Free Space Settlement

bring space to life and life to space

"I want Americans to ... push out into the solar system not just to visit, but to stay." Barack Obama, U.S. President, in the 2015 State of the Union address to Congress

The Idea

Hundreds of millions of years ago there was life in the ocean, but no life on land. Today, there is life on Earth and very little life in space, just a few astronauts, plants and animals on the International Space Station and a few bacteria here and there on spacecraft. We can change that. In the 1970's Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill showed that we can build giant spacecraft in free space (in orbit, not on a planet or moon) and live in them. These space settlements could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades, and great wealth. In time, we may see millions of free space habitats in our solar system alone. Unlike earlier colonization events, no people will be oppressed and no ecosystems destroyed for the simple reason that there aren't any out there. Space settlement may become as important as ocean-based life's colonization of land half a billion years ago, perhaps even more so.

An Easier Way

As fantastic as Dr. O'Neill's work is, the space settlements envisioned are too big, too massive, and too far away to be a practical place to start. We now know how to massively reduce the size, mass, and shorten supply lines of early space settlements by:

To investigate this approach further:

Index

  • My space settlement writing, asteroid mining writing, space solar power (SSP) writing
  • My work as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center
  • Translations,
  • What you can do right now to move free space settlement forward
  • Space settlement themed music I've written and recorded
  • Online books +, Interviews, Awards, Images and video, Quotes, Links, College, Miscellaneous
  • My space blog
  • My home page
  • My online space settlement store
  • I co-founded and now co-manage the National Space Society Space Settlement Contest for students up to grade 12. In 2019 over 12,000 students participated. For the first 25 years of this contest it was a NASA Ames operation.

    Some of My Space Settlement Writing

    Some of My Asteroid Mining Writing, Plus

    Some of My Space Solar Power (SSP) Related Writing

    Translations of parts of this site

    Press

    Online Space Settlement Books +

    Images and Video