The High Frontier: Gerard O’Neill’s Space Utopia

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "The High Frontier: Gerard O’Neill’s Space Utopia"

Podcast: New Books Network, Sighted Podcast ("Green Dreams" miniseries)
Date: September 13, 2025
Host: Gordon Caddick
Featured Guests: Frederick Sharman, Rick Tomlinson, Mary Jane Rubenstein

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Overview

The episode explores the legacy and impact of Gerard K. O’Neill’s radical vision for space colonization as a solution to terrestrial environmental and societal problems. Delving into O'Neill’s seminal work, "The High Frontier," the podcast examines how his ideas intersected with the environmental movement, counterculture, Cold War politics, and continue to influence today’s corporate space race led by figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Throughout, host Gordon Caddick and his guests critically assess O'Neill's utopian aspirations, their intellectual and cultural roots, political hurdles, and the potent blend of techno-optimism and environmental anxiety that still shape outer space dreams.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of Modern Environmentalism and O’Neill’s Thesis

• The episode opens with a historical recap of postwar environmentalism, highlighting Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" (1962) and the resulting environmental crisis awareness in the 1960s and 70s.

• The Club of Rome’s "Limits to Growth" (1972) introduced the concept of "biophysical limits"—the idea that Earth's resources are finite and expansion must be checked.

• O'Neill read and agreed with the diagnosis of this work, but instead of advocating for limits, he proposed space as the new frontier for sustainable human flourishing.

  "If you've read some of the prognoses about what's likely to happen on the surface of the Earth as energy, materials and so on get more and more in short supply and populations get higher, the pressures toward war are getting greater all the time here, and we're seeing that effect already."
  — Gerard K. O'Neill [08:20]

2. The Space Age Meets Environmentalism

• The space and environmental movements grew together, influencing concepts like “Spaceship Earth” and Gaia theory.

• Historians like Peder Anker document how ecologists helped imagine space colonies as closed-loop ecological systems, serving as models for planetary sustainability.

  “The environmental age grew up along the Space Age. When you look closely, you'll find that environmentalists and astronauts influenced each other in surprising ways.”
  — Gordon Caddick [09:13]

3. O’Neill’s Vision: Technical, Utopian, and Apolitical?

• O’Neill, a Princeton physicist, began his space colony research as a pedagogical exercise with students, proposing habitats at "Lagrange points" using lunar materials launched via "mass driver" slingshots—detailed step-by-step in "The High Frontier" (1977).

• His visionary cylinders would include artificial gravity, ideal environments, and could house thousands or eventually millions, sustained by solar power beamed to Earth to end the energy crisis.

  “For him, these environmental problems were more like technical kinks. This was Gerard O’Neill's true genius. Underlying environmental concerns of the day became a justification for his cosmic visions, not a threat.”
  — Gordon Caddick [19:08]

• O’Neill bypassed the ideological call for limits with an offer of limitless growth, seeing space as a continuation of humanity’s trajectory.

  “It's very logical, and it's exactly in keeping with all of human history up to the present time.”
  — Gerard K. O’Neill [32:40]

4. Entrée to Mainstream and (Counter)Culture

• O’Neill leveraged support from countercultural icons like Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, bridging the environmental vanguard and Silicon Valley techno-optimists.
• His ideas attracted both NASA scientists and grassroots enthusiasts, sparking the formation of the L5 Society and a universe of "Jerry's kids."

5. Political and Technical Obstacles

• Despite initial excitement, O’Neill failed to secure major government funding.

• Public skepticism, economic recession (e.g., 1970s oil crisis), and waning faith in large-scale government projects limited progress.

  “We’ve been saying that Gerard O’Neill had this post political solution to the environmental challenges of his day. But of course you cannot escape politics. And it was politics that eventually defeated Gerard O’Neill.”
  — Gordon Caddick [48:49]

• The technical shortcomings of the Space Shuttle program (high costs, safety issues culminating in the Challenger and Columbia disasters) dashed hopes for affordable, routine access to space.

  “We were abandoned. It was a lie. It was an aerospace industrial complex lie.”
  — Rick Tomlinson [51:27]

6. Legacy into the Corporate Space Age

• From the 1990s onwards, disillusioned enthusiasts (the "orphans of Apollo") lobbied for commercialization of space; their efforts bore fruit with the rise of SpaceX and Blue Origin and policy changes in the 2010s supporting private space resource extraction.

  “That all came from O’Neill's ideas.”
  — Rick Tomlinson [58:18]

• Today’s billionaires cite O’Neill as inspiration, often echoing his belief that Earth's salvation lies in cosmic expansion.

  “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans... Why not? That's the world I want my great grandchildren's great grandchildren to live in.”
  — Jeff Bezos [11:21]

7. Myth, Religion, and Colonial Rhetoric in Space Dreams

• Religious motifs and colonial narratives permeate both early government space programs and their commercial successors.

• Prof. Mary Jane Rubenstein contextualizes this through NASA's use of ritual, Genesis readings, and flag-planting—patterns tracing back to European conquest.

  “Insofar as this is the way that imperial religious traditions tend to conquer, to take new land, to me, it's no surprise at all that the Apollo missions read Genesis and put a vertical thing on the moon. This makes a lot of sense.”
  — Mary Jane Rubenstein [69:40]

8. Space Expansion as Capitalist and Environmental Escapism

• The tension between environmentalist warnings and endless capitalist expansion:

  • O’Neill and current advocates argue that space offers infinite resources and population growth without harming the Earth.
  • Critics see this as a continuation of problematic narratives of Manifest Destiny and economic escapism.

  “I think Gerard O’Neill wanted infinite growth, infinite profit, very comfortable living, and also a pristine, beautiful Earth of waterfalls and jungles and happy birds and happy trees. And incidentally, Jeff Bezos will say at any chance he can get very clearly, we can have both. We can have both.”
  — Mary Jane Rubenstein [73:55]

9. Hopeful Alternatives and the Power of Narrative

• The episode closes with speculative fiction and alternative narratives as resources for thinking beyond "colonize or perish" logics.

• Rubenstein suggests that imagining social transformation on Earth is not more far-fetched than building O'Neill cylinders in space.

  “If we're really thinking about impossible things, building a bunker on Mars, that is impossible. ... Maybe we could think about how to build a just society. Why is it more unthinkable to think about a just society than it is to build a bunker on Mars?”
  — Mary Jane Rubenstein [83:30]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• O’Neill on Limits vs. Expansion:
  “For him, limiting growth would be societal stagnation and stasis. O’Neill argues that we don't need to limit growth, we just need to find new resources to exploit.”
  [32:29]

• Sharman on Utopian Politics:
  "The most revealing moments in the High Frontier are when he talks about ... a kind of post-political reality ... Anybody who wants to live a different way can simply, you know, get a bunch of their friends together and go and make the kind of life that they want to live and live in it."
  [34:03]

• Public Skepticism:
  "No, the cash. ... They wasted as far as I'm concerned. ... All that money that went into going to the moon could have been used to feed poor Black people in Harlem and all over the place."
  — Harlem resident [44:05]

• Tomlinson on the 'Orphans of Apollo':
  “Here we are, we're getting into all of this, we're all getting excited, we're all like, oh my God, let's go. We're going. And then we find out that it's not true, it's not going to happen.”
  [55:13]

• Rubenstein on Colonial Ritual:
  "A myth is a sort of anchoring, orienting story that holds a group of people together by telling them, This is where you come from, this is who or what created you."
  [68:00]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | | ---------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 03:17 | Silent Spring and environmental crisis origins | | 06:07 | The dawn of the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day | | 08:20 | O’Neill on resource limits and “disaster environmentalism” | | 13:01 | O’Neill’s biography and influence | | 17:10 | O’Neill’s classroom “tabula rasa” and origins of space habitat ideas | | 24:45 | O'Neill's “critical path” for space colonization | | 27:32 | Description of O’Neill cylinders and habitat design | | 30:04 | Solar power satellites and population offloading | | 35:02 | O’Neill’s pitch to Congress and funding struggles | | 40:56 | NASA’s Space Shuttle and dashed expectations | | 43:34 | Public skepticism and opposition to space spending | | 46:25 | Senator Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Award” and congressional opposition| | 53:33 | Challenger, Columbia disasters; the failure of the Shuttle program | | 56:48 | Corporatization and privatization of space | | 58:18 | Policy changes enabling private space industry | | 64:12 | Mary Jane Rubenstein: religion, myth, and colonial symbolism | | 72:35 | Capitalism, environmentalism and infinite resource logic | | 73:55 | Environmental movement and space expansion—two strands | | 80:42 | Alternative narratives and speculative fiction for the future |

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Conclusion

"The High Frontier: Gerard O'Neill’s Space Utopia" offers a sweeping analysis of how 1970s environmental anxieties were transformed through high-tech optimism into a vision of limitless cosmic expansion. The story is at once a history lesson, a meditation on human myth-making, and a caution against repeating expansionist, colonial patterns under new banners.

