Jeff Bezos has proposed that his company, Blue Origin, begin building an O’Neill space colony.
I played a role in the history of space colonies.
In late 1971 I flew around the world stopping in Kyoto, Seoul, Bangkok, Kabul and Tehran. When I got home I founded the Committee for a New Planet, made up of my friends from around the world. The first meeting was the following Spring at Green Gulch in Marin County California.
I started the Committee after coming to understand culture while in Kyoto. I realized that every culture had a different conception of the world. Focusing on a New Planet would help humans to understand cultural difference.
Within the next six months Dick Austin introduced me to Prof. Gerard O’Neill who was at a physics conference across the street from my office. It was at the Hilton in San Francisco. Dick knew about my International Committee and connected it with O’Neill when O'Neill knocked on our door.
(Sidebar: I hired Dick to be the public face of the Point Foundation. Point was the money from the sale of Stewart Brand's Last Whole Earth Catalog. He met applicants and answered the phone. Dick had been an employe of mine in Marketing Research when I was a banker. He had several unique hippy qualities. Extremely naive, innocent and optimistic. Perfect to be enthusiastic about proposals people brought us, yet turn away all the people who wanted Point grants. Point only initiated grants but couldn’t make that fact public.)
Gerard told me about his ideas for a space colony and told me about his 30+ student followers. He wanted some money for them to come to a conference. I told him that, he as a physics professor at Princeton, with this idea, could do anything he wanted and his position would make him a world star figure. I wrote a Foundation check to Princeton for roughly $600 and explained to Gerard that Princeton would do the PR for him based on receiving a foundation grant.
That is precisely what happened and it resulted in a note in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Gerard O'Neill became a star.
He wrote up his L5 space colony idea in a 1974 Physics Today article and gives me credit in the last line.
L5 is a Lagrange point in the Earth-Moon orbit that would be a stable orbital point for a space colony.
For future safety I put a copy of the article here.
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