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The High Frontier
from the call-my-home-the-hwang-ho dept.
| The High Frontier | |
| author | Gerard K. O'Neill |
| pages | 326 |
| publisher | (1989 edition) Space Studies Institute Press |
| rating | 10 |
| reviewer | apsmith |
| ISBN | 0962237906 |
| summary | O'Neill outlines how to colonize near space with little more than boring 1970s materials and engineering know-how, with boot-strap colonies of thousands of peopleprocessing moon and asteroid dust in high-earth orbit. |
The Big Idea
Continued growth in material well-being and freedom for humanity is only possible through colonization of space; O'Neill outlines how to do it with little more than boring 1970's materials and engineering know-how, via boot-strap colonies of thousands of people processing moon and asteroid dust in high-earth orbit. The only problem is the seed capital to get started; his initial $100 billion was clearly an over-estimate - a later estimate brought the startup costs closer to $7 billion. Even more important we really should now have the resources and motivation (global warming!) to make it happen. There is a new 2000 edition with additional material from other authors.
The Scenario:
In 1969 Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill organized a weekly seminar for the advanced students in his freshman physics class. It was Apollo's heyday, but also a time of deepening skepticism in the benefits and relevance of science and technology. Both the Cold War with the Soviets and the hot war in Vietnam were at their height; pollution seemed to be worsening everywhere; serious people were arguing that humankind was already overstepping Earth's carrying capacity, and it was time to retrench. In this climate O'Neill asked his students:"Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?"
And despite what Isaac Asimov called our "planetary chauvinism", O'Neill and his little group came up with strong arguments and designs for artificial colonies in high orbit or free space, well away from planetary surfaces. O'Neill was so taken with their enthusiasm for this that he committed a good deal of his spare time over the next several years to developing the ideas and trying to get them published. Along the way he enlisted a young MIT student named Eric Drexler, and colleague Freeman Dyson, among a small group of supporters. Worldwide publicity finally arrived in May 1974, when the NY Times sent a reporter to the small conference O'Neill had organized on this new topic of "space colonization".
Three years later came "The High Frontier", O'Neill's main publication for a popular audience on the subject. In his 1993 obituary Freeman Dyson said, "The High Frontier... established O'Neill as a spokesman for the people in many countries who believe that the settlement of space can bring tremendous benefits to humanity ...."
Repeated throughout the book is O'Neill's goal: "the humanization of space", by which he means in part the capacity to move the bulk of humanity off this planet and into colonies with resources vastly greater than what the Earth can provide. These colonies would be more than self-supporting; their first great contribution would be in construction of solar power satellites from lunar materials, allowing the nations of Earth to vastly expand their energy resources in the most environmentally sound fashion possible. Earth's surface captures only a tiny fraction of the solar energy available; something like 30 times what Earth receives comes through even the relatively narrow confines of geosynchronous orbit; another factor of 100 times as much energy is available inside the Moon's orbit where the "L5" or "high" orbits for the colonies are suggested.
O'Neill goes through in some detail what it would take, using the capacity of NASA's then-planned space shuttle, to first set up an initial mining station on the moon, which would then launch hundreds or thousands of times more mass to high orbit. The one new technology O'Neill relied on was his "mass driver", an electromagnetic acceleration system used both on the lunar surface to dump raw materials into space, and as a propulsion system somewhat similar to the electromagnetic "ion drive" NASA is now using on its Deep Space 1 mission, and of course related to the electromagnetic particle accelerators O'Neill worked with at his real job. O'Neill and colleagues even put together several "mass drivers" out of spare parts to test what accelerations were feasible -- even the first model achieved over 30 g's.