By charting the arc from O’Neill’s classroom to today’s billionaire-led space race, and counterpointing it with religious critique and speculative fiction, the episode invites us to ask: What kind of future do we really want—and who gets to write the story?

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Transcript

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[Gerard K. O'Neill]

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[Gerard K. O'Neill]

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[Gordon Caddick]

Hello New Books Network. My name is Gordon Caddick and I have a very brief message before we get going. If you're hearing this, it's because you've discovered cited syndicated across the nbn. Now cited is a reference to academic citation. So I think this is a show that you're going to like. We have a whole new season and it is called Green Dreams. Green Dreams is telling stories about influential environmental theorists and exploring the impact that they have had on environmental movements, sometimes for good and other times for ill. You're going to find the episodes across the network, but if you like this, I really recommend that you subscribe to our main feed. That way you won't miss an episode. You can find that wherever you find your podcasts or [e-mail] that's C I T-E- dash podcast.com okay, on with the show. This is Sighted Podcast. I'm Gordon Caddick. Welcome to Green Dreams, a new sighted miniseries on Green Dreams. Each episode tells the Story of a radical environmental thinker and their dreams for our green future. Should we make that dream a reality? Or is it more of a nightmare? Let's begin. Green Dreams at the Beginning at the beginning of modern environmentalism Man's attitude toward.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and to destroy nature.

[Gordon Caddick]

This is from a CBS documentary from 1963 called the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson. Historians often point to the publication of Carson's Silent Spring as the birth of modern environmentalism.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

First printed on September 27, 1962, up to now 500,000 copies have been sold and Silent Spring has been called the most controversial book of the year.

[Gordon Caddick]

The book documents the environmental effects of chemicals, including pesticides like ddt. Carson suggests that we could one day have, well, silent springs because we've poisoned all the animals.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

We poison the caddisflies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain. And soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song.

[Gordon Caddick]

Silent Spring was a huge success because, well, the environmental conditions at the time were not great. The United States had been rapidly developing its post war industrial economy, but it did so with little regard for its environment.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Water is polluted by sewage, by wastes of industrial processes and by pesticides.

[Gordon Caddick]

In this Encyclopedia Britannica film from 1969, the presenter here visits a bunch of lakes near major U.S. cities and Lake after lake. What he finds is truly grim.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Lake Erie is almost biologically dead. That is desirable. Aquatic life can no longer survive here. The story is depressingly similar in many other parts of the country. New York's Hudson and East rivers are open sewers. The Cuyahoga river in Ohio is so loaded with the waste products of petroleum distillation that it is actually in danger of catching fire.

[Gordon Caddick]

In fact, it did. The Cuyahoga river caught fire at least 13 times, including once in the year 1969. Time magazine ran a major story about the blaze, and the story further catalyzed the growing environmental movement. Then change started to actually happen.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

The great question of the 70s is shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?

[Gordon Caddick]

In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed an executive order to create the Environmental Protection Agency. That same year also marked the first Earth Day and just a couple years later, the first global conference on the environment.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

The attention of the world is now.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Directed at us in Stockholm.

[Gordon Caddick]

It was the 1972 UN Conference of the Human Environment set in Stockholm, Sweden.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Let us therefore fulfill the justified expectations of the peoples of the world that this conference will lay a lasting foundation to ensure a better quality of life for all.

[Gordon Caddick]

By that point, the scene was set and we began racing towards our sustainable future. Okay, of course it didn't happen like that, but at least environmentalism had gone mainstream. But the environmentalism of this period was shaped by a very unique intellectual history. And if you don't already know intellectual history, that's sort of what we do here on sighted. We talk about the ideas that shape our world. And one way or another, pretty much every episode of Green Dreams is going to trace its way back to this early period of environmental thinking in the early 1970s. There was a bunch of different ideas coming together at the time to make a pretty strange sort of politics. Here's one idea that will prove especially important to this. Biophysical limits. In 1972, the very same year of that UN conference, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth. This was one of the earliest efforts to use computer modeling to understand environmental systems. The models suggested that our planet was reaching its finite ecological limits. The solution, well, it's right in the title, Limit Growth. Limits to Growth is one of the most read environmental books of all time. And the person that we're going to focus on in this episode read it carefully. And he agreed with its dire prognoses.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

If you've read some of the prognoses about what's likely to happen on the surface of the Earth as energy, materials and so on get more and more in short supply and populations get higher, the pressures toward war are getting greater all the time here, and we're seeing that effect already.

[Gordon Caddick]

This is Gerard K. O', Neill, a Princeton physicist. In that clip, he was echoing the rather apocalyptical flavor of the time. Some people have called it disaster environmentalism. Like, could resource wars lead to all out nuclear Armageddon? Many environmentalists blamed war, crime and even urban unrest on the Earth's biophysical limits. But as we'll learn on this episode, Gerard o' Neill offered a utopian answer to this potential environmental dystopia. He argued we should colonize space and then mine the moon for its resources. For solutions to earthly problems, look to the stars. That type of argument was actually rather common in the early 1970s, and it was common because of this interesting historical Coincidence. A coincidence that has had ripple effects through decades of environmental politics. The environmental age grew up along the Space Age. When you look closely, you'll find that environmentalists and astronauts influenced each other in surprising ways. This is an argument made by the historian Peder anker in his 2005 article, the Ecological Colonization of Space. Anker points to a number of examples like, for instance, many famous ecologists actually did research into space stations and even mocked up plans for lunar bases. These cosmic ecologies served as theoretical models for envisioning sustainable ecosystems back at home. And there are many other environmental examples. The concept of Spaceship Earth, Gaia theory, geodesic domes. These are all environmental concepts and technologies that were influenced by space research. So the space Age has indeed shaped environmental thinking and. And today, over 50 years after Gerard O', Neill, there may be more of this kind of cosmic ecological thinking than ever before. Because as climate change accelerates, more people are turning to Gerard o' Neill and his ideas, including people like Jeff Bezos.

[Narrator/Host]

Professor o' Neill was very formative for me, and it started I read the High Frontier in high school. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me.

[Gordon Caddick]

Bezos and other corporate space evangelists are reiterating ONeills green dream. In fact, they're offering an even more imaginative version of it.

[Narrator/Host]

The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have 1000 Einsteins and 1000 Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources from solar power and so on. Why not? That's the world I want my great grandchildren's great grandchildren to live in.

[Gordon Caddick]

Is that the world we want to live in? And more generally, was o' Neill right? Can we find solutions to earthly problems by looking to the stars? After the break, we begin Green dreams with episode one, the Green Cosmos. Gerard ONeills Post political space Utopia on Green Dreams I'm going to be giving these brief recommendations to some of our favorite environmental focused podcasts today. I thought I'd start with one of the oldest, the Green Majority. The Green Majority is Canada's longest running environmental newshour. They've been broadcasting since 2006 from CIUT FM in Toronto and syndicated across the country. They're actually coming up on their thousandth episode. Every week. The Green Majority combines the most important climate environmental justice news with voices from the grassroots. You'll hear book clubs and exclusive interviews with folks who have decades of climate movement experience. If you're looking for a pathway into the movement, well, this is a good place to start. Check them out on your podcast platform of choice [e-mail]. back to your regular scheduled programming. Mark Apollonio and I bring you the story of Gerard K. O' Neill and his green dream of settling the cosmos.

[Narrator/Host]

To me, he looks like Spock. The hair, definitely. Those pointy sideburns, the helmet bangs. But in reality, it's Spock who looks like him. Spock debuted the look in that original Star trek back in 1966, but O' Neill had been rocking it for years. I don't actually know if the makers of Star Trek copied o' Neill's haircut, but I do know they took inspiration from some of his other ideas and science fiction has been taking from him ever since. Because Gerard K. O' Neill is America's most influential space evangelist, or space huckster, depending on who you ask. In 1976, he wrote a book called the High Human Colonies in Space. The basic idea is right there in the title. We should establish new homes off of this planet of ours. It's an influential vision. So influential, many of today's corporate space evangelists refer to themselves as Jerry's Kids. Today, they're trying to finish what Gerard O' Neill started. Gerard O' Neill was born in New York in 1927. By all accounts, he was a rather precocious teenager. At 17 and near the end of the Second World War, O' Neill enlists with the US Navy and serves as a radar technician. He goes on to study math and physics and gets his PhD from Cornell at age 27. He's then hired by Princeton. Soon he's making a name for himself with groundbreaking work in high energy particle physics. According to the physicist Freeman Dyson, o' Neill's early writing laid down the path that high energy physics has followed for the next 36 years. If you read it now, you can see that almost everything in it is right.

