Who developed the space settlement concept?
Principally, Gerard K. O’Neill (1927-1992), who was a physicist with Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Prior to popularizing space development, O’Neill was well known as a researcher in high-energy physics, and as the inventor of the colliding-beam storage ring, an innovation now standard on most particle accelerators. Compelled by the logic of space settlement, O’Neill wondered if someone else hadn’t thought along these same lines before. A colleague, Freeman Dyson, directed him to the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, J. D. Bernal, and Dandridge Cole. Tsiolkovsky was the Robert Goddard of the soviet space effort. As early as 1929 he wrote about “orbital mansion/greenhouses” which spun for gravity, and realized full well the advantages of continuous sunlight and asteroidal resources. Bernal foresaw future humanity living in enormous orbiting spheres, and Cole had proposed hollowing out asteroids to make orbital habitats. Dyson himself had published a paper specula
