, recommending
against publication, wrote, “No one else is thinking in
these terms, therefore the ideas must be wrong.” Today,
even space “visionaries” imagine establishing human
settlements on the Moon, Mars, and among the asteroids, with
space travel seen as a way to get to these destinations and
sustain pioneer communities there. This is a vision akin to long
sea voyages to settle distant lands. O'Neill's High Frontier is
something very different and epochal: the expansion of a species
which evolved on the surface of a planet into the space around
it and eventually throughout the solar system, using the abundant
solar energy and material resources available there. This is like
life expanding from the sea where it originated onto the land.
It is the next step in the human adventure, and it can begin,
just as it could have in 1976, within a decade of a developed
society committing to make it so.
For some reason the Kindle edition, at least when
viewed with the iPad Kindle application, displays with tiny type. I
found I had to increase the font size by four steps to render it easily
readable. Since font size is a global setting, that means than if you
view another book, it shows up with giant letters like a first grade
reader. The illustrations are dark and difficult to interpret
in the Kindle edition—I do not recall whether this was also the
case in the paperback edition I read many years ago.
May 2013 