Breakout (Newt Gingrich) by Newt Gingrich

Author:Newt Gingrich [Gingrich, Newt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621570226
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

CHAPTER SEVEN

BREAKOUT IN SPACE

In 1976, four years after Apollo astronauts had departed the moon for the last time, a Princeton University physicist named Gerard O’Neill published a manifesto called The High Frontier, a detailed vision of humanity’s near-term future in space. He imagined cylindrical space stations miles in diameter, with artificial gravity and landscapes like Southern California, complete with trees, lakes, and flowing streams. Thousands of people would live in traditional homes clustered in villages and towns. There’d be restaurants, movie theaters, playgrounds, and neighborhood barbeques. When space-dwellers sat “outside” on their decks and looked up at night, they’d see not stars but the sparkling lights of distant towns across the cylinder, hanging upside down from their perspective.

O’Neill was convinced that his designs could be commercially viable. His “islands” weren’t just vacation spots; they were primarily to be manufacturing hubs, with plenty of jobs for extraterrestrial expatriates. Residents could do manufacturing work that would be impossible on Earth, such as building extremely light structures or novel pharmaceuticals that require zero gravity to form. O’Neill also envisioned massive steam turbines designed to remain in space, powered by the sun twenty-four hours a day. The first space stations, he speculated, would be built by energy companies to generate low-cost electricity, which would be beamed back to Earth in the form of targeted microwaves. Other people on the islands would work in mass agricultural production, which would have extremely high yields at always-sunny points in space. A small local economy would grow around these primary industries, he predicted.

But how to build these gigantic cities in space? Men could mine the raw material at a base on the moon, O’Neill envisioned, after which they’d use what amounted to a huge magnetic cannon to launch it through the almost-nonexistent lunar atmosphere to construction sites somewhere between the earth and the moon.

O’Neill’s ideas were more than Star Trek–style science fiction. He, along with a substantial number of colleagues, produced detailed engineering plans to back up the concept. He demonstrated the feasibility of a number of the ideas in the real world, such as the “mass driver” he wanted to build on the moon. There was no theoretical reason why the stunning islands he described should not be possible, even profitable. And he thought it would all happen by 2010.

The High Frontier was an instant hit, exciting Americans about space for the first time since the Apollo missions. 60 Minutes covered O’Neill’s proposals, as did the New York Times. As Greg Klerkx writes in Lost in Space, “After the book’s publication, O’Neill became a media darling, appearing on talk shows, writing for newspapers and magazines and speaking before congressional hearings on the merits of space manufacturing, space solar power and space settlement. His allies included…California’s governor and presidential candidate Jerry Brown, and the powerful congressman Morris Udall, who was sufficiently impressed by the energy ramifications of O’Neill’s plans to lobby (albeit unsuccessfully) the Federal Energy Research and Development Administration to fund further design studies of O’Neillian concepts.… Even Carl Sagan became an O’Neill supporter.

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