Do you know that space travel could be made easy? Alright come to think of it I it, once a time, a man in Washington DC, delivered a risk-involving presentation that could change everything about our home. He proposed we could live in outer space.

The presentation however, came at a very challenging time: high growth of pollution and other environmental destructions, the peak of people’s discovery that Earth’s resources were shrinking, and at a time it became clear that expansion beyond our horizons is the only way to escape unending limitations.

Physicist Gerard K. O’Neill (1927-1992) of Princeton University made this influential presentation in the summer of 1975 while briefing the Congress about what he was working on with NASA.

According to his plan, the project would start on the Moon’s surface with a small group of people that would mine materials for the construction of its next stage – large-scale rotating habitats that will remain in orbit and house millions of people. Having started in 1969, O’Neill’s project suffered some setbacks: Vietnam’s War that was ragging on, also some of the Princeton physics students O’Neill was working with began losing faith in the engineering prospects, despite the success of the Apollo moon landing. However, not all the students gave up the quest.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was one of Gerard O’Neill’s students at Princeton when the project’s funding was at its peak, in the mid-1980s. Bezos became interested in space at an early age. In a 1982 Miami Herald interview with 18-year-old Bezos, he disclosed an interest "to build space hotels, amusement parks, and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in orbit,” with the intention to preserve where we live, the then-aspiring engineer told the Newspaper. Bezos’ ultimate goal is not different from that of O’Neill: to build huge habitats that will handle challenges from industrial pollution, overpopulation, energy crisis, culture wars and the extinction of our ecosystem.

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Source: https://sabibaze.com/space-travel-made-easy-blue-origin