O’Neill Colonies

[jude_rook]

Back in the 70s and early 80s, Gerard O’Neill’s proposal for a colony at the L5 point between Moon and Earth was all the rage in SF, and the subject of a lot of serious discussion (pro and con) among futurologists.  One of my prized possessions is a copy of Space Colonies, a book on the subject published by CoEvolution Press back when the subject was at its hottest, which includes contributions by K. Eric Drexler before he became the prophet of nanotechnology.  A lot of the contributions (though not Drexler’s) are angry denunciations of the idea, which make for just as interesting reading as the ones boosting it.  One set of remarks by John Holt (How Children Fail) and T.A. Heppenheimer of the Center for Space Science, although done by mail in the Seventies, reads like an exchange on Usenet.

O’Neill mania got to a point where, well, I seem to remember a novel where the author felt the need to include an explanation of why the people in his interstellar future lived on planets and not O’Neill colonies.  Then it all seemed to go away, somehow.  Maybe the Challenger disaster had something to do with the way the concept faded out?

Links to general information on O’Neill colonies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

And to an online version of Space Colonies:

http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/CoEvolutionBook/Table_Of_Contents.HTML