[Gordon Caddick]

So Gerard o' Neill is a pioneering researcher, but he also has an adventurous streak. In 1966, NASA is running a program to recruit civilian scientists to become astronauts. O' Neill applies. He goes through months of training, and he's actually selected as a finalist. But he doesn't make the cut. So o' Neill never does become an astronaut. Still, he brings his lessons from NASA back to Princeton, and he uses them to shape his teaching there.

[Narrator/Host]

Problem is, back at Princeton, students were becoming increasingly hostile to the scientific establishment.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

I was teaching a course, a big freshman physics course, back in 1969.

[Narrator/Host]

This is from a 1975 episode of a PBS show called Roundtable.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

That era. It was a time when technologists were even more hated than they are at the present time. Now suddenly they're told that their profession is useless and that it's even counterproductive in the modern phrase.

[Gordon Caddick]

Space exploration had been generally popular in the early 1960s, but by 1965, about a third of Americans wanted to actually get decrease NASA's budget. And later there was of course a growing protest movement against the Vietnam war. So many student activists were beginning to see scientists like o' Neill as complicit with the US war machine.

[Narrator/Host]

But o' Neill gets an idea. What if he could pull together some of his best and brightest? And what if those students could show people that us scientists, we're still the good guys?

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

I said, let's perhaps have a little seminar for a few people who are maybe the top 1% of the class, you know, that are going too fast for the rest of the class, let's try to see if we can think of any large scale projects which could be a benefit to humanity and are within the technology that is imaginable now. So almost by chance, and I really can't tell you where it came, I picked the notion is it possible to build a habitat in space?

[Frederick Sharman]

He claims that he asked this sort of innocent question without a sense of what the answer might be or where it might lead them.

[Narrator/Host]

Meet Frederick Sharman, an architect and researcher who specializes in the history and theory of space habitat design. He teaches at Morgan State University in Baltimore and he'll be our guide through o' Neill's thinking.

[Frederick Sharman]

So given that industry feeds material good and material circumstances, given that civilization exists as organized human cultures and human systems, should we do it on the surface of planets? He asked the students to step back from received knowledge and really examine from first principles the terms of that question.

[Gordon Caddick]

O' Neill can read a room look at this question from the perspective of his students. Do you remember the context I laid out at the beginning of this episode? That a growing movement was starting to question the environmentally destructive growth model of post war America. Those sentiments must have been on the minds of these students. But their professor was telling them, we can come up with a fix to all this together, even if it means we have to pick up our industrial system and find a new home for it.

[Frederick Sharman]

If it's not on Earth because we're making too much pollution and we're running out of resources, could it be on the surface of other bodies like the moon or elsewhere in the solar system?

[Narrator/Host]

And so the students, they band together and at least according to o' Neill, they come up with an answer. They say, sure, we can create colonies in space, but we don't need to move to a new planet. We can actually create colonies in space, floating somewhere not too far from our Earth and its moon. Although Fred, he doesn't actually buy the story that it was the student's idea.

[Frederick Sharman]

I think he wanted to make a kind of tabula rasa. And he sort of uses the exercise that he put in front of his students as an alibi to do that. That's my own reading of that of his origin story.

[Gordon Caddick]

Whether this was self mythologizing or whether it did actually play out like o' Neill says it did, it honestly doesn't matter all that much. The upshot of this story is that o' Neill and his students offered a solution to the problems of science and technology. That solution was, well, more science and technology. Now, many environmentalists saw earthly problems as political problems. These were problems that required new social relations, maybe even new economic systems or new understandings of the natural world. But o' Neill didn't see it that way. For him, these environmental problems were more like technical kinks. This was Gerard o' Neill's true genius. Underlying environmental concerns of the day became a justification for his cosmic visions, not a threat. He convinced his students that we are indeed the good guys. And soon he'd convince many more people of that.

[Narrator/Host]

But amongst the scientific establishment, o' Neill was not getting a lot of buy in for his cosmic visions. He tries for years to get a paper on space settlement published in peer reviewed journals. No dice. So he doubles down on his approach of appealing to the environmental movement. And he turns to the Point foundation, an organization co founded and bankrolled by Stuart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth catalog. Brand had created the catalog to give you the complete information on everything. Yeah, everything. He said that he came up with a concept for the catalog when he was high on acid.

[Gordon Caddick]

So here's some of the pages. Here's making books. Here's direct use of the sun's energy.

[Narrator/Host]

This is Lloyd Kahn. He's an old Whole Earther. And in this YouTube video he posted, he's walking through the first issue of the Whole Earth catalog from the fall of 1968.

[Gordon Caddick]

Here's the Heathkit catalog, which included building your own computers. I mean, building computers. This was almost 50 years ago. Here was a book on science experiments for everyone. Here was the Edmonds scientific catalog, which I loved. So this came out and.

[Narrator/Host]

It just.

[Gordon Caddick]

Struck everybody as the most wonderful thing. The Whole Earthers weren't exactly the Sort of countercultural hippies that were big during those days. Actually they were sort of counter, countercultural, at least when it came to science and technology. These were early Silicon Valley techno optimists and they were especially optimistic about space exploration. In fact, the catalog got its very name from a famous NASA image of the Whole Earth. Brand had been pushing NASA to take the image and when they did, he put it on his very first issue of the catalog. What this is here, this is the first view of the Earth from space. That was the big deal about the whole Earth catalog.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

It was the first time we saw.

[Gordon Caddick]

The Earth from space where we saw this shimmering blue planet and got the idea of how fragile it was.

[Frederick Sharman]

Stuart Brand was gaining a lot of clout but also a lot of money from that project. And he was unsure what to do with it because he wanted to feed it back into investing in other cultural developments that would help define new possible human futures.

[Narrator/Host]

O' Neill didn't encounter Stewart Brand right away. His first contact was Michael Phillips, the guy helming Brand's Point Foundation. Michael Phillips and the Point foundation were looking for novel future oriented environmental projects.

[Frederick Sharman]

And one of the things that he invested in was to fund a conference at Princeton that I think took place in 1974 that Gerard O' Neill led. The public relations department is on the ball and doesn't miss a good story. So when they hear that local Princeton physics professor is studying how to design and build space colonies, they take that and run with it and start issuing press releases.

[Gordon Caddick]

This brand backed conference is a masterclass in primary. What better way for o' Neill to get cred with the anti establishment students than to get the backing of a countercultural heavyweight?

[Narrator/Host]

And that year, 1974, O' Neill finally gets a paper published in Physics Today, a flagship journal. And the journal puts a mock drawing of a space colony right on the COVID O' Neill also then gets the attention of NASA. The next year he leads a 10 week study program aimed at, and these are NASA's words, constructing a convincing picture of how people might permanently sustain life in space on a large scale.

[Gordon Caddick]

Everything's coming up Milhouse. The idea of space colonization has made it to the scientific mainstream and to the countercultural and environmental vanguard. They were all saying the same for solutions to earthly problems, look to the stars. But how could space settlement solve the Earth's environmental problems? And how would it even work?

[Narrator/Host]

O' Neill builds on that Physics Today article and writes a book, his most famous and probably the most influential book about space colonization ever. It's called The High Human Colonies in Space. It comes out in 1977. In the book. Oh. O' Neill doesn't just say, this is what space settlements should look like. He actually gives the step by step process for how we get there. It's called the critical path. In a nutshell, it goes like, first, we need a reusable spacecraft with heavy lift capacity, a kind of pickup truck that carries all kinds of industrial tools and materials off Earth. Earlier spacecraft couldn't carry that much stuff and could only ever be used once. So we'd need something new, a big space shuttle. Once we have that, we can go back and forth to the moon carrying the necessary equipment to build a base there. Then o' Neill proposes we build something called a mass driver, a device that can launch things from the surface of the moon into space.

[Gordon Caddick]

Are you saying that it's sort of like a big slingshot?

