Gerard K. O'Neill

Gerard Kitchen O'Neill ( born February 6, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York City, † April 27, 1992 in Redwood City, California ) was an American physicist and space pioneer.

Life

O'Neill is best known for his space vision. Ideas to he developed in the early 1970s, when he held exercises in this direction his physics students. His first publication to The Colonization of Space, was released in September 1974 Physics Today, after the essay was four years again and again of journals (even from Science and Scientific American ) rejected. In 1975 he organized a conference in Princeton on technology for the colonization of space. 1976/77 he constructed with Henry Kolm from MIT prototype of a mass drivers, an electromagnetic catapult (see propulsion methods for space ). After the original idea so that materials should be shot from the moon to the Lagrangian point L 5, the place had taken the O'Neill for the first space colony in the eye. In 1977, O'Neill, the Space Studies Institute, which is currently headed by Freeman Dyson founded. The Institute developed several plans for the exploration and colonization of space.

From his first marriage from 1950 to 1966 with his fellow student in Swarthmore Sylvia Turlington he had a son and two daughters. In 1973, he married Renate Steffen, who then supported him in a cross-country gliding through the United States. With her he had a son.

O'Neill was a passionate pilot, both as a powered aircraft as well as gliders. In the 1960s, he underwent the selection tests NASA for astronauts than it was possible for candidates from civil life. O'Neill was not taken. He was also one of the first people who were buried in the universe itself.