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O'NEILL: We Earthlings have always been an adventuring people.

We've always looked to a frontier

to give us new opportunity,

free reign to our sense of enterprise.

The frontier enriched us, generating new wealth,

but it also gave us new ideas,

new institutions, and new ways of living.

Today, the colonization of space

offers us a new limitless frontier.

It's bountiful, it's friendly, and it's waiting for us.

[♪♪♪]

When I speak of space colonies, I mean Earth-like habitats,

complete with grass and trees and flowers.

Habitats that can be built

within the limits of existing technology.

These are the most dangerous decades

in all of human history.

We have the capability to destroy ourselves

and yet, we have not yet quite broken free

of the limitations of that thin biosphere of the Earth.

Life is extraordinarily rare, extraordinarily precious.

Opening the high frontier means making possible

and ensuring the survival of the human race.

MAN: Five, four, three, two, one.

Liftoff on Apollo 11.

2000 feet. 45 degrees. Roger.

TUMLINSON: You had this optimism of the Apollo program,

the optimism of the Russian space program.

We are going out there. This is amazing.

Even if the two space programs

were somewhat covers to some degree

for military activities, we didn't know that.

We're hooking on to the optimism side as kids.

And underlying it, there's this darkness we all could die.

You're watching on television,

click, Star Trek.

Oh, my God, that is so cool.

Click, children being napalmed in Vietnam.

Click, wow, Voyager is going out into the solar system.

It's gonna tell us all about the universe

and how the solar system was created.

Click, nuclear missiles on parade in Moscow.

Click, oh, my God,

they're driving carts around on the moon.

This is so incredible.

Click, mushroom clouds of nuclear tests.

That's what's in your head at that time.

A lot of people chose to tune out.

But some of us, a tiny percentage,

there was a spark going on.

In the future, space shuttles coming 50 times a year,

hundred dollars a pound.

In the past, all of these positive messages

and these negative threats are laying in there.

And right in the middle of that,

Dr. O'Neill drops this book, The High Frontier.

My next guest...

Talking about outer space

and colonizing outer space is always intriguing.

And here's a gentleman who knows about it.

He's a professor of physics at Princeton University.

He's also the creator of a concept

for space manufacturing and space colonies,

in which people of the future... A not-too-distant future.

I'm not talking 2 or 300 years. We'll live in outer space.

And that's the subject of this book called The High Frontier.

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

[Applause]

I read the book as being an amateur astronomer.

A very amateur astronomer. Stuff like this fascinates me.

Great possibilities for astronomy out there.

The book that he wrote, The High Frontier,

was just a massively influential book.

Being a practical visionary

was what made him such an influence on the community.

He was this big, heroic figure that everybody was following.

He was, well, very precise in his language, very direct.

He'd tell you what he thought.

And if you were going off the path in some technical matter,

he would recognize that and set you straight.

But he was a very modest man.

I remember him worrying that the space colony idea

would become a one-man show.

And he was glad to see other people getting into the game.

He was like the rock star.

He was like Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, you know.

A great speaker, huge audience excitement.

It was just a feeling that the future had arrived

and we can be part of it.

Why has he not remained famous?

I think it's because he straddled different communities.

He didn't fit into one box.

You know, this is why he wasn't more popular.

He did not have immense economic success.

He did not use his accomplishments

to put down everyone else and succeed.

The political climate wasn't there

and he wasn't economically wildly successful.

Gerry was aware of

and thoughtful about a whole range of technological subjects

that you would not think he would be.

O'NEILL [RECORDED]: From our beginnings,

technology has paced the development of mankind.

It's the heartbeat of civilization.

Possibly, by the end of this century,

computers that speak and understand human speech.

We'll see a complete switch to electronic mail.

The personal communicator, a device worn on the wrist

that will enable us to take calls anywhere on Earth.

Today's paperbacks will give way

to the small electronic slate board of tomorrow.

We can expect to travel routinely

in magnetic floater trains,

silently coasting through the vacuum,

not of space, but of long, narrow tubes.

The private car will still be around.

It, too, will be computer-guided.

Vehicles would follow pre-chosen routes

and we could start saving lives lost annually to car accidents.

I think it's important to paint a picture of the future.

A lot of scientists don't do that.

But he's really vividly painted an image

of what the future could look like.

When you create that kind

of an image of the future for people,

then it's like a blueprint that people can go to work on.

Gerry was incredibly smart

and incredibly visioned and incredibly creative.

They don't make somebody full professor of physics

unless he's done something really amazing

and really, you know,

really fundamental contributions to the field.

And he did.

In the '60s, he invented the particle accelerator,

which is really, then, the...

Was the basis for every other big machine

like CERN in Switzerland,

all based on Gerry's first idea,

except he never got the credit.

And that's sort of a leitmotif through his life.

That was, in fact, a big contribution

that essentially, the whole world followed his example.

After O'Neill, then everybody was building colliding beams.

It changed the whole strategy of high-energy physics.

About the time where you'd expect

that he might've been under consideration

for a Nobel Prize, he started writing sort of popular science

like The High Frontier.

And that is a kiss of death to the Nobel committees.

Gotta stay within your lane.

NARRATOR: Gerry O'Neill is a physicist

with a brilliant reputation among his colleagues

for his pioneering work on giant particle accelerators.

O'Neill might have stayed in that abstract world,

but he has always been intrigued by space.

And then came the year of 1969.

It happened that year I was teaching

the big freshmen physics course

at Princeton with about 350 students.