[Narrator/Host]

Not exactly. O' Neill describes it as a, quote, recirculating conveyor belt. So imagine a track with buckets. At regular intervals, the buckets whiz around the track at super high speeds, each carrying a payload. When they hit a certain point, they release the payload, firing it into space, but then continue back round the track to do it all over again. This mass drop will be used to shoot packages of moon dirt, also called lunar regolith, towards a Lagrange point. That's a point in space where the gravitational forces of the Earth and Moon are in equilibrium. You put something in the Lagrange point, it stays there.

[Gordon Caddick]

So it, like, just floats in space.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah, sort of. Imagine a triangle with the Earth and moon at two corners. The third corner is a Lagrange point. A big object placed there will orbit around that point, but the point itself stays fixed relative to the Earth and Moon. There are other kinds of Lagrange points that work differently, but that's the way Lagrange point five works, which is why L5 is O' Neill's favorite for kicking off space settlement. So, yeah, at L5, you catch that moon dirt, and it is full of all the useful materials you'll need to create a new cosmic civilization.

[Gordon Caddick]

Moonshees, of course, that. That's what you need.

[Narrator/Host]

Sure. And among other things, aluminum and titanium, some of the building blocks of the first space habitat. Then o' Neill proposes we build permanent structures there made up of giant cylinders. On that episode of PBS's Roundtable in 1975, O' Neill describes two counter rotating cylinders.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

This is a cylinder rotating in space. It's about 1,000 yards long and perhaps 200 in diameter. And there are two of them. There's one like this, and there's another one which is down below the picture and connected by these very thin structures that are shown here, these thin white.

[Narrator/Host]

Lines in the cylinders. He claims you could actually create a new cosmic civilization with all the creature comforts of our Earth back home.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

There are window areas. There are three of them here. And there are land areas. It contains an atmosphere, a breathable atmosphere, mainly of oxygen.

[Narrator/Host]

And it would have artificial gravity as.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

It rotates, rotates at the right speed so that it makes one Earth normal gravity on the inside. In the land area, you would have the same weight that we have now.

[Narrator/Host]

O' Neill works with artists to illustrate his vision. They create some of the most idyllic landscapes you've ever seen, populated with happy people and young families. But these landscapes are in a tube. They literally curve up. The paintings are stunning.

[Frederick Sharman]

There's this really interesting to me mix of this normative architecture and urbanism and this really radically distorted geometry. We're used to things falling away at the horizon. We're used to a sky over our heads that is a void, right? We're looking up and we're looking light years, you know, into space and millions of years into the past in some cases. But here you'd look up and you'd see more built stuff, more of your own world. You'd see really the limits of your.

[Gordon Caddick]

Own world.

[Frederick Sharman]

Which is a really interesting thing that even some psychologists and social scientists were a little nervous about. Would that make people upset? Would that be destabilizing? Would it be too weird to not be able to see infinity?

[Narrator/Host]

Despite those social scientists and their nerves, o' Neill promises paradise. These cylinders would be filled with mountains and streams, grass and trees. They'd be populated with animals from Earth. They'd have perfect weather and spacious homes. Plus, o' Neill tells sci fi writer Isaac Asimov, the cylinders would even have mountain climbing.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

The mountain climbing would be fun, by the way. You notice as you get higher, the G forces go down. The gravity is less. The gravity is less.

[Narrator/Host]

So it becomes easier and easier to.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Climb the higher you go.

[Gordon Caddick]

You might be wondering, what does any of this have to do with the Earth's environmental problems? Well, o' Neill proposes building solar power stations in space. It's much more effective to capture solar energy in space than on Earth, because in space there's no atmosphere or nighttime to get in the way. This is oneills great environmental trump card. He proposes that this space colony beam solar energy back down to Earth. This could basically replace fossil fuel production and all of its negative environmental effects. So energy crisis over, environmental crisis also mostly over. Plus, he says we could reduce the planet's supposed population pressures because millions of people could emigrate from Earth to the colonies and only go back once in a while for their holidays.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

You do suggest that we would go only to the Earth for recreational purposes, let it restore itself. Well, I'm very fond of the Earth, and I think that the best thing we can do is to put the industry somewhere else.

[Gordon Caddick]

The High Frontier is o' Neill's answer to limits to growth. O' Neill agreed with the report's prognosis, but he didn't agree with its prescriptions.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra Value.

[Narrator/Host]

Meal includes a hash brown and a.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Small coffee for just $5 only at McDonald's for a limited time.

[Narrator/Host]

Prices and participation may vary.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Recently we asked some people about sharing.

[Narrator/Host]

Their New York Times accounts.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

My name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New.

[Gordon Caddick]

York Times, but my husband isn't and it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections. Thank you Dana. We heard you introducing the New York.

[Frederick Sharman]

Times Family Subscription one subscription, up to.

[Gordon Caddick]

Four separate logins for anyone in your life.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Find out [e-mail] family Ford was built.

[Narrator/Host]

On the belief that the world doesn't get to decide what you're capable of. You do. So ask yourself, can you or can't you? Can you load up a Ford F150 and build your dream with sweat and steel? Can you chase thrills and conquer curves in a Mustang? Can you take a Bronco to where the map ends and adventure begins? Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right. Ready, set forward.

[Gordon Caddick]

For him, limiting growth would be societal stagnation and stasis. O' Neill argues that we don't need to limit growth, we just need to find new resources to exploit.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

It's very logical, and it's exactly in keeping with all of human history up to the present time.

[Gordon Caddick]

This tape is from a PBS miniseries from the 1980s called the Next Civilization.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Of course, in space, the real long term resources are abundant, free, clean energy from the sun and the material resources in space.

[Gordon Caddick]

But o' Neill stays away from the question of how these resources ought to be managed. He actually has no manifesto for a new political order. He only proposes experimentation.

[Narrator/Host]

He writes in space, where free solar Energy and optimum farming conditions will be available to every community, no matter how small. It will be possible for special interest groups to do their own thing and build small worlds of their own. We can imagine a community of as few as some hundreds of people sharing a passion for a novel system of government, or for music, or for one of the visual arts or nudism.

[Gordon Caddick]

There's that countercultural Stewart brand style, do it yourself ethos again. Some of these communities will succeed, some will fail, but in the eyes of o', Neill, they'd be pioneers. Even though o' Neill bills himself as ambivalent about his preferred political system, Fred Sharman tells us there's definitely a politics there.

[Frederick Sharman]

Well, I think there are a lot of libertarian strands in o' Neill's thought. The most revealing moments in the High Frontier are when he talks about how the creation of these new worlds could create a kind of post political reality that the capability to build a new world from scratch means for him, effectively, hypothetically, the end of conflict, the end of political conflict. Anybody who wants to live a different way can simply, you know, get a bunch of their friends together and go and make the kind of life that they want to live and live in it.

[Gordon Caddick]

There's a rather glaring irony to this post political vision. Perhaps you've picked up on it already. O' Neill really, really needs the US government because before he can get his hands on all that moon cheese, he's going to need oodles of cheddar.

[Narrator/Host]

Bad jokes aside. Yeah. O' Neill is going to need billions of dollars in government investment. So in 1975, O' Neill goes to Washington. He appears before a congressional subcommittee on space science. He needs huge sums of money to build a first 10,000 person space habitat, which he calls Island One. He doesn't have a hard and fast budget. Instead, he provides several preliminary estimates ranging from 33 to $200 billion. At the time, Nassau's entire budget is just $3.6 billion. O' Neill says he's not looking for a handout. He tells the committee the money would be paid back in about 25 years by the sale of solar space energy beamed down to Earth. And he promises space solar power will deliver energy independence. America will no longer depend on risky Middle Eastern oil producers.

[Frederick Sharman]

So there's a direct rebuke to what was really present in Everybody's mind in 1975, which is the oil crisis and energy crisis of 1972. 73. Energy was very obviously not going to keep getting cheaper indefinitely, at least on the surface of a planet. So it was a real kind of come to Jesus moment for a lot of folks. And to have a way out from under those constraints, o' Neill thought, was a pretty good thing to present to Congress at that at this point in time.

[Narrator/Host]

O' Neill's argument is well received. Subcommittee chairman Don Fuqua responds to O' Neill's testimony with this.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Thank you, Dr. O'. Neill. We appreciate your very mind stretching presentation this morning. And I say that with kindness.

[Narrator/Host]

This is cited producer Jay Coburn reading the part of Chairman Fuqua.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

It's something that will happen. And even though it kind of boggles the mind at the present time, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. I hope I live to see it.