The centerpiece of the book is the design of the colonies themselves, constructed for the most part out of lunar material. These are the hollow spheres or cylinders, which O'Neill refers to as "Islands", rotated so as to provide a land area with artificial gravity. There's no fancy technology needed, despite what you might expect reading Clarke's Rama novels, or Greg Bear's Eon, or countless others. The magnitude of Island One, a colony designed for some 10,000 people, is well within the scale of many artifical structures we have built here on earth; O'Neill compares it to shipbuilding in particular. O'Neill's materials are aluminum alloys or even steel; no need for carbon fiber composites here (and the Moon is a little low on carbon anyway). The colonies provide comforts similar to home, with terraced apartments, rooftop gardens, forests and rivers and recreational areas. Lighting is provided through a somewhat complex system of mirrors, baffles, and ordinary glass windows - no need for a central "plasma tube"! Radiation shielding is the usual six feet of slag or lunar dirt.
The book is chock-full of great ideas that seem to make the whole scheme obviously practical. Did you know the space shuttle cargo bay has roughly the same capacity as a DC-9 airliner? In principle our current space shuttles could be used to ferry over a hundred passengers into space at a time; O'Neill estimates that even a limited shuttle fleet could get close to a hundred thousand people into low earth orbit every year (of course that was back when NASA thought it would be doing 60 shuttle missions a year). O'Neill was sure that other better ways of getting into low earth orbit would come along; the next few years should be very interesting in this regard with new launch systems from Kistler Aerospace, Rotary Rocket, etc. supposedly in the works. With O'Neill's reasonably optimistic scenario, we would have hundreds of millions of people in these colonies in 35-50 years. Sounds outrageous? A hundred years ago most people thought it was impossible to fly something heavier than air, but now airlines routinely handle hundreds of millions of passengers every year.
What's Good?
Just about everything -- I'd heard about this book probably since I was in grade school, but never got around to reading it until now. It's the clear foundation for any logical expansion of humanity into space; all we need to do is get with the program! O'Neill founded the Space Studies Institute to gather private donations to spur further research into the whole scheme, which it has done very extensively. What's Bad? Why hasn't it all happened yet? The 1989 edition contains a newer appendix by O'Neill with the following quote that sums up at least part of the problem: "In 1973 the U.S. space program had been fifteen years ahead of all others. By 1988 that lead had been thrown away." But O'Neill's prophesying was somehow also at fault. With such huge untapped resources, why hasn't Exxon or Mobil, or General Electric, been leaping at the chance to invest some of their spare capital to make a killing? Maybe they're just too clueless about the possibilities here? Or maybe they've made a rational judgment to be second or third, not first on something as apparently risky as this? Somebody has to do it first, and O'Neill in his 1989 comments at least seems to have lost faith in NASA and its over-cautious contractors to get the thing started. So who will it be?What's in it for me?
There seems a good chance space development will be "the next big thing" after the Internet has run its course through our lives. After all, we still need material resources to do the things we want to do. Earth's population is still increasing, and its resources really are limited. The threat of global warming traces almost entirely to our burning of fossil fuels for energy. If we don't get started on a long-term solution now, when will we? This book is still the clearest rational outline of why, and how, space development makes sense. Plus, who wouldn't want an apartment on one of those "islands in the sky"?"
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
Shuttle external tanks were part of O'Neill's visi (Score:3)
The Shuttle ET is discarded right before an orbital circularization burn and could be held on to during that burn without depleting the orbital maneuvering fuel supply badly. For more information on how this these tanks could be converted to space stations and more, visit the following:
http://www.orbit6.com/et/
Space Exploration and the Poor (Score:5)
Case in point: When the Europeans overflowed into the Americas, it wasn't because the land had been 'just discovered' or 'it was ripe for opportunity'. The first commercial ventures for American exploration were complete and utter financial and physical disasters. Hundreds died in the early periods of starvation and disease. Worse, they brought their disease with them to infect Native Americans. Their backers realized that American exploration was costly and unprofitable despite the fact that there was a wealth of untapped resources.
The people who took the risks and learned a new way of living and made American exploration really work were those who just didn't have any hope of living the life they wanted to in Europe: The poor, the tired, the huddled masses, etc...
