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Review: The High Frontier: The Untold Story Of Gerard K. O'Neill

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 12, 2021
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Review: The High Frontier: The Untold Story Of Gerard K. O'Neill

The High Frontier: The Untold Story Of Gerard K. O’Neill: A Review
As the size of satellites shrinks and the ubiquity of the technology expands it is close to being possible to build a rocket in a garage and put something into space. OK, I am exaggerating. But my straw man talking point is a lot closer to reality today than it might have been 40 years ago.
Back in the late 1970s and 1980s the potential of space exploration had started to morph into the era of space utilization. Utilization meant different things to different people. Some wanted to make money. Full stop. Others wanted to settle the solar system. Most were somewhere in the middle with an eye on both extremes. But most people tended to think small since space efforts had, to date, involved putting small things in space, once in a while and at great expense to get them there.
Some of you may recall the world before Federal Express or the Internet. It cost a lot to move things across Earth. More to get things into space. What happens when the cost of putting things into space drops while the need to bring things to space from Earth drops as well? That was at the heart of what Gerald K. O’Neill thought about – what this documentary aptly focuses on.

Full Review

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

5 responses to “Review: The High Frontier: The Untold Story Of Gerard K. O'Neill”

  1. tutiger87 says:
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    One of the pivotal moments in my deciding to pursue spaceflight as a career came when I was about 6 years old, and my parents bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias. In the Appendix was an article on space exploration with beautiful pictures of Gerald K O’Neill designed space colonies. I really thought we’d be there by now….*sniff*

  2. Michael Kaplan says:
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    I was inspired by O’Neill’s visionary leadership early on in my career and am very much looking forward to watching this documentary.

  3. jamesmuncy says:
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    Thanks for this, Keith. So many names coming to mind. I even remember BOTH meanings of the FASST acronym. Trudy Bell’s census of the space advocacy ecosystem. God I’m old.

    So many memories. Among my favorite: the Fall 1985 Stanford meeting of the Tom Paine-chaired National Commission on Space. Dr. Sagan, in his typically arrogant way, decreeing to the Commissioners that he had advanced his thinking on human spaceflight and determined that while humans weren’t necessary or even especially useful for scientific exploration, human presence was justified in order to promote international cooperation and peacemaking. In the context of the time: he favored U.S.-Soviet cooperation on humans to Mars to replace the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gerry, in his modest-but-playful way, asked if creating economic opportunity wasn’t another potential justification for humanity going into space. And Carl, true to his values, replied derisively that economic development of the solar system would be like Cecil Rhodes and the robber barons who plundered Africa and other parts of the Earth.

    And here we are today, 36 years later, with Musk and Bezos (who read the High Frontier in school) and so many more trying to open space to everyone, and the naysayers on both the left and right saying commercial space is either evil or unfairly displacing NASA and its heritage contractors.

    So, with a boomer’s generationally-obligatory narcissist worldview, I’m proud to have been one of Gerry’s kids… and to have spent most of my life in service to our shared vision of an open High Frontier in space.

  4. Courtney Stadd says:
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    Keith – I never cease to be amazed at how close we orbited during those early years and yet somehow never enjoyed a rendezvous.

    To wit: I was befriending Leonard and Alan on M St around the same time and I was one of those long haired twenty somethings in May ’79 watching the mass driver demo.

    I was given the task by Dr. O’Neill to draw up a list of key decision-makers in the world’s capitals (pre-Internet so I spent much time in the library) to whom we sent free copies of his seminal book, “The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.”

    He had a huge impact on my peers and me and, frankly, has led many of us to be more interested in large scale self-supporting space habitats in free space rather than exclusively planetary surfaces.

    He was a truly kind and generous soul whose intellect was awe inspiring. Before he became associated with space colonies, he pioneered work in high energy physics including his theory of particle storage rings that allowed particle accelerators to achieve even higher energies.

    His Space Studies Institute has had enormous impact on future generations of students interested in carrying on his legacy. And he co-founded Geo-Star Corp – based on his patented satellite position determination system. He was a private pilot and was very interested in the use of Radio Determination Satellite Service for aircraft nav. Although GPS has long transplanted the need for the RDSS, position determination is yet another example where Dr. O’Neill made significant contributions. Of course, no overview of his career is complete without his contributions to the technical literature concerning solar power satellites, magnetic flight … the list of his contributions to science and technology is daunting.

    A truly great man – whose legacy lives on whenever any of us challenge orthodoxy and continue our push for large scale (and sustainable!) human settlement in the high frontier.

    • Charles Chafer says:
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      So many of the remembrances of Gerry and his work overlook the pivotal role of T. Stephen Cheston – Georgetown U. Graduate School Dean – in providing guidance through the myriad pathways of DC. Steve brought together Courtney, David Webb, Tim Hart, and me as O’Neill worker bees and went on to work governmental issues for Geostar. Steve was always at Gerry’s side, providing candid and sought after advice in those early days of introducing the notions of large scale space industrialization to the DC crowd.