Gerard Kitchen O'NeillBorn 6 Feb 1927; died 27 Apr 1992 at age 65.Gerard Kitchen O'Neill was an American physicist who invented the colliding-beam storage ring which increased the energy output of particle accelerators by utilizing beams of particles moving through a ring-shaped chamber in opposite directions. He constructed two storage rings at Stanford in 1959, and the technique soon was adopted for numerous high-energy installations. As a leading advocate of space colonization, he wrote in his book The High Frontier (1978), that space colonies could be the ultimate solution to such terrestrial problems as pollution, overpopulation, and the energy shortage. He designed a 1-km long sealed cylindrical space station to be built primarily of processed lunar materials and using solar energy. It would be capable of sustaining a human colony indefinitely in space between the Earth and the Moon. |