This carries over into today. Americans don't *need* space exploration in the same way the rich, elite Europeans didn't *need* American exploration. The people who could really benifit from space exploration are the relatively poor from 3rd world Asian and South American countries. Unfortuneately, it's not so easy to build a dome on Mars as it was for early settlers to build log cabins and sod houses. Right *now*, we're in the same period of exploration where the ultra-rich (like the King of Spain and his funding of Columbus's ventures) are throwing money into exploration, hoping to find profit where there is none yet. It will only be when there is a driving, urgent *need* for the middle-class and poor to get the hell off Earth that space habitats and Mars domes will become viable and profitable.
The Problems are Not Technical (Score:4)
The problem is that we simply have no percieved business, social or political need to do it. Call it a "lack of will", for lack of a better turn.
Big business? They're focused on short-term, low risk profits. Also, they are violently opposed to anything that would challenge their business models.
Small business/nonprofit foundataions? Not enough resources.
Government? No payback at all before the next election, and (at least in the US) crippling turf battles. There's also the possibility of the "colonists" squirming out from under their thumb.
Result: no action.
Whatever entity (nation, corporation, etc) first gets appreciable numbers of people (and the infrastructure to support them)into space will be the ones to replace the USA on the world scene.
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Minor engineering solutions (Score:4)
Excuse me, but how do you know? It seems that all the experience we've had has been with 1 G and 0 G, with a couple short experiments at 1/6 G. Who exactly has spent a year at
Oh, well, it's irrelevant:
Steel is not strong enough to provide this in a rotating cylinder,
You want to do the math on this one, and get back to me? Neglecting air pressure (which makes the problem worse, but not much) and endcaps (which makes the problem better, but not much), the maximum radius of a cylindrical O'Neill colony would be
radius = (tensile strength)/[(density)(pseudogravity)]
Plug in your 8.8 m/s^2 pseudogravity, and 2700 kg/m^3 density and 185 MPa ultimate tensile strength for a good aluminum alloy, and you get a nice 7.7 kilometer radius. Drop down to the yield strength of structural aluminum, let the colony structure carry it's own weight in radiation shielding and contents, and throw in a safety factor of 2, and you still get a colony a mile wide.
Radiation storms strong enough to kill unprotected people happen frequently. Every few years, we on earth at sea level get an extra chest X-ray from one. They are not predictable, have fast onset. Solar flares are more predictable, but require lots of mass between living tissue and the sun.
Gee, that's funny, I haven't heard about all the Shuttle astronaut and Mir cosmonaut deaths over the past decade. Of course, they're shielded partly by the Van Allen belts, but they're also in a space station whose skin is dozens of times thinner than an O'Neill colony's would be. Would you provide a reference for this assertion?
I want to see us go into space, but all the simple stories like O'Neill's are just silly.
I've heard O'Neill's ideas called uneconomical, and perhaps they're not politically tenable either... but "simple" is one of the last words I would have used...
Higher Ground that we won't see... (Score:4)
Although it makes sense, I'm not envisioning that it happens anytime soon... In fact, I'm not seeing a real drive to the commercialization of space with the plain fact that getting off this planet safely and inserting into an orbit, and then moving to locations that you need to get to, and survive is not brain surgery - it's rocket science.
And as easy as the math may be to work out, and state on paper, it takes an incredible infrastructure to get to that stage - so far, Russia and the USA are the only ones to launch people. China is catching up, and I expect that India will catch up as well, but it's not as easy as it looks. It took a huge amount of resources and energy to do so.
There is also a considerable hesitancy to send people into such a hostile environment without the immediate rewards being available. People left the "old world" because of political and population and philosophical reasons to a place where they had atmosphere, water, and some sort of food supply as well as something to sell.. There was incentive.
Although I see an incredible benefit to moving into space, a lot of people would not see it that way. Heinlein really did it best when he wrote "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I mean - there had to be a real good reason to go there - greed. And no, it wasn't easy, and people died in his space exploration stories.
Forget the space station - move to the moon, start working with a lower-gravity world, strip mine it for all it's worth - do nuclear fuel research there, and yes, grow food, have children, allow them to have children - then we will be on higher ground.