As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments.

O'Neill pursued graduate studies at Cornell University with the help of an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship, and was awarded a PhD in physics in 1954.

[3][6] O'Neill posed the question during an extra seminar he gave to a few of his students: "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?

The Hampshire lecture was facilitated by O'Leary, by now an assistant professor of astronomy and science policy assessment at the institution; in 1976, he joined O'Neill's research group at Princeton.

If we begin to use it soon enough, and if we employ it wisely, at least five of the most serious problems now facing the world can be solved without recourse to repression: bringing every human being up to a living standard now enjoyed only by the most fortunate; protecting the biosphere from damage caused by transportation and industrial pollution; finding high quality living space for a world population that is doubling every 35 years; finding clean, practical energy sources; preventing overload of Earth's heat balance.He explored the possibilities of flying gliders inside a space colony, finding that the enormous volume could support atmospheric thermals.

[30] While he was waiting for his paper to be published, O'Neill organized a small two-day conference in May 1974 at Princeton to discuss the possibility of colonizing outer space.

[31] Among those who attended were Eric Drexler (at the time a freshman at MIT), scientist-astronaut Joe Allen (from Astronaut Group 6), Freeman Dyson, and science reporter Walter Sullivan.

[38][39] After the conference Carolyn Henson arranged a meeting between O'Neill and Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, then a leading contender for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination.

[43] In these studies, NASA developed detailed plans to establish bases on the Moon where space-suited workers would mine the mineral resources needed to build space colonies and solar power satellites.

[7][45] SSI received initial funding of almost $100,000 from private donors, and in early 1978 began to support basic research into technologies needed for space manufacturing and settlement.

[49] One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space.

[32][43][50] With financial assistance from SSI, later prototypes improved this to 1,800 g (18,000 m/s2), enough acceleration that a mass driver only 520 feet (160 m) long could launch material off the surface of the Moon.

[54] In 1978, Paul Werbos wrote for the L-5 newsletter, "no one expects Congress to commit us to O'Neill's concept of large-scale space habitats; people in NASA are almost paranoid about the public relations aspects of the idea".

[56] His plan had also been based on NASA's estimates for the flight rate and launch cost of the Space Shuttle, numbers that turned out to have been wildly optimistic.

[7] The commission, led by former NASA administrator Thomas Paine, proposed that the government commit to opening the inner Solar System for human settlement within 50 years.

Some technologies he described were space colonies, solar power satellites, anti-aging drugs, hydrogen-propelled cars, climate control, and underground magnetic trains.

New York Times reviewer John Noble Wilford found the book "imagination-stirring", but Charles Nicol thought the technologies described were unacceptably far-fetched.

[63] He argued that the United States had to develop six industries to compete: microengineering, robotics, genetic engineering, magnetic flight, family aircraft, and space science.

[51] He also thought that industrial development was suffering from short-sighted executives, self-interested unions, high taxes, and poor education of Americans.

[77] O'Neill's work informs the company Blue Origin founded by Jeff Bezos, which wants to build the infrastructure for future space colonization.

[81] One of them, Rick Tumlinson, describes three men as models for space advocacy: Wernher von Braun, Gerard K. O'Neill, and Carl Sagan.

O'Neill, with his grand scheme for settlement of the Solar System, emphasized moving ordinary people off the Earth "en masse".

[83] As of November, 2013, Gerard O'Neill's papers and work are now located in the archives at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

O'Neill visited HEPL in 1957 to discuss colliding beams with Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, then the director of that laboratory, and to seek collaborators.This facility, first proposed by Gerard K. O’Neill of Princeton, and built at the High-Energy Physics Lab by a Princeton-Stanford collaboration, is the grandfather of all electron colliding-beam machines.The Office of Naval Research, a very imaginative organization that was then the principal supporter of fundamental research in physics, funded the project to the tune of $800,000, thanks to the persuasive powers of Panofsky.The construction of the first serious colliding-beam system began there in 1958 ...He solved the tough technical problems of injecting a beam from an accelerator into the ring and keeping the betatron oscillations of the particles in the ring small, so that a substantial fraction of the injected particles were stably captured.Finally obtaining financial support in 1959 from the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission, O'Neill and his colleagues built two particle storage rings at Stanford University that used his high-vacuum technique and successfully demonstrated his colliding-beam theory.O'Neill: So then it went through a period of-let's see, that was 1970, and it was not until four more years that I was able to get an article published.O'Neill: ...

The L4 and L5 Lagrange libration points satisfy all these conditions.Therefore, in 1977, he sought and obtained private support for a new, non-profit corporation called the Space Studies Institute.

Located at Princeton University, the Space Studies Institute supports technical research on the science and engineering of living and working in space with grants made possible by members' contributions.At the end of the year and with legal matters attended to, SSI was given a strong head-start by two gifts from private donors, totaling nearly $100,000.An offshoot of this maglev research resulted in the concept of the mass driver by Professor Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton University in 1974.Someone in NASA apparently agreed, because in 1976 the space agency awarded a $50 000 contract to O'Neill and MIT professor Henry Kolm, part of which they used to build a coilgun.

Called the Mass Driver I, the 8-meter-long device had its public debut at Princeton, in the lobby of Chadwin Hall, where a conference on space colonies was taking place.

As Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee responsible for NASA's appropriations, I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy..."In 1983, he founded the Geostar Corporation which, based on O'Neill's own patent, developed the first private satellite navigational system to guide travel on earth.In 1987 ... the Geostar Corporation began providing limited one-way position determination service (Geostar System 1.0) from mobile subscribers, primarily in the long-distance trucking industry, using the French Argos transponders on U.S. meteorological satellites.The second was on GStar 2, launched in 1986; the subsystem operated properly in initial testing but failed less than two months after launch.Satellite News has learned that Iridium Inc., a Motorola affiliate, and Comsat Corp. have purchased the assets of ill-fated, Washington, D.C.-based Geostar Corp. at a bankruptcy auction proceeding late last week.At the last board meeting that he attended, one month before he succumbed to a seven-year bout with leukemia, Dr. Gerard O'Neill firmly stated, "Our mission is not complete until people are living and working in space.

"The conference was held again at Princeton the following year in cooperation with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and took place every other year from 1975 to 2001.The Magplane Pipeline Technology was demonstrated in Florida at IMC Global Inc., which has merged with Cargill Crop Nutrition to form The Mosaic Company [NOS-NY]—the world's leading producer of potash and phosphate crop nutrients.

In the demonstration, phosphate ore was successfully transported at speeds up to 65 kilometers/hour using the pipeline system that utilized rare earth (neodymium-iron-boron) permanent magnets on the capsules over a 275-metre long pipeline containing a linear synchronous motor winding.Books Articles Videos The Vision of Gerard K. O'Neil 30 min testimony about what ordinary people can do about space Nasa Ames présentation of his ideas on YouTube 5 min presenting space habitats and solar power satellites Other references