I felt it was very important at that time

to show to those students that it was possible

for science and technology to be used

for human good and not just for ill.

NARRATOR: Spaceship Earth was becoming crowded,

dirty and short of supplies.

Most experts saw things getting worse.

But O'Neill asked instead

a startling and extraordinary question.

The question that he asked that physics class at Princeton

was classic in that it was not, strictly speaking,

a technological question.

It was a civilization question.

Is a planetary surface the right place

for an expanding industrial civilization?

So he and this special group of students

looked into the numbers

and they were really impressed by the results that they found.

And that's when the answer was no.

He wanted to teach the physics by asking interesting questions

that would force the students to actually learn the physics.

MILLER: If you go read back what started Gerry at Princeton,

you know, where is the logical place

for people to live and work in space?

They went to first principles and thought long-term.

In the long term, fundamentally,

you can construct space settlements

in free space.

Industries and colonies in space may sound incredible

but we who are working toward them

know that most of the building blocks

are already in place.

You know, it sounds crazy, but completely feasible.

And all the technology is already available.

Seems to be. What you are saying is,

eventually, and you would construct these,

you'd send up a space shuttle,

which we are gonna have very soon or will have.

That's absolutely right. Send up construction workers

and fabricate probably something.

A sky lab or some kind of space station

with a small number of people. And the colony, actually,

would have to be built while it's in space, right?

Yes, that's right, Johnny. And the fundamental idea

is to try to use those energy and material resources

that are really already waiting for us out in space.

O'NEILL: Something which we feel could be made

as a first model space colony.

But this is a cylinder rotating in space.

It's about a thousand 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 lines.

This is a cylinder which is...

Has its axis pointing toward the sun always.

And as you look at it,

you see that it's divided into about six segments.

There are window areas. There are three of them here.

And there are land areas.

This is a cylinder, which is rotating.

It contains an atmosphere,

a breathable atmosphere, mainly of oxygen.

And as it rotates, rotates at the right speed

so that it makes one Earth normal gravity on the inside.

So by the time you get up to a diameter of several miles,

that's enough atmosphere so that it can produce the scattering,

which gives us the blue sky here on the surface of the Earth.

And clouds. And clouds.

You would have mountains and sun. Yes.

See, the natural thing

is to model mountains on the end cap like this.

I hate to persist with this dumb question

in my head. No questions are dumb.

What is the mountain? Is...? Does the mountain come

from the composition of the materials...

The material. Material... from the moon?

The moon is a really good source for building materials.

You know, the Apollo astronauts, in many of their...

Of the Apollo flights, were picking up,

just casually, chunks of rock in the lunar surface.

They were 40 percent aluminum by weight.

And oxygen...

The lunar surface is, like, 30, 40 percent oxygen by weight.

There's no problem about atmosphere.

The moon is very rich in titanium too...

That's right... which we never use enough of

here on Earth because steel is so much cheaper.

But you could do things with titanium.

They can be very cute.

The human race must leave and occupy other places in space.

Do you really believe we can be there soon?

With the technology that we have now,

we could do it in maybe by the late 1980s.

The episode of human life

being confined to Earth is coming to an end.

Space will be the next civilization.

Plans are on the drawing boards for space colonies.

In the long term, it's really much the same thing

that brought us first as amphibians onto the seashore,

and then eventually got us down out of the trees

and walking around on the earth.

And that is the movement into new habitats

and the opening up of new possibilities,

basically new sources of wealth to support our people.

The kinds of cities that we speak about in space

would look a lot like small villages here on the Earth.

We wouldn't have to have cars

because the distances wouldn't be great.

But we'd be riding bicycles and walking.

It ought to be quite a healthy life.

[♪♪♪]

O'NEILL: The excitement is going to be, in part,

the unusual geometry working on the interior

of a rotating sphere.

Second, the tremendous challenge and the tremendous opportunity

of working with different levels of gravity.

Because although the architecture

of the region near the equator

is going to be not that different

from the architecture of the Earth,

by the time you get up close

to the rotational axis of the colony,

gravity will fall off to almost nothing.

It will be possible to design very light, airy structures,

which can yet support the very small loads

that they'll be required to take.

So a beautifully new and airy

and fantastic kind of architecture

will become possible there.

Extremely beautiful, if done properly,

that will never be possible on the surface of the Earth.

Come closer.

[Chuckles]

Hello. Hey, guys. How are you?

Hey, sweetie. How you doing?

Hey, you. Oh, I love you.

Good to see you.

You all right? How you doing?

Great. Awesome.

That's so cool. All right.

Hi, Janet. How you doing?

Okay. How are you doing?

So comfy.

[Laughing]

EDWARD: Everything against what he's into.

ELEANOR: Yeah. EDWARD: Yeah.

TASHA: Because a planetary surface

was not the right kind of place...

BOTH: ...for expanding technological civilization.

[All laugh]

We got that tagline down pat.

I think the inspiration might have been...

I mean, he certainly wrote about you in The High Frontier and...

I was a mascot. Yes, you were a mascot.

But I think he was thinking about future generations.

That was what was driving him. And his kids were driving him.

And he loved all of us very, very much

and wanted a better world for us.

And I think he really integrated that into his writings.

He'd write and I'd sort of lie there in that little sofa

and read the first chapters and so on, you know.

Had me as a sounding board.

But we could have, you know,

Gilbert and Sullivan in the background.

And we just, you know...

Companionable thing together.

I take this very seriously

because I think we have to leave this planet.

We've gotta expand our horizons.

And this is the next and logical frontier.

I've been trying to get to New York all my life.

