| The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space | |
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The High Frontier first edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Gerard K. O'Neill |
| Cover artist | Rick Guidice |
| Country | United States |
| Subject(s) | Space colonization |
| Publisher | William Morrow and Company |
| Publication date | 1977 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 288 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0688031331 |
| OCLC Number | 2388134 |
| Dewey Decimal | 609/.99 |
| LC Classification | TL795.7 .O53 1977 |
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space is a 1976 book by Gerard K. O'Neill, a road map for what the United States might do in outer space after the Apollo program, the drive to place a man on the Moon. It envisions large manned habitats in the Earth-Moon system, especially near stable Lagrangian points. Three designs are proposed: Island one (a modified Bernal sphere), Island two (a Stanford torus), and Island 3, two O'Neill cylinders. These would be constructed using raw materials from the lunar surface launch into space using a mass driver and from Near-Earth asteroids. The habitats were to spin for simulated gravity and be illuminated and powered by the sun. Solar power satellites were proposed as a possible industry to support the habitats.
The book won the 1977 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.[1]
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The book featured impressions of life in outer space by a number of artists including Don Davis, Rick Guidice, and Chesley Bonestell.
Many of the concepts illustrated in The High Frontier can be seen in the early series of the anime franchise Mobile Suit Gundam, which depicts a world where humans have migrated into space colonies. The O'Neill cylinder colony design appears frequently, largely unchanged from its original concept.[2] The main space station in the popular TV series, Babylon 5, is an O'Neill cylinder.
O'Neil's designs for the colonies do not make efficient use of materials in terms of materials used per square meter of living area. For example to hold air at 40% of normal pressure (as O'Neil proposed) with a 5-fold safety margin (traditional in bridges, the most similar civil engineering items), the smallest design, Island one, a 1.6 Km ball, requires a steel shell with 2 metric tons of steel per square meter of shell. In contrast, a habitat made of 10 meter balls requires only 12 Kg per square meter. The habitable area is distributed in different ways in such different designs, but the difference in costs remains huge.
Science fiction writer Charles Stross wrote a critical essay with a similar title on the feasibility of interstellar space travel and making practical use of various moons and planets in our own Solar System: The High Frontier: Redux.[3] Stross's criticisms do not directly apply to the O'Neill's "High Frontier" document about colonizing interplanetary space.