[Narrator/Host]

But despite Fuqua's kind words, Congress does not give o' Neill the money he was looking for. O' Neill tries once more a year later, but again, no dice.

[Gordon Caddick]

It's his first major setback. But O' Neill doesn't get sour. He gets organized. In 1975, some of his biggest fans start a grassroots group called the L5 Society that's named after O' Neill's preferred spot to kick off space settlement Lagrange.5. So now we have the beginnings of a real movement and it's time for their coming out party.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Would you welcome please Gerard K. O'. Neill.

[Narrator/Host]

And what better way to celebrate than with the king of late night Johnny Carson?

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

What you are saying is eventually you'd send up a space shuttle, I assume, which we are going to have very soon or will have. That's absolutely right. Send up construction workers and fabricate probably something a Skylab or some kind of space station with a small number of people. And the colony actually would have to be built why it's. While it's in space, right? Yes, that's right, Johnny. And the fundamental.

[Narrator/Host]

And over at CBS, Dan Rather profiles O' Neal in the movement on the show 60 Minutes.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

O' Neill does have a solid reputation as a high energy physicist. He is the kind of person NASA listens to. Not only listens to, but fun.

[Gordon Caddick]

Well, this is a proposed habitat.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

This was designed by a man named.

[Gordon Caddick]

Gerard o' Neill from Princeton, and it could house as many as 10,000 people comfortably.

[Narrator/Host]

And in 1976, O' Neill has a feature interview in Penthouse magazine, which you.

[Gordon Caddick]

Only read for the Astronomy articles, of course.

[Narrator/Host]

Widely respected for its coverage of the sciences generally. Gord, Gerard o' Neill is telling anybody who would listen, we can make space colonization a reality and it won't even take that long, about a decade.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

You suggest that if we start now on Model 1, it can be ready by 1988. I think that's true.

[Gordon Caddick]

The media blitz galvanizes support. An influx of donations allows o' Neill to create his own research and education, not for profit. The Space Studies Institute and the grassroots L5 society is really hitting its stride.

[Rick Tomlinson]

And in the organization Institute, we were all. In a sense we would be today you would call us makers.

[Narrator/Host]

This is Rick Tomlinson. He first heard about O' Neill in the late 70s. He was at a talk by a rather famous Harvard psychologist and psychedelic guru, Timothy Leary.

[Rick Tomlinson]

Just to be straight up with it, I was stoned out of my mind sitting on the floor of a student union at a university in East Texas. And his lecture was about this incredible idea that this guy named Gerard K. O' Neill had had about building what they used to call, we don't use the word anymore, space colonies. And as a nerd, science fiction freak person looking for what my world was going to be, what my purpose was going to be, I latched onto it and it began to change my life.

[Narrator/Host]

Soon after Tomlinson joined the L5 Society, it was a dream come true. He became a bona fide operative in oneills movement, one that was clearly growing.

[Rick Tomlinson]

So we were participants. We weren't just passive members. We weren't pay your money, get your magazine people. We were actually engaged. Every couple of years we would gather together with other people like ourselves and listen to presentations that were. A lot of them were pretty dry. You know, how to make a brick out of moon dirt, you know, that kind of stuff. But we saw them as all within the context of. And no pun, I'm not trying to tie these together the wrong way, but paving the critical path to the high frontier.

[Gordon Caddick]

But for o' Neill and for all his space cadets, they know there's a missing link. We mentioned it earlier. The workhorse spacecraft, NASA's Space Shuttle program.

[Narrator/Host]

Had officially kicked off under Richard Nixon in 1972. It might seem like the shuttle was almost purpose built for o'. Neill. It wasn't. NASA just really needed their own pickup truck of the skies for putting satellites in space and that kind of thing. But the o' Neillians hoped that one day they'd be using it too.

[Gordon Caddick]

And on 6-30-19, in 1977, NASA is finally ready to show off their new pickup truck. It's scheduled to take off from Edwards Air Force Base in California. Hundreds gather as the shuttle is ferried out from its hangar. The band swells and the onlookers chill.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Christened the Enterprise, the Shuttle orbiter is our first reusable spaceship able to fly a mission beyond Earth, return, land, and then be launched over and over again, achieving cost reductions through its round trip use. And we are airborne. That's good, Fitz.

[Gordon Caddick]

When NASA tests out the Enterprise in the Mojave Desert, it's a big win for the o'. Neillians. Gerard o' Neill was a little like that shuttle. It all happened so fast. His rise to becoming the leading figure of space exploration. That story took place over just three years, from the first Stewart brand backed conference in 1974 to the shuttle test in 1977. In those years, O' Neill gained scientific legitimacy, started to work with Nassau, wrote a popular book, had national media flock to him, earned countercultural clout and environmental bona fides, and developed a grassroots movement committed to advancing his ideas. Shuttles take off fast, but as we know, they can explode fast too.

[Narrator/Host]

There were warning signs throughout all of this. One of them was popular support. I want to take us back a few years in time to 1969, the year of the moon landing. That event legitimized the Apollo mission, but even then there were serious doubts about colonizing the cosmos. We're living in economic colonialism based on.

[Gordon Caddick]

Money, where the greedy are exploiting the needy.

[Narrator/Host]

This is the Reverend Jesse Jackson speaking in Harlem. The year of the moon landing. Well, we are more concerned about the moon than men. Somebody better wake up.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

There was a large crowd gathered in Harlem this afternoon for some of the reaction there. Correspondent Bill Plant.

[Narrator/Host]

The tape you're hearing is from a 2021 documentary called Summer of Soul. It's about that 1969 festival.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

What are your thoughts?

[Narrator/Host]

Well, you know, like me, I couldn't care less.

[Gordon Caddick]

No, the cast is.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

This means more to you than that?

[Gordon Caddick]

Yeah, much more cash they wasted as far as I'm concerned.

[Narrator/Host]

And getting to the moon could have been used to feed poor black people.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

In Harlem and all over the place.

[Frederick Sharman]

All over this country.

[Narrator/Host]

The reporters at that music festival, they captured a feeling at the time, not the feelings of the cosmic utopians and scientific triumphalists you normally saw on tv. They captured the unvarnished feelings of a disaffected American public. Never mind the moon.

[Gordon Caddick]

Let's get some of that cash in.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Holler better change and you might be the President of the United States one day.

[Gordon Caddick]

Listen, all you young people doing.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

A.

[Narrator/Host]

Rat done bit my sister Nell.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

With Whitey on the moon, her face.

[Narrator/Host]

And arms began to swell. And Whitey's on the moon. If you look closely at the polling data. Gil Scott Heron and the folks in Harlem weren't alone. There was quite a bit of public skepticism. In the eyes of many, the space program just wasn't worth the cost. Especially because in 1969, a minor recession was underway. How come I ain't got no money here? White is on the moon. During the vast majority of the Apollo mission, polls tell us most Americans, sometimes as high as 65%, did not think Apollo was worth the money. There was a small exception. Around the 1969 moon landing, approval rates broke 50% only briefly, but for most of this period, the public felt like the program just wasn't worth the cost. I think I'll send these doctor bills.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Air mail special.

[Gordon Caddick]

To whitey on the moon. So that's the underlying opposition to NASA. And it's an opposition that would only grow in the years to come because economic conditions got worse. There was, of course, that oil embargo of 1973. Remember, O' Neill promised Congress that he could end US dependence on oil from the Middle east if they funded his program. But Congress didn't actually. They began slashing NASA's budget. Money for the agency reached a high of nearly 4.5% of the national budget in 1966. But by the mid-70s, it was cut to less than 1%. So O' Neill was seriously on the back foot.

[Narrator/Host]

Then another blow. It came from a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire. Proxmire is famous for going after unnecessary spending. He's so absorbed in this pursuit, he invents an ironic prize, the Golden Fleece Award. He hands it out to boondoggles, or at least what he thinks are boondoggles. So in 1977, Proxmire is watching CBS one evening and he catches an interesting story.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

These are some of the people who would like to see a space colony in your future. They call themselves the L5 Society.

[Narrator/Host]

That same Dan Rather story we clipped earlier, that's the one Proxmire happens to see.