I don't wanna leave it.

NARRATOR: Since man appeared on the Earth,

he has reached into the unknown for a better life.

That age-old quest now takes us

beyond the Earth into the universe.

The knowledge exists today to expand beyond our planet

to a totally new environment.

Space can free us from our dependence

on Earth's precious resources.

Space will provide us with the energy

and raw materials to create new things.

It will give us room to grow.

Living in space offers the promise

of a better life for man,

but raise questions we haven't yet thought to ask.

The whole story of human civilization

has been one of exploration and discovery.

That's what's made me... Made us what we are.

And, um... if we stayed in one place,

we'd have probably become extinct.

We have to go out into the universe

to open other possibilities,

to get around the barriers to growth,

which exist on this Earth.

I think I've always been somebody

who likes to look ahead instead of behind.

And so those ideas were like:

"Yeah, something really cool is going to happen."

I want to go towards that. In a way, that's my agenda.

I do want us to go out in space.

And I definitely have a really strong...

priority that we diversify our home as a human species

and not be subject to a really bad volcano going on

and giving us a winter for the next 10 years

or a meteor hitting and... That wiped out the dinosaurs.

All those things, they could happen.

If we don't try and get off the planet

or diversify our base before that happens,

it'll be too late when it does happen.

There are a lot of people

who aren't interested in space exploration.

And they're not interested in space settlements.

But they're really interested in the Earth

and the fate of the Earth.

We were advocates.

We were advocating its importance.

And we were trying to interest people

who are more concerned with Earthbound issues

and we were trying to show them

how moving out into the solar system and beyond

would be a transformational event for humanity.

But he once told me that... His belief that...

Was that most wars were around resources.

Scarce resources. WOMAN: Right.

And so his belief was so strong

that if we could create unlimited resources

out in space, everybody would have

as much land, as much water, as much...

Everything they needed to eat and live.

There would be no more wars.

[CHUCKLES] If only.

So what a beautiful vision.

Everybody could have their own colony.

Right. Whatever persuasion they were

or whatever. Yeah. Right.

[♪♪♪]

NARRATOR: The colonization of space in the 21st century

would involve thousands of people from Earth

living and working in huge settlements

stationed at what are known as the Lagrangian points.

Stable, gravity-free locations

in roughly the same orbit as the moon,

some 300,000 kilometers from Earth.

Professor Gerard O'Neill of the Space Studies Institute

is one of the main architects of the space colony concept.

The fundamental, long-term human necessity

is the generation of greater wealth

to raise the living standard for all of the world's peoples.

O'NEILL: We're hoping to develop a view of the Earth

that will enable us to predict the climate

over long periods of time

so that humanity won't get into trouble

if something goes wrong.

I think it's very important that we'd be outside

this nuclear-filled pressure cooker that we're in

and we get people out and living far away

and dispersed from the Earth

so that no single catastrophe could wipe out the human race.

If you give mankind a huge project

to interest themselves in

and once they get this vision

of life in space of a myriad worlds,

of mankind expanding,

the notion of fighting wars over real estate on Earth

becomes a little too ridiculous to take seriously.

So I see before us two basic choices.

There can be more wars,

more restrictions on individual freedom

as we battle in what has to be a zero-sum game

over the resources of our planet

or a new flowering of opportunity

with wealth for all humanity and the arts

as we open a new frontier in space

with more than a thousand times the land area

and resources of planet Earth.

You know, the more money we put into space,

the less money we have for arms and munitions.

When people talk about how much it costs us to go out in space,

it seems to me that it's much better

to spend the money on that than on weapons.

And I would like to see the various nations of the world

no longer able to afford war

because they're putting too much money into space.

I think that would be great.

Mary Helen, I'm really concerned

about space exploration and scientific research in general.

I feel the government isn't spending quite enough money

on research in productive areas.

We're spending much too much money on defense.

I think we could probably do

what Dr. O'Neill was talking about

if we just take some of those defense dollars

and move them into space. I've got a better idea.

Let's move the whole Pentagon. That would solve the problem.

Oh, but not to space.

The space is everybody's frontier.

One of the most common statements by astronauts is, I...

In my mind, I did expect to see lines,

borders, boundaries on the Earth.

They are not there.

And in many ways, these imaginary lines and borders

cause us to work from that perspective,

but we know, for example, climate change,

war and peace, almost every issue you think of,

we can't resolve without getting beyond our national identities.

Going to space and seeing our world without borders

and seeing where we all came from

and just how finite and how special our existence is,

that perspective is essential

for us to address the global problems we are now facing.

We call the Earth "the old country".

Yeah. Right.

And, in fact, you do suggest that there's...

We'd go only to the Earth for recreational purposes.

Let it restore itself. I'm very fond of the Earth.

I think that the best thing we can do

is to put the industries somewhere else.

[♪♪♪]

In the fall of '69, I came to Princeton

to be the au pair for the Gallop family.

And on my first night off

the other German girl took me to the Y

to an international club.

All of a sudden, the door opened

and a man came in, and I thought:

"Gee, the first interesting guy around here."

And he approached me and he wanted to know,

you know, my phone number. He was going to give a party.

So the next day, when the phone rang and he said:

"This was just the ruse, talking to all of these people.

I have no intention of giving a party.

I just needed to get to you gracefully

and get your information."

He seemed like... To me, like a graduate student

when he looked young, he acted young.

And we fell in love quite quickly.

We talked about our lives and he told me about his family

and his divorce and his children.

