Colonizing Space

When Princeton Physicist Gerard K. O'Neill made the proposal that space colonies be established to relieve the earth's overcrowding, increasing pollution and energy shortages, many of his more skeptical colleagues dismissed the scheme as one more exercise in scientific fantasy. But, unlike many other far-out proposals, the idea has not faded into oblivion.

For almost a year, O'Neill has continued to expand his vision with imaginative new details. He has become so convincing an advocate that this month, at a three-day conference in Princeton, 100 scientists, engineers, international lawyers and social scientists agreed that space colonization is not only possible but eminently feasible. They even discussed such basic questions as what kind of meat the colonists will eat (the conferees were told that rabbits, chickens and pigs would be easier to raise in space than cattle) and what types of legal and social structures might be set up in their extraterrestrial world.

Huge Cylinders. This summer two dozen specialists, including O'Neill, will convene for ten weeks at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., to study the practical problems of getting the enormous project into orbit. Meanwhile, O'Neill, 48, is energetically continuing to press the idea in sci entific articles, television and radio talks, and in campus lectures at the rate of at least two a week. Says he: "The whole thing is exploding so fast that I am beginning to worry about how to make time for my work in physics."

As it was first spelled out (TIME, June 3), O'Neill's scheme called for assembling in space large aluminum cylinders that would house self-contained communities. The cylinders would be built at the constantly moving "libration points," where the gravity of the earth and of the moon cancel each other out. Permanently in orbit at those positions, each pair of huge cylinders (1,100 yds. long and 220 yds. in diameter) would support 10,000 people; they would contain an atmosphere like earth's, water, farm land and a variety of flora and fauna. The cylinders would rotate slowly, thus simulating gravity and holding people, buildings and soil "down" on the inner surfaces. For power, the space colonizers would rely on ever-present sunlight, captured by large external mirrors that could be controlled to create the effect of night and day and even of seasonal change.

At the Princeton gathering, O'Neill and others discussed the establishment of the first colony at a libration point called L5, which lies in the moon's orbit at a spot equidistant from earth and moon. Simultaneously, the space colonizers would set up a small mining base on the moon. Its purpose: to provide most of the building blocks for the colonies. Rich in aluminum, titanium, iron and other essential materials--including oxygen--lunar rocks could be fired off by a continuously catapulting device. Slowing as they climb out of the moon's gravity, these building blocks would eventually arrive at the construction site in free space. That would be much cheaper than carrying the materials from earth, where mineral-rich ores are already scarce and stronger gravity makes it necessary to use more powerful and costly rockets for launching.

Future Shock. As an added incentive, says O'Neill, the early colonies could be devoted to space manufacturing --for example, the construction of large turbogenerators driven by sunlight. Much easier to build in the gravity-free environment around the colonies, these giant machines could be towed back to the vicinity of the earth, parked in fixed orbit and then used to relay the captured solar power down to earth as a beam of microwaves.*

O'Neill concedes that such conceptions are "very rich in future shock" and larger than anything yet attempted in space or even planned on the drawing boards of space scientists. But he is firmly convinced that they could be achieved with technology that is either already available or almost perfected. In fact, says O'Neill, the first space habitat--he thinks the word colony connotes exploitation--could be functioning by the start of the next century. Its early inhabitants would probably be "hardhat types," O'Neill says, but after the initial construction is finished almost anyone with a spirit of adventure could live at L5. The cost would be somewhat more than that of the $25 billion Project Apollo, which placed men on the moon, but no more than a fifth of the estimated minimal $600 billion tab for Project Independence, the U.S. effort to free itself from dependence on foreign energy sources long before the year 2000.

*Which can be converted back to ordinary electricity with only a minimal loss of power.

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