Gerard K. O'Neill

Gerard K. O'Neill was an American experimental physicist at Princeton University who became a leading theorist of large-scale space colonization. In his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, developed from a course he taught and a widely read 1974 journal article, he proposed detailed engineering designs for enormous rotating cylindrical space habitats, since called O'Neill cylinders, that would use rotation to simulate gravity and could house thousands of residents using materials mined from the Moon and asteroids rather than launched from Earth. He founded the Space Studies Institute in 1977 to fund research into these concepts and organized a series of NASA-Ames-sponsored summer studies on space settlement design during the 1970s that brought his ideas to a wider scientific and engineering audience. Independently of the colonization work, he also invented the particle storage ring used in high-energy physics research and co-founded Geostar, an early satellite positioning and navigation company.