And I found out that he was 42

and a full professor here at Princeton

and already quite renowned

in his field of high-energy physics.

And I was 21.

It didn't seem like a barrier to us.

But people sure, you know, thought it wouldn't work.

In '73, we went to California

for a sabbatical and we got married.

We lived in the Bay Area

and he had become acquainted with gliders.

He just knew he had to learn how to fly and own this airplane.

And he was determined to have it.

You know, once we had our own plane,

I mean, he didn't go anywhere without me.

Very, very rarely.

You know, we were a team.

I was his co-pilot.

In the spring of '74,

he decided to have a little conference

to introduce his space ideas.

And the science writer for the New York Times came

and then reported on it.

And it was on the front page on the New York Times,

which changed our lives instantly.

We had to delist our phone number,

and it was just crazy.

[♪♪♪]

HOST: 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 funds.

Some serious scientists

are talking about whole colonies in space.

Not on the moon, Mars or Jupiter,

but on man-made planets.

And populated not by scientists and astronauts alone,

but by hundreds of thousands of just plain folks

looking to get away from an overcrowded Earth

running short of energy, water and clean air.

Far-fetched? That's what we said

20 years ago about walking on the moon.

Today, nothing seems far-fetched.

NARRATOR: One national magazine after another

became intrigued enough with O'Neill

to print major articles

detailing his ideas in a generally uncritical light.

TASHA: So then money came in.

And we said, we need to start an entity

because it can't go through the university.

And so that's when

the Space Studies Institute was started in '77.

Working with Space Studies Institute and Gerry

caused us to think about all aspects

of human space exploration,

including ethics, economics, environmental issues.

Not just how are we gonna do it, but the why.

Dr. O'Neill, when he formed the Space Studies Institute,

did something that was really smart.

He didn't just write a book

about creating this amazing future and go:

"Hey, I wrote the book." You know. "I started it all."

Or, "Didn't happen because I wrote this book

and nobody listened."

He wrote a book, then he formed an institute

to manifest what was going on in the book

and draw people

towards actually doing something about the book

so that that tribe that he had created,

that message, that beacon he had thrown out, saying:

"If you believe in this, come in here, join us,

and look around and there's people

who are just as crazy as you are."

If you were a professional in the space business,

you are from the military or you are from government.

And the idea that you could be a player

in the space business or the space community

and not be military, not be business,

not be a professor, not be in astronomy, was unusual.

And Space Studies Institute attracted a cross section.

You had young kids, you had...

You had the true visionaries, you had the engineers.

So it was a wonderful time to just free yourself

and say it must be possible

because all these people share with me that it is possible.

In founding SSI, we decided

that we were not going to be a lobbying organization.

There were plenty of those already.

We were not going to argue and be political

about trying to get the federal government to do the job for us.

Instead, the funding would come from the people themselves

who were going to benefit

from the opening of the high frontier.

RATHER:: It should come as no surprise

that the people who are the most receptive to this

are the science fiction enthusiasts.

That avid subculture ready to spend time and money

in pursuit of fantasy worlds

that capture their imaginations.

O'Neill's book, The High Frontier,

is on sale at one of the booths,

and they are also selling the idea of space colonies.

MAN: Well, this is a proposed habitat.

This is designed by a man named Gerard O'Neill from Princeton,

and it could house as many as 10,000 people comfortably.

And those long... You can see long windows on the side.

And those long, straight pieces of metal are actually mirrors

that would focus sunlight onto the inside,

perhaps to grow crops.

RATHER: These are some of the people who would like to see

a space colony in your future.

They call themselves the L-5 Society.

L-5 refers to a point in space

equidistant from the Earth and moon

where the space colony might orbit.

Their optimistic slogan is "L-5 in 1995."

TUMLINSON: So you had the L-5 Society starting to go make it happen.

This dream was something we bought.

I remember I still own the bumper sticker

that says "L-5 by '95."

We believe we were going to be

building cities in space by 1995.

It was a real thing.

Everyone from L-5 Society who I talked to

was a disciple of Dr. O'Neill.

And that was a whole transformative way

of looking at space.

We had, at that time, nobody to take us to orbit

in a way that was less than a billion dollars a launch.

And it seemed pretty far away and was very compelling

that people, even with that distance...

dropped their careers, followed him, uh...

really gave up a lot of things

in order to try and make this a reality.

And that alone struck me,

is there something here that's different?

People are doing this because it's the right thing to do,

not because their own personal wealth depends on it.

So we were a bunch of young, intuitive, you know, punks.

You know, all of us, with different backgrounds

and different inclinations that, you know,

coming to this from very different places,

were all curious kids,

were all, in one way or another, caught up in this idea.

You'd go to an L-5 conference and it was crazy.

You'd have a speaker like Newt Gingrich

and Timothy Leary, you know, and Robert Heinlein,

all in the same place at the same time,

and people that would be characterizable

as followers of all of that.

You'd have the cryo people with the...

You know, "We'll freeze you for eternity" over here,

and you'll have Boeing over here pitching their space projects,

all in the same event. It was great.

It was very much a place where you felt comfortable

having this enthusiasm for this effort.

And also, it was a place where you felt comfortable

being who you were.

Ladies and gentlemen, Timothy Leary.

[Applause]

NARRATOR: Yes, it's Timothy Leary.

One-time Harvard professor,

LSD advocate, and revolutionary.

He now has involved himself

in this idea of immigrating to space.

I'm telling you, the best jobs,

young man and young woman, lie in space.

I refer you, of course,

to the work of Gerard O'Neill of Princeton

who is the Christopher Columbus of the space migration movement.

