O’Neill colonies: A decades-long dream for settling space

But building these colonies is a challenge beyond any humans have accomplished so far in space, and Bezos acknowledged that. He referred to two “gates” in his announcement, which he clarified as challenges that humans need to overcome. The first, which his company Blue Origin and other space entrepreneurs have been tackling, is to reduce the cost and difficulty of getting to space at all. But the second involves using resources from space, rather than hauling them from Earth.Bezos isn’t alone in such thinking. Most of NASA’s long-term plans for the Moon and Mars involve rely on harvesting materials and manufacturing products locally , using lunar and martian regolith to build and repair structures. And in the shorter term, three of the dozen experiments NASA selected as the first to fly as part of the new lunar program — possibly even by the end of the year — are what NASA terms “ resource prospecting instruments .”That pairs well with O’Neill’s vision. These colonies are meant to use resources gathered from space, whether asteroids, the Moon, or even Mars. Doing so avoids the costly effort of heaving materials and goods out of Earth’s deep gravity well. That means they would be built using materials available cheaply in space. The humans and their attendant plants and animals would need to be carried from Earth. But raw materials like oxygen, nitrogen and aluminum are plentiful in the solar system, and mining for resources in space is a common theme across space settlement discussions. Because of their size, the colonies should be able to act as fully independent ecosystems, with plants to cycle air and water and resource cycles not so dissimilar from Earth.Humans are a long way from being able to launch anything like an O’Neill colony in the near future. But it’s somewhat telling that, after 50 years of space exploration and technological achievement, one of the modern leaders in private spaceflight is still espousing an idea from the first days of space exploration.