Gerard Kitchen O’Neill was an American physicist and space activist. He invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments. In the 1970s, he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space. His book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space inspired a generation of space exploration advocates.
About Gerard K. O’Neill in brief
Gerard Kitchen O’Neill was an American physicist and space activist. He invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments. In the 1970s, he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space. His book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space inspired a generation of space exploration advocates. He died of leukemia in 1992 at the age of 80. He is buried in Newburgh, New York, with his wife, Sylvia Turlington, and their three children, Roger, Janet, and Eleanor. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was honorably discharged in 1946. He studied physics and mathematics at Swarthmore College and Cornell University. He also held instrument certifications in both powered and sailplane flight and held the FAI Diamond Badge, a gliding award. He had a son, Edward, and two daughters, Janet and Eleanor, before their marriage ended in divorce in 1966. He married Renate Steffen the day after his first cross-country glider flight in April 1973, and they were married the next day. He held a conference on space manufacturing at Princeton in 1975. He proposed a futuristic idea for human settlement in space in his book The Colonization of Space: His first paper on the subject was published in 1956. He considered mass drivers critical for extracting the mineral resources of the Moon and asteroids. He wrote a book about his ideas in the early 1970s called The Colonisation of Space.
His ideas were not immediately accepted by the space community, but he went on to found the Space Studies Institute, an organization devoted to funding research into space manufacturing and colonization. He passed away at age 80 in New York in 1992. He leaves behind a wife and three children. His son Roger is a professor of physics at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His daughter Janet is an assistant professor of Physics at Princeton. He and his daughter Eleanor have two sons, Roger and Edward, who were born in 1978. He has a daughter, Eleanor, who was born in 1982. He lived with his second wife, Tasha Steffen, in the Newburgh area of Newburgh. He retired from Princeton in 1989. He later moved to California and died in 2010. He will be remembered for his work on particle accelerators and magnetic launchers. He worked on the first colliding beam physics experiment at Stanford University in 1965. He helped build the first CBX beam experiment on March 28, 1962. His work on the CBX experiment led to the creation of the High-Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford. His first book on space exploration, The Colonizing of Space, came out in 1986. He published his first paper about the idea of humans in space with a paper on The Colonizations of Space in The New York Review of Science and Technology. His last paper was on the topic of space travel in 1991.
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