With a show of hands, how many of you

would like to live in space and live forever?

How about it? Hey, there we go. That's incredible, I'd say.

MAN: He's saying that it's happening, that it's gonna happen.

That's all he's saying. His concept is

that these plans will be for...

Say someone's bisexual and a vegetarian,

well, there's a planet that's just made especially for him.

Someone that eats eggs and drinks beer...

Drinks beer, there'll be a planet for them.

There will be a different place

for every kind of person there is,

is more or less what he's saying.

We're just exploiting the universe.

For whoever has a habit rather than, you know, changing it,

whoever has a different way of lifestyle.

I think it's kind of conceited to think

this is the only place in the universe

where people could live.

We, you and I,

are the only people who I ever have the privilege of saying

we explored the solar system first.

I know that Gerry was very interested

in how they would be governed.

And he was thinking a lot about, um...

them being more democratic

because they would be like small towns.

And I think he was hoping that

as we moved outward and left the Earth,

we would experiment with new economics,

new politics, new ethics,

and that they would not only be a place for people to live

but to experiment with new ways of being.

Gerry had created this cohesive end-to-end vision

that was compelling and held together,

and it was, for me, something extraordinary.

The closest thing I had seen was in the Star Trek universe,

and that was 300 years in the future.

But what Gerry was talking about was something

I could start to play in right now.

So we've had some significant victories,

politically, along the way.

But the greatest victory, I think,

that the L-5 Society had,

intentionally or not,

was they communicated the vision

to the space intelligentsia,

and specifically to the space intelligentsia in Washington.

We feel that the best way to make sure

that the human movement into space,

the breakout from the confines of the planet takes place

is by getting as many players on the stage as possible.

When we publish through the Space Studies Institute

our program plan, it can, of course, be implemented

either by a private consortium or by our own government

or by many governments or some foreign government.

And right now, I don't think we have to make a prediction

as to which way it's gonna happen.

The most important thing is that that we make it happen.

The whole point is, each step we take beyond our planet

is a step in awareness.

Awareness of ourselves,

awareness of the environment,

and awareness of the whole.

And one of the things that people forget about Gerry's work

is that he was a strong environmentalist.

He had the idea of using solar-powered satellites,

which quite a few people have embraced,

but he supported it,

Space Studies Institute supported it.

[♪♪♪]

There are environmental questions

which I think ought to be attacked very seriously

on that as in all other energy sources.

ASIMOV: Out there in space, the sun is always shining.

The full range of the solar spectrum is available.

There is no night, there is no mist,

no clouds, nothing to interfere.

Solar energy can be collected

much more efficiently than here on Earth,

and this solar energy can then be beamed down to Earth

as in the form of microwaves so that the future

might eventually see Earth's energy supply

from the sun via a station in space.

NARRATOR: Building such mammoth structures in space

to help solve the energy problems of Earth

was originally the idea of just one man.

And when he took his idea to NASA 10 years ago,

they thought he was crazy.

After all, he was a total outsider coming into NASA

talking about a project which, by all counts,

look like the largest space project ever suggested.

So at first they were skeptical.

Can it be done? Should it be done?

You know, the obvious questions.

But I believe that after they...

The first shock sort of wore off,

both in terms of size of the satellite and so on,

and they began to get into the details

that are required here,

they recognized what it really could do

and how the technology that the space program has developed

could be applied,

and in a sense, it was an obvious way to go

in order to get the most

out of the experience that we have gained.

The whole point about the high frontier of space

is that it's a virtually unlimited resource

of energy and materials.

We're suffering increasing poverty

here on the surface of the Earth

that it'd make sense to go out and begin in using

that wealth of solar energy and of materials.

Energy is a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

All 7 billion people on this planet

should have the same standard of living.

We could either do a world of limits and cut everybody back

or we could innovate our way out of it,

with space solar power and how you do that

and that free-market approach of innovation

is a hopeful future that Gerry pointed the way to.

[♪♪♪]

O'NEILL: This will definitely be the great age of pioneering.

Now pioneering really begins.

We're learning how to move out into space,

the problems we're gonna have to solve,

but pretty soon it'll be solved and we'll be out there doing it.

There's a fundamental reason

why Gerry O'Neill's settlements have not been built.

They're too big.

They're kilometer-scale, they're enormous.

They're too heavy, they weigh millions of tons.

And they're too far away, they're at lunar distances.

And it turns out you can attack all three of those.

It's possible to make habitats which are relatively big,

big enough to be very Earth-like,

out of ordinary materials,

like steel and aluminum and glass.

And it's possible to find those materials

in very large quantities on the surface of the moon

and eventually in the asteroids.

Every asteroid over about 150 meters in diameter

is big enough to supply the materials

for a decent-size settlement.

There are thousands of such asteroids in near-Earth orbits.

NARRATOR: O'Neill came up with the idea of a mass driver,

a giant catapult that would accelerate

sacks of lunar rocks in buckets.

The sacks of rocks would be hurled into space.

The buckets would slow and return to be filled again.

The track taken by the sacks of moon rocks

would bring them to a point

where they'd be caught, processed

and used to build space colonies.

But there was one flaw in O'Neill's scheme.

He didn't know how to build a mass driver.

But it turned out that one already existed.

Though the moon was the last place

its designers thought of using it.

And moon rocks weren't intended as the cargo, people were.

Once in motion,

the vehicle is lifted on its magnetic cushion

and can travel without friction.

The MIT magneplane project ran out of funding,

but proved just what O'Neill was looking for.