[Frederick Sharman]

And he had a seat on a budgetary committee that, like senators do, controlled the purse strings, and especially in this case, the purse strings of NASA. So this is a post Apollo moment in which the budgets of NASA were already shrinking. The big grand project of beating the Soviets to the moon had been accomplished. And of course, things were only going to go downhill from there. But I think people really hadn't quite realized that on a fundamental level yet. There's almost this Wile E. Coyote moment. In the late 1970s and into the 80s, in a lot of ways in culture where people hadn't realized that the bill was due, that certain types of growth were not going to continue indefinitely. They hadn't realized that they had run off the cliff yet. Myself as a child of the 80s, I was born in 1977. I absorbed like a lot of people, ideas about space futures and ideas about big science continuing indefinitely into the 80s, 90s. And of course everybody's excited about the turn of the millennium. The way that all kinds of science fiction ideas were going to become true. That was embedded in the DNA and the cultural DNA of the 1980s in so many ways. And I think it's really people like Proxmire who said, no, we're not going to do that.

[Narrator/Host]

And Proxmire, he goes on to write a letter to the L5 Society. He writes, quote, I have concluded that any funds spent on space colonization is simply a waste. Given the massive problems remaining to be solved here on Earth. The administrator of NASA has informed me that their planning for the foreseeable future is not directed at permanent settlements of people in space.

[Gordon Caddick]

We've been saying that Gerard o' Neill had this post political solution to the environmental challenges of his day. But of course you cannot escape politics. And it was politics that eventually defeated Gerard o'. Neill. Think about it. The dwindling support for space exploration. Political. O' Neill couldn't mobilize the kind of mass support that he needed. The 1973 oil crisis, also political. It wasn't like the world had reached peak oil or something. This was an embargo. An embargo that was launched in response to the Yom Kippur War. And we haven't even mentioned the broader ideological shift that is going on in the background here. If you think about the space age, it really takes off throughout Kennedy era Cold War liberalism. This is a period where post war Keynesianism has this faith that government investment could fuel the economy and defeat the Soviets. That is really the thinking that turbocharges the space race. But our story ends in the cultural and economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter era. This is an era that ushered in a shift to pared back neoliberal forms of governance. That whole ideological transformation that is definitely political. So in the end it was just ordinary cost cutting politics that did it. The senator from Wisconsin said no. And that was basically that for the post political dreams of Gerardo Neil o'.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Neill.

[Narrator/Host]

O' Neill has a technical setback too, not just the political one. The space shuttle program is still going strong. So that offers a glimmer of hope to resurrect o' Neill's vision. But it's a glimmer that will soon go dark.

[Rick Tomlinson]

We were being told there was this new vehicle system coming called the Space Shuttle and it was going to fly 55, zero times a year and it was going to be $100 a pound to go to space again.

[Narrator/Host]

This is Rick Tomlinson, an early member of the L5 Society, the grassroots group that formed around ONeills ideas.

[Rick Tomlinson]

And with that being held out in front of us and looking at everything else that was going on, that's why it shows up frankly, so heavily in the High Frontier book. And it didn't turn out that way.

[Frederick Sharman]

Oh, 100%, yeah. I mean, the space shuttle was designed to be a pickup truck to space and it ended up not fulfilling any of those promises.

[Rick Tomlinson]

We were abandoned. It was a lie. It was an aerospace industrial complex lie. The shuttle flew maybe I think five times in one year at its peak, and it established a baseline price of roughly $10,000 a pound.

[Frederick Sharman]

It wasn't as reusable, it wasn't as cheap, it wasn't as versatile, and it wasn't as safe as a pickup truck.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

3, 2, 1, and lift off. Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower.

[Narrator/Host]

The Challenger space shuttle launches on a brilliantly clear morning, January 28, 1986. But it's unusually cold for Florida.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Throttling up three engines now at 104% challenger go at throttle up.

[Narrator/Host]

The shuttle races skywards with its its giant tail of flames and gas. But suddenly it seems to split in two different directions.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

[Narrator/Host]

The control room and the flight director are dead silent for 35 excruciating second, then this.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. Flight director confirms that we are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point.

[Narrator/Host]

The explosion was caused by gases escaping through through improper seals in a rocket booster. The bad seals were caused by the cold weather. All seven crew members were killed. Seventeen years later, tragedy strikes again. In 2003, the Columbia space shuttle explodes on reentry. Another seven astronauts are lost.

[Gordon Caddick]

The U.S. government ends the shuttle program in 2011. So it's clear for now we're not going down O' Neill's critical path.

[Narrator/Host]

Rick Tomlinson through all of this, his dedication to the cause never wavered. He met O' Neill in the early 80s and was hired to work with him at the Space Studies Institute at Princeton. But as the 80s wore on, the O' Neillian hype of the late 70s wouldn't return. He keeps writing books and researching and he actually develops some novel technologies and starts companies around them. One is a kind of precursor to gps. Another is a type of ultra fast train. But in this era, he mostly fades from the public eye. Then in 1992, O' Neill's life is cut short. He dies of leukemia at the age of 65. In 97, O' Neil's ashes and those of about two dozen other notable people, including star. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Timothy Leary are launched into space where they orbit the Earth for five years before re entering the atmosphere. It was the world's first private memorial. Spaceflight, o' Neill's death and the failure of the shuttle program. For people like Rick Tomlinson, it caused something of an identity crisis. He's long been one of Jerry's kids, also a child child of Apollo, but now he's an orphan.

[Rick Tomlinson]

The orphans of Apollo speaks to the fact that there was a generation of us that were raised during that program watching these astronauts. At the same time, you've got science fiction you're watching, you know, above and beyond everything else, Star Trek. In the mind of a teenager or a child, those things get weaved together. It's like, oh, we're doing this, so of course that's going to happen. So here we are, we're getting into all of this, we're all getting excited, we're all like, oh my God, let's go. We're going. And then we find out that it's not true, it's not going to happen.

[Narrator/Host]

The way Tomlinson interprets this is that it's a failure of the US government and a failure of the aerospace industry. He positions himself and the other o' Neillians as populist outsiders who are being snubbed by the establishment.

[Rick Tomlinson]

And the aerospace establishment was not welcoming us in. They were using us to get support for the space program, but they were not letting us in. We were not welcome.

[Frederick Sharman]

The fan base got cranky and like fan bases do, they start to critique the institutions that they love. The popular interest and enthusiasm for NASA on the part of these very highly educated, highly invested people with maybe too much time on their hands started to wane and they started to turn against the institutions and the canon that they loved. But I would say that mainstream big government investment in science is something that a lot of people got really cynical about.

[Narrator/Host]

For the orphans of Apollo. What this cynicism means is they want government out of the way. They still need public money, but they want more private input, access and competition. This requires a shift in policy.

[Gordon Caddick]

In 2010, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Kennedy Space Center. This is a speech that would transform the US space program.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

So today I'd like to talk about the next chapter in this story.

[Gordon Caddick]

In this speech, the President announces some new funding initiatives. But the big, big piece of news here. We will work with a growing array.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable.

[Gordon Caddick]

This means that the government is going to contract with private companies to travel into space. No more big government shuttle programs. Elon Musk is there in the audience watching all this. And I bet he's clapping along to the President's speech because he knows things are about to get good for SpaceX.

[Rick Tomlinson]

Now, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

With the private sector in this way. I disagree.

[Gordon Caddick]

Later, President Obama signed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness act. That's in 2015. The act allows private companies to extract space resources and commercialize them. That 2015 policy change is really the starting gun to today's corporate space race.

[Rick Tomlinson]

That all came from ONeills ideas.

[Narrator/Host]

Rick Tomlinson and the other O' Neillians had been pushing for this for a long time.

[Rick Tomlinson]

I do want to point out that it was those orphans that made all of this happen. Right? We worked it. I sat in front of a committee in Congress and called for commercial transportation to and from the space station in 1995, and that all expansion of the space station would be done privately. And it wasn't like I was some genius. I was speaking for the movement. I was speaking for the cause.

[Gordon Caddick]

It's been almost a half century since the publication of the High Frontier, but Gerard o' Neill's book is still influencing people. Perhaps it's more influential than ever because you look around and you see Jerry's kids everywhere. But Fred Charman tells us they've taken things in a more anti government direction.

[Frederick Sharman]

And we can see that antagonism manifests today in so many different ways. We've heard a lot of people talk about how NASA is just one of many large, cumbersome, bureaucratic government institutions that needs to be reformed at best, you know, taken apart and stripped for parts at worst. And that's part of the, you know, the active political agenda that we're seeing play out right here in early 2025. That impulse, I think we could trace it back to a moment in the 1980s when these when space science and space exploration met its own limits to growth.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Foreign.

