The High Frontier, the Megastructure, and the Big Dumb Object FRED SCHARMEN Morgan State University Gerard O'Neill designed his first space colony in 1969, in collaboration with his freshman physics students at Princeton 1 . O'Neill's work with space colony design, developed and published throughout the next decade, would be a kind of high water mark for technological optimism. His vision of endless resources and expansion into the solar system was almost an inverse to the predictions of immanent collapse outlined in the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth and other popular futurist science from the same era. It’s useful to examine O'Neill's colony proposals as a design project of the 1970s, in parallel with other threads from that period: connections to the imagery and narratives of science fiction, the idea of the Megastructure in architecture, and finally the vagaries of the design process itself, somewhere between collaborative consensus and visionary leadership. O'Neill's first work, developed from the Princeton course, was finally published in Physics Today in 1974 2 . It was further developed in a conference at Princeton over the summer of that same year, with the support of a grant from Stewart Brand's Point Foundation 3 . The Point Foundation was the publisher of CoEvolution Quarterly, the successor to Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. These design concepts were detailed and revised at another summer conference in '75, this time at Stanford with funding from NASA 4 . 1975 also saw O'Neill testifying before Congress on his work and publishing it in CoEvolution Quarterly. The space colony (NASA seems to have preferred the term ‘space settlement’ 5 ) designs developed via these venues come in three types, based on three geometric primitives: The O'Neill Cylinder, the Bernal Sphere, and the Stanford Torus. The cylinder design appeared first, published in the 1974 article, based on his work with students five years earlier. O'Neill spent much of the article working out the details of this colony type - two miles in diameter, 20 miles long, capable of housing "several million" people. This type, in the scenario sketched out in Physics Today, was imagined as a later model, "Model 4", appearing 20 years after the initial construction of a "Model 1" type. "Model 1" would be much smaller, built for 10,000 individuals 6 . The Bernal Sphere and the Stanford Torus, both first worked out at the NASA funded summer conference in '75, were attempts to design this smaller, first phase “Model 1” configuration. All three rotated to provide artificial gravity inside. These structures would be the hometowns for people put to work building large solar power satellites, beaming microwave energy down to an Earth which was, in the early '70s, just feeling the effects of dependence on fossil fuels. All three versions - sphere, torus, and cylinder, were illustrated shortly after the '75 study, by NASA artists Don Davis and Rick Guidice. These paintings and others were published in a 1977 report from the '75 study 7 , and in O'Neill's 1976 book, The High Frontier 8 . The paintings are in the public domain, have been widely reproduced, and still remain some of the most familiar images of speculative space science from the period between the Shuttle and Apollo programs. Figure 1: An O’Neill Cylinder space colony interior, Rick Guidice for NASA, 1976 THE HIGH FRONTIER, THE MEGASTRUCTURE, AND THE BIG DUMB OBJECT 1