This is a model lunar mass driver being built at MIT.

[♪♪♪]

NARRATOR: In a lab at Princeton University,

a working-scale model of the machine

that could solve some of the problems

of large-scale space construction

has been developed.

It is called a mass driver.

Futurist Dr. Gerard O'Neill of the Space Studies Institute.

This is the bucket of a mass driver electric motor.

The bucket carries a payload of lunar material

and it's accelerated by these magnetic coils

with an acceleration that's more than

100 times as fast as the hottest drag racer ever made.

When the bucket and its payload

get to the full speed of 8000 miles per hour,

the payload is released and goes out into space,

and the bucket is recirculated for reuse.

So if you were to look at a mass driver in operation,

you'd see that stream of payloads

like water coming out of a fire hose, off into space.

And this is how it works.

We can use the mass driver as a catapult

to bring thousands of tons per year

of lunar material into space.

There we can process it using solar energy,

into oxygen that we can breathe,

into silicon that we can make into solar cells,

and into big structures, space industries,

space power stations or space colonies.

Yes, it was crazy. Yes, it was science fiction.

Yes, it was way out there. But the steps were there.

There was no new physics to be invented.

It just was hard work.

And all of us were willing to do the hard work.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six,

five, four, three, two, one. Fire.

MAN: Aah! [CROWD MURMURING]

Just a second, folks. I'm gonna calculate

the acceleration on that one right now.

Can we see that again?

Derailed? Derailed? It's right here.

Five, four, three, two, one. Go.

Tell you what, I calculated the acceleration.

It seems that we still had some problems.

We only got 33 G's on that shot.

MAN: How many? Just 33.

We'll keep working at it.

O'NEILL: The moon is a source of minerals,

which we know about thanks to the Apollo project.

It's very rich in oxygen,

that's the most popular element in the surface soils.

It's rich in silicon.

It's got lots of aluminum,

lots of iron, titanium, magnesium.

All of the things, in fact, that we need

for many of the products of an industrial civilization.

You can actually, using high heat,

which you can get from the sun because there's no atmosphere,

you can direct sunlight in mirrors,

okay, really thousands of degrees

and melt lunar regolith in containers,

and then the gassing of that

creates water, creates other chemicals,

other elements that you can use for rocket fuel,

for all kinds of things like that.

So you can literally take the dirt

and melt it into the core elements you want.

I think what's unique about the opening of the high frontier

is that that program can benefit

personally and directly and measurably

every human being on Earth.

I wanna reflect what Gerry has brought to us,

which is to let everybody realize

they can get involved in this.

People will come back down with a completely new understanding

of everything that's happening on our planet.

From the environment, politics, the humanitarian issues,

to even... To even their place in their local communities.

WOMAN: What can the average person do to help open space?

O'NEILL: I'd say a general thing is to work very hard

at the thing that you think you're best suited for.

If you're a natural artist or a natural musician,

don't try to turn yourself into a scientist

if you're not meant to be.

But just be the best possible artist or musician.

Space isn't something that's just the engineers show up to.

You know, this is something for artists

and writers and business people

and finance and whatever you can do to inspire people.

And there's so many different ways

that people get involved in all of this,

and so you've seen a whole generation

inspired by, I think, by this whole idea

that it is bigger than... Bigger than something than us.

[♪♪♪]

This is what began my interest in space colonies.

This is a story in the local newspaper.

That lit a fire in me. It struck my imagination.

And so I sought out Gerry, I found out where he was,

telephoned him and told him I was an artist,

that I wanted to do a painting of a space colony idea.

And so we would telephone and mail stuff back and forth.

And I did my first painting of a space colony subject

and it was of the giant cylinder.

I did a painting looking down the long axis of the cylinder,

and I picked an unusual lighting condition.

I put the space colony in the Earth's shadow

just as the moon goes during a lunar eclipse.

And so the lighting was very red,

and it was the light all of the sunrises

and sunsets taking place on the Earth at that moment.

And so it was an unusual lighting,

it was kind of a whimsical choice,

but that was my first colony painting.

I asked Gerry, "What do you think

the interior should be like?

What kind of surroundings do you think

people would like to make for themselves?"

His vision was looking down on Sausalito

from the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge

at the houses, the buildings, very much next to the ocean

with some sailing ships and stuff,

little boats going around.

Gerry just did a quick sketch here

showing the sunlight paths

where the heavier lines are land surfaces

and the smaller ones are... Narrower ones are the windows.

There's a side view showing the path

of the light into the interior.

Gerry had a dream of going into space.

He was a dreamer. He listened to Buck Rogers

when he was a kid and he would...

Oh, my God, he was such a devotee of the Star Trek.

He watched every episode for years.

And then Apollo.

I mean, he really was inspired by the Apollo mission.

NARRATOR: NASA has been exploiting

its newly discovered Star Trek connection

in its astronaut recruitment drive.

Hi. I'm Nichelle Nichols.

But I still feel a little bit like Lieutenant Uhura

in the starship Enterprise.

You know, now there's a 20th-century Enterprise.

I'm speaking to the whole family of humankind,

minorities and women alike.

If you qualify and would like to be an astronaut,

now is the time.

NARRATOR: Over 8000 people have applied to be shuttle astronauts

from which NASA is selecting some 200 for further training.

TASHA: In 1966, NASA wanted to have some scientist astronauts.

He applied and he went through the whole program,

the whole... All the rigorous, grueling

physical and psychological tests.

And he was a finalist.

