SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.
His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O’Neill cylinders.
The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O’Neill, titled “The High Frontier.” The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat’s interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light.
O’Neill cylinders and their ilk have become a standby for hard science-fiction stories. For example, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312,” hollowed-out asteroids known as “terraria” house communities that travel back and forth between planets. In the movie “Interstellar,” Matthew McConaghey’s character finds himself inside an O’Neill-type outpost named Cooper Station near Saturn.
Bezos is said to have talked up the concept in the 1980s, when he was a starry-eyed student at Princeton. Three decades later, he’s the CEO of Amazon with a net worth estimated at $67 billion, and with his own space venture called Blue Origin.
So far, Blue Origin has launched a reusable rocket ship called New Shepard on uncrewed suborbital test flights. But Bezos has much bigger ambitions, for an orbital launch system called New Glenn and a super-rocket called New Armstrong.
During last weekend’s Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Bezos referred to his long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space, as well as his enabling goal of creating the “heavy lifting infrastructure” to make that happen.
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