[Gordon Caddick]

Was produced by Mark Apollonio and myself, Gordon Caddick, with additional editing from A.C. rowe.

[Narrator/Host]

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[Gordon Caddick]

O' Neill couldn't make it all the way down his critical path, but today Jeff Bezos promises that he can. O' Neillianism is having something of a resurgence, so now we shift towards today's new corporate space race. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and other billionaires are taking us somewhere new. New space, they call it. But is it the same old story? Climate change is not funny. The extinction crisis isn't funny either, and the collapse of human civilization certainly isn't funny. But somehow the Crazy Town podcast finds a way to find some laughs. Join Jason, Rob, and Usher to laugh about our climate crisis, but also to find new ways to live differently on this planet. One of the reasons why I'm so excited to recommend this podcast is they have this series called False Prophets and it's kind of similar to Green Dreams, but they profile different people. They have an episode on Stewart Brand and you can Ecomodernism. Brand was kind of like the Forrest Gump of our season. He played a role in basically every episode, but he was kind of in the background. We didn't have a dedicated episode on him, so I recommend you check out episode 71 of Crazy Town. That's on Stewart Brand and Eco Modernism. I will link it in the show notes. Okay, back to our regular scheduled programming. Let's talk about the colonial language of o' Neill and the other space evangelists. Timothy Leary once even called o' Neill The Christopher Columbus of the space frontier movement. Now, we did learn that folks like Rick Tomlinson don't use that kind of language anymore, but we'll soon see that many others in the movement still do. And this is not just unfortunate wording. It's a feature, not a bug. Because the very same story that we told ourselves to justify the colonization of the Americas is the same story that we're now using to justify the colonization of space. At least that's the argument that Professor Mary Jane Rubinstein makes in her book, the Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. Yes, religion. Mary Jane takes a religious studies approach to understanding the narrative of the space exploration movement. I called her up to learn a little bit more about these religious narratives and also to ask her whether there might be alternative narratives that we can tell ourselves. We began, though, with the Apollo program and its religious symbology, because when I was reading Mary Jane's book, I learned that NASA had actually had a committee on symbolic activities.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Yeah, isn't that bonkers? They had a whole, like, ritual committee to figure out what the symbolic activities would be, particularly for the lunar landing. And so the two I think, that are most significant here are that the Apollo 11 mission, as they orbited the moon and saw the lunar sunrise, were told to say something significant. And the poor astronauts, I mean, can you imagine? Like, they're not trained in, you know, rituals, but they were like, what are we supposed to do when we say, what kind of special thing are we supposed to say? The crew of Apollo 8 ended up as they saw the lunar sunrise, saying, and for those of you watching at home, and there were a lot of people watching at home because it was Christmas Eve, so that they could be relatively assured that all Americans were at home with the fire going, watching their televisions, watching this strange trapezoid on their television that everybody told them was the moon.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

We are lunar sunrise. And for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth, and the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

And they go on to recite the whole first chapter of Genesis.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

You know, I wish that I'd been around back then to know how it hit. I have to say, whenever I introduce this idea to my students, they are baffled. They're like, they read Genesis, these, you know, these, like, military scientist, astronaut, you know, post punk, awesome. People were reading Genesis like, what, the Bible in space? Why is the Bible in space? And I think that there are a lot of ways we can talk about why this was the reading that they judged to be so appropriate. One of them has to do, of course, with sticking it to the atheist Soviets, right, And marking a kind of godly American triumph over them. Another, I think, is just a sort of lack of imagination. It's just a really easy place to go. But. So that was the first big ritual. And then the other, of course, was the planting of the flag on the moon. The ritual committee there was trying to figure out what they should leave, what kind of marker they should leave on the moon. And of course, since this was a deeply international venture, right, the US relied on scientists from all kinds of nations. Some people suggested, why not fly a UN flag to say that this is done on behalf of all human. And since Neil Armstrong himself was going to say this was some small step by a man that was undertaken on behalf of all humanity, why not put a UN flag up? But the committee decided that no, no, what it needed was some kind of symbol that insisted that America had done this thing on behalf of all humanity. And of course, that was gonna be an American flag. And that's how we got there very.

[Gordon Caddick]

Much sounds like the Catholic Church I grew up in. Lots of concern over the right symbology.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Oh, absolutely. Especially about what you read and where you put the stick. I mean, these are very. These are. I don't mean to belittle, you know, high liturgical practice. I have. I have myself carried large sticks in all sorts of church services. And like, you gotta be very precise about what you're carrying and where you put it. But if you look back at the history of imperial religions and the way that they go about taking over new land, what you find over and over again, and this obtains, particularly in the Christian imperial tradition, what you find over and over again is that the conquerors do two things. They one, recite their creation story and they two, put a vertical thing in the ground. These are two ways to claim territory. Why to these two things? One, because what myth is it? Doesn't. Myth doesn't mean that the thing is wrong. A myth is a sort of anchoring, orienting story that holds a group of people together by telling them, this is where you come from, this is who or what created you. So the retelling of a creation myth in the act of taking over new territory sort of repeats that act of creation. It does the recreation, it takes the formerly undifferentiated kind of wild territory and turns it into a world that belongs to the people who have taken it. And the installation of the pole does a similar thing. Here is where we are centering our new little world on this vertical structure. Vertical structures in religious traditions tend to unite the Earth with, of course, the underworld and the heavens. Installing a kind of a vertical structure is a way of anchoring and establishing new territories. So, of course, when Christopher Columbus, for example, crossed the seas and came to the Americas, what he. What subsequent trips did on all of these shores was to read a document, usually in Latin, that reminded me the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas told them who God was and what God did and how God had created the Earth and how they were doing the same thing now in the Americas. And they usually erected either a flag or a cross or both of them to do this kind of vertical dance. So insofar as this is the way that imperial religious traditions tend to conquer, to take new land, to me, it's no surprise at all that the Apollo missions read Genesis and put a vertical thing on the moon. This makes a lot of sense.

[Gordon Caddick]

Mary Jane Rubenstein's book traverses many eras of space exploration. And of each era, she shows how religious and colonial logics feed directly into the popular narratives. The doctrine of Discovery and the idea of Manifest Destiny are especially important. Decades later, space evangelists are repackaging this religious language in secular clothing. Take, for instance, Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society. He warns that humanity will collapse unless it finds a new Martian frontier to sustain its energies. Zubrin claims that we must extend our Manifest Destiny to the stars. In the 2020 State of the Union Address, President Donald Trump echoed this very sentiment.

[Narrator/Host]

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Our wealth, expands our territory, builds our.

[Narrator/Host]

Cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

And we will pursue, pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

[Gordon Caddick]

Yeah, I'm wondering what you felt when you read those words, because it couldn't be sort of more on point in terms of the thesis that you're articulating in this book.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Am I a really bad person if I say that? I read that and I thought, oh, this is good for business. This has been my sense that this notion has not gone away, that as godless as the US Might be, as godless as Donald Trump might be, that this rhetoric still functions in a way that authenticates the conquest of all sorts of territory and resources. By a very powerful nation. A kind of very traditional religion is still being asked to function in this way, to endorse military and economic endeavors. So it has not gone away. It didn't go away with 2020. It's back now. Mars is America's manifest destiny.

[Gordon Caddick]

I want to ask you about another religion, Capitalism.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Yeah, I've heard of it.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Gordon Caddick]

So I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how the kind of vision of space changes from the kind of humanitarian branding of Cold War liberalism to, you know, moving forward into the neoliberal era.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

The reason that I think space becomes such a promising economic possibility is that capitalism, as you know, needs the economy to keep expanding in order to function at all. The economy has to keep expanding. Everything has to keep. Every market has to keep growing. Infinite growth. Infinite growth. Infinite growth. So I think that's it. It's not all that complicated. Outer space, economically speaking, seems to offer the promise of infinite resources.