He was ready to quit Princeton when his hopes were dashed,

and Deke Slayton called him up one day

and said, "Sorry, Gerry,

Congress has just reduced the funding."

He was actually glad that it hadn't worked out for him

because he always said, "I wouldn't have met you

and I wouldn't have started the space colonization program.

So I left a much greater legacy

than if I had been an astronaut."

The U.S. government at that time

has this great hope that's coming called the space shuttle.

This big white space vehicle

that's gonna carry us into space.

MAN 1: I was wondering, if the Saturn V was so good,

why did they discontinue it? That's a...

MAN 2: We'd like to know the answer to that.

I could go on two hours on that one.

It was a darn good question. It was a highly political issue.

There were people within NASA

and some people in other parts of the federal government

who very much wanted to develop

a highly experimental space vehicle, the shuttle.

[♪♪♪]

NARRATOR: After Apollo, America's space agency, NASA,

turned its attention to building

the world's first reusable spacecraft.

Originals plans called for a shuttle

to be composed of two separate manned vehicles.

The first would be a huge but reusable rocket plane

to boost the shuttle into orbit.

The manned rocket launcher

would then return to the launch site.

Budget constraints altered this plan

and a compromise was made.

The manned rocket launcher was dropped.

Instead, two reusable rocket boosters

and a large throwaway external fuel tank were designed.

[Alexander courage's "theme from Star Trek" playing]

NARRATOR: Space, the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

Its five-year mission:

To explore strange new worlds.

To seek out new life and new civilizations.

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

NARRATOR: This is the first voyage of the space shuttle Enterprise.

Its mission: To make leaving the Earth

as easy as flying around it.

To begin the economic exploitation of space.

To open up the final frontier.

NARRATOR: By the time the shuttle is rolled out

for its first powered flight,

it is two years late and $1 billion over budget.

TUMLINSON: Now, during the 1970s,

as it was being sold to the public and Congress...

the space shuttle

was supposed to fly 50, five-zero, times a year.

It was gonna make the cost of going into space $100 a pound.

Now, think about that for a second.

$100 a pound, 50 flights a year,

you can start to do stuff in space.

Put all these pieces together

and Dr. O'Neill rolls out this book called The High Frontier

that shows how to do it, step by step...

and it's go time.

What we found out, though, as the shuttle began to fly,

was that we were sold a bill of goods,

and we bought it, lock, stock and barrel,

because we needed to believe.

We wanted that dream so badly.

You know, you're not going to get to a...

A free enterprise human community in space

through a massive government program.

Reagan was like a movie star and believed in this stuff.

Right? He'd been in Westerns, he was this kind of guy, right?

He's looking at this frontier

and he's like, "Yeah, let's do that."

I think he really believed in this stuff.

So Reagan signs the Space Settlement Act

and now we've got a law...

that tells NASA they have to report every year

on the progress they're making

towards the human settlement of space.

This makes them crazy.

The space shuttle turned out to be one of the most expensive

and poorly functioning programs

in the history of American technical development.

But NASA never wanted to admit that,

so they had big celebrations about how many times it flew

and they never acknowledged

that it completely failed to meet its initial goals.

When you go to a big scale, like he was talking about,

this has to succeed or else it really will kill the whole field

and that, politically, that makes it very difficult.

And then most of the big NASA programs have that problem.

I think about how we've gotten to this wonderful point

that we're at in America

and across the planet in the exploration of space,

I think about that a lot.

And certainly in the '80s was the first attempt.

And you had a couple of ingredients coming together

and it was alive from the beginning

in that it was all based on the reliability

of the space shuttle program.

And the concept that this...

We would get to space in a truck is what we called it,

and that it would go to and from space

50 times a year and it would be low-cost.

Well, that frees up the mind to say:

"Okay, this is all possible."

And because of that, because of that mistake,

a number of things came together.

And the importance, in hindsight, of the '80s

was not space shuttle program,

it was almost not even the Apollo program,

it was that we were allowed to dream in the '80s

which led to the advances we've gotten

in the '90s and the new century.

NASA is the foundation of everything

that's going on now today too,

and so I think we're reaching

somewhat of an equilibrium of balance.

We decided at NASA to partner with industry in new ways

and utilize space act agreements to do launches.

The space shuttle retired because it costs

multiple billions of dollars a year to operate

and it was through its useful service.

After 30 years, it had launched amazing satellites to space

including things like the Hubble Space Telescope

and it had built the International Space Station.

We don't need the space shuttle

and the billions of dollars to be spent

on just the transportation part of going out

about our space exploration work,

so we're going to be buying rights

from commercial industry in the future.

The direction that we must go

is toward a more sophisticated, more intelligent technologies,

not a retreat into old-fashioned 19th-century technologies

which are less energy efficient,

more polluting, and serve people more poorly.

I think the future is incredibly bright and optimistic

for this industry,

and that space is really the place to be doing business

and to focus your attention.

Our economy's gonna be changing,

it's changed throughout our history.

Space is where we're gonna grow as a nation.

Gerry was such a holistic thinker

in that he had a clear vision.

He wrote that in a book,

he created the engineering architecture.

And then when he realized that very few people out there

would actually fund this

because it was so risky, it was so crazy,

he ended up creating Geostar,

which was the potential for what we now call GPS.

Every company that Gerry founded

was based on something that he invented

or something that triggered his thought process

that something should be improved.

Geostar was founded because there was a...

The plane crash in San Diego

between a small plane and an airliner in...

On a day when it was just beautiful

and they should have seen each other, and they crashed.