[Gordon Caddick]

I think it's maybe surprising to others, but that the kind of environmental movement and the space exploration movement grew up in tandem. And that wasn't just a historical coincidence, that there was quite a bit of overlap and quite a bit of sort of theoretical work going both ways. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that, about how the vision of planetary limits and environmental destruction has kind of motivated some of these visions.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

I'm taken back to that. Two famous photographs from the Apollo era. The first one is called Earthrise, where you see the Earth kind of peeking up over the moon. And the other is. It technically doesn't have a name, but it's just the photo of that, the whole Earth from space. It's just like that whole Earth photo that gets put on tote bags from your favorite co op and coffee mugs and things that implore us to think about the planet as a whole. Historian and philosopher of outer space, Dennis Cosgrove, has argued that this image of the Earth from outside the Earth did give birth to these twin movements of environmentalism on the one hand, and also the acceleration of what becomes kind of global capital on the other. Oh, is that all the Earth is? It's so small we could actually encompass it. It's not that big at all. We could actually see it. So the efforts to protect the Earth and control the Earth kind of emerge reborn out of this imagery. I think that Gerard o' Neill very much wanted to have it both ways. I think Gerard o' Neill wanted infinite growth, infinite profit, very comfortable living, and also a pristine, beautiful Earth of waterfalls and jungles and happy birds and happy trees. And incidentally, Jeff Bezos will say at any chance he can get very clearly, we can have both. We can have both.

[Gordon Caddick]

I think you put it really well when you said he's kind of having it both ways or having his cake and eating it too. Right? Because on the one hand, it's a kind of pessimistic neo Malthusian view of the limits of the planet. But then it is a kind of like post scarcity, techno utopian vision of how those things exist, but we can transcend them, right. Rather than actually changing the material relations on the planet that is creating this kind of environmental degradation. But then he talks about like a thousand. Bezos does talks about like a thousand Mozarts. Right. When we have an interplanetary species. So it's incredibly optimistic at the same time as it's incredibly pessimistic.

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

I hate that line, that. Right. If we had all these space colonies, we could have all these more people. We could have more and more people because we'd be beyond the limits of the Earth and a trillion human beings would mean we would have a thousand Mozarts. I don't understand the math there. I mean, just because you had one Mozart in X billion people doesn't mean you get a thousand Mozarts in a trillion. It just doesn't work that way. And Mozart isn't just a numerical likelihood. Mozart is the product of an Earth with things on it that are beautiful. It's not clear to me that you get Mozarts in outer space. You might get something else. But also it's just a dumb logic because if you've got a thousand Mozarts, you've got a thousand Hitlers. So like, cut it out. It doesn't make anything any better.

[Gordon Caddick]

We haven't talked very much about Elon Musk. He doesn't have the same sort of vision that Bezos does, does he? It's even more kind of cynical, especially about the future of this planet. I'm wondering if you could tell me about how his vision differs and maybe why he landed here. Like what. What is it that that makes him him?

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

Oh, gosh. Well, I don't want to psychoanalyze Elon Musk. I will certainly say that although I am inclined to disagree that Bezos's vision is possible, I at least understand why he wants so badly to believe that it's possible. Musk's vision is very different, as you're saying, rather than we can have both, which is to say a pristine Earth and infinite expenditure. Musk says, why do you want a pristine Earth? Use up everything we have here. Do whatever you need to do in order to start a new society on Mars. Now, that's more his endpoint. It's not his beginning point. His beginning point is the concern that something will wipe out humanity at some, some point. This might be an asteroid strike. He doesn't talk about climate change, for what it's worth, but it might be an asteroid strike, or it could be like AI bots might. Might get us. So maybe AI is going to, you know, wipe us out or nuclear war or something like that. And in that case, all of humanity would go the way of the dinosaurs. Therefore, we need a backup planet, and that backup planet is Mars. He's so set on this vision of creating some kind of backup planet that he does not see, seem to care much, Tesla notwithstanding, what his technologies might be doing to the Earth.

[Gordon Caddick]

I wanted to kind of maybe wrap with a few questions, some more obvious and some less. I mean, the kind of obvious question, and I don't know how much it matters in a way, but people will wonder, like, how much of this is real, right, in terms of the new space and their grand visions, and how much of it do you see as. As essentially bluster?

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

I hear the question, I understand the question, I often find myself asking the question. But I don't think it matters so much because it has the same effect either way. Right. Race doesn't exist. Race isn't real, but it does all sorts of work in the world. And whether or not these visions are achievable, they're doing some unbearably damaging things in the world. So, you know, I'm inclined to take them at their word and not to try to expose some sort of lie, because I don't know what good exposing a lie would do. I think the trick instead is to ask what kind of effects these technologies and these visions sold under these grand ideological gestures are doing and to evaluate them that way.

[Gerard K. O'Neill]

Mm.

[Gordon Caddick]

So we always look to space for answers to Earth's problems, it seems. And the people that we've been talking about have looked to space and found a particular sort of vision that seems to me sort of both utopian and quite prosaic, I suppose, in terms of its just sort of continuation of the existing relations of capitalism on this planet. When you look to space and you look to others who maybe have alternative visions, where do you find some hope? Where can you find some alternative futures about space, but also about this planet?

[Mary Jane Rubenstein]

One of the things that I try to Say, in the book that I've written about this is that we have a narrative problem. The reason we can justify the infinite expansion of fabulously wealthy people first into other people's nations and then into other planets at the expense of this planet, is because we have all of these stories that tell us that a certain number of human beings are somehow destined to take over new lands, that God wants them to do it, or that destiny wants them to do it, or that the universe wants them to do it, or something like that, or they're somehow programmed. Humans are programmed always to need more stuff. So it's their destiny always to need more stuff. That's a narrative problem. But there are other narratives. So my sense is that if we've got a story problem, then we should look to stories for solutions. And one of the places that I like to go is kind of speculative fiction written by deeply thoughtful authors, the ones that try to imagine other ways of being. So I think here of N.K. jemisin, of Ursula Le Guin, of Becky Chambers, of a really growing throng of Afrofuturist, indigenous futurist, queer futurist, feminist futurist, eco futurist thinkers who use the possibility of, you know, starting over or starting differently to think about ways to build societies that might actually be genuinely different. There's this NK Jemisin story that begins in the aftermath of some kind of disaster and imagines that every human on Earth is granted the option either to remain on Earth with nothing, as she says, you know, no devices, no resources, no modern comforts, just, just, just Earth, Earth with nothing or everything that they've come to know. Refrigeration, AC shopping malls, et cetera, out on the asteroid belt. And every human faces this decision, and every human decides what to do. And almost everybody heads out to the asteroid belt to live in kind of o' Neill cylinders in the asteroid belt. But a few people stay on Earth, and the sort of old sages and the rabbis and the Earth carers come out to teach everybody how to live again in relationship to the Earth. And I've asked my students a number of times, who, incidentally, can't stand Jeff Bezos, can't stand the man, and they're very suspicious of Gerard o'. Neill. So what would you do if you were given this option, you were given the option to head out to the asteroid belt with all of your modern conveniences, or stay on the Earth with nothing in quotation marks, and sheepishly, almost all of my students will say, I would go out to the asteroid belt. And when I say why, they say it just seems so impossible. What seems so impossible? Well, living without all this stuff seems so impossible. And it's at this moment that I think the learning happens. Because it's at this moment that I think we have to ask how did living without computers and iPhones become more unthinkable than living without the earth? Which is to say, living without air, living without water, living without habitability at all. So I'm really taken by the authors who can say, if we're really thinking about impossible things, building a bunker on Mars, that is impossible. How are we going to build a bunker on Mars? Then maybe we could think about how to build a just society. Why is it more unthinkable to think about a just society than it is to build a bunker on Mars? It's actually not.

[Gordon Caddick]

That was Mary Jane Rubenstein, professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is author of the Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. That's from the University of Chicago Press. And that's it for the first episode of our new season, Green Dreams. The lead producers on this episode were Mark Epilono and me, Gordon Caddick, with additional editing from AC Rowe. Our technical producer is Jay Coburn, Dakota Koop is our graphic designer and Sighted's theme song was composed by Mike Barber. Special thanks to astrophysicist Erica Nesvold for her help walking us through some of the space science. Thanks also to the two podcast networks that distribute this the Harbinger Media Network and the New Books Network. Harbinger is Canada's largest podcast Network. Go to harbingermedianetwork.com to find over 50 Canadian made progressive podcasts. And if you're into academic ideas and academic books, the New Books Network is the place to go. Cited as a project in collaborative academic journalism, that means we partner scholars, students and journalists together in in production. This season we are working with Dr. Imra Zeman, a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. And we're Also working with Dr. Tanner Murlies, professor of Communication at Ontario Tech University. Both consulted on the research and development of this series and this episode. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding to support this partnership. My own time was also underwritten in part by a grant from my Tax Canada. For more and for a complete list of credits, visit the series page to Green Dreams. You can find [e-mail] and linked in the show notes. Thanks for listening. We'll have a new episode next week. This has been a production of Sighted Media, the academic population podcasting company. For more go to sightedmedia Ca.