And as a fellow pilot, he just thought,

you know, something needs to be done.

You need to have a warning system.

So he invented the precursor to GPS.

And Geostar was, for all intents and purposes,

this extraordinary near-term economic engine

that could power all of Gerry's dreams.

Just so close.

You know, had it only happened,

I think we'd be on the moon right now

implementing Gerry's visions.

After Geostar,

after he was sort of ousted and Geostar went under,

that was just a real tragedy.

He'd really thought, you know, that company could make it big.

But we had decided we didn't want that wealth, you know.

And he was weak because he was sick.

So this was 1985, we were happy,

we had a 5-year-old,

um, and Gerry was supposed to have a hernia repair.

And out of the blue, I got this call

that, you know, "Your husband can't have

the hernia operation tomorrow because he's got leukemia."

So...

And that was just shattering.

You know, we cried together. We cried separately.

We tried to shield Edward from the disaster

that struck the family.

And...

given him 18 months to live,

and so we kind of passed that threshold.

And we decided that he needed an office at home

so that he could interact with his office,

the Geostar office at the time,

and be in isolation when he needed to be.

And so we then decide to...

give him this room where he went into isolation

when he couldn't be at the office.

Whew! That was rough.

I mean, you really got the brunt of it.

You know, you would tell us you're under stress,

but you wouldn't...

You didn't go on and on about it.

You don't have a choice.

You have a little kid. I know. Right.

We cried and we took turns crying.

And, you know, putting up the good front for Edward,

and then one and the other one would go and cry

until we had finally wrapped our heads around it.

But it was so cruel to find it all out, you know.

And... Anyway...

We tried to live our lives as normally as we could.

And we made plans and sometimes they were canceled

because he got a fever

and which meant it was an infection

and off he'd go to the hospital.

And as soon as he had a room, he would say, you know,

"Now bring me my laptop,"

and whatever else he was working on.

And then he'd sit in bed with his IV

and started working and inventing and so on.

I mean, he was also driven at that time

because he really needed to leave a legacy.

And he wanted to accomplish more,

and he did more in those seven years of illness

than a lot of people did in a whole lifetime.

When Gerry got ill,

unless you knew, you didn't know.

He was very private about it.

I'm willing to bet most of the people

around him didn't know for the longest time he was ill.

He gave us hope.

You know, he created a huge movement...

uh...

with an interesting cast of characters.

And a lot... So a lot of good things have come out of it.

In all the things that Gerry did,

he was still very much a human, very much a loving family man,

so you don't have someone who just lived the dream

exclusive of having a full and complete life.

And, boy, what a great model.

He was just starting this new project, full of enthusiasm,

and then he just got sicker and sicker and...

And in the end, he had to give up, and it was a terribly

sad time for him and for me and...

And for Tasha.

Our 19th anniversary, he got his final...

Fatal, final illness.

And then we brought him back to San Carlos,

and he went into the hospital in Redwood City.

And his condition just got worse and worse.

And he was then on life support.

And the family all got together, all four kids.

And we had to decide when to pull the plug.

And I remember you saying,

you know, "I have a voice in this family too."

ELEANOR: That was so great. EDWARD: I do remember that.

We had a whole big family circle. We did.

And we were making the decision,

and then you said that. That was great.

And then Edward gave Gerry permission to die.

Which, it still tears me up.

Yeah. Yeah.

The next day was my birthday,

so we decided to do it the day before.

And the doctors had said I shouldn't be present

because they didn't know how he would react.

So I wasn't.

And I'm forever sorry that I wasn't.

There's this one statement that I found, um,

which is sort of typical Gerry and if I may read that.

Yeah, of course.

"I hope at the end of my life,

I can look back on work honestly done

and on fair dealings with others."

When he passed away, um,

we were in the business at that point

of memorializing people with space flights,

and Tasha had sent me a note saying:

"Well, we'd promised Gerry

to scatter his ashes on a space colony

and I think that may take a little while,

so could you fly him on one of your missions?"

And we were honored to have him on our very first flight.

And we had on board Gene Roddenberry,

the creator of Star Trek,

the '60s icon, Dr. Timothy Leary,

and launched into space in April of 1997,

orbited the Earth for about 10 years,

and then reentered the spacecraft

with his and everyone else's ashes,

and, of course, burned up in entirety,

sort of an ashes to ashes tribute to him.

Space travel is a challenge.

It's a battle against the universe and the unknown.

And what we're leaving behind is war.

So we are alive,

just got to go out and see the universe,

and take life from Earth and make the future.

That's what our future has got to be.

And my spirit will go with you.

I was really worried

that O'Neill's influence and his greatness

has not been publicly understood.

But then somebody with the wherewithal of Jeff Bezos

actually tries to implement it.

That's transformational

because we didn't have enough money to make it happen.

Professor O'Neill was very formative for me.

And it started... I read The High Frontier in high school.

I read it multiple times. And I was already primed.

And as soon as I read it, it made sense to me.

It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces

were not the right place

for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

And for one, they're not just that big.

There's another argument that I like to make too...

Just they're hard to get to.

And when we build our own colonies,

we can do them in near-Earth vicinity.

These people are gonna wanna come back to Earth.

Very few people, for a long time anyway,

are gonna wanna abandon Earth altogether.

Earth is gonna be a very important place

to be able to come back to, you're gonna wanna come and go.

Remarkably, we now have billionaires,

almost all of whom,

are moved by political, social

or visionary interests

in space exploration,

but they're using the private enterprise system to get there.

My role is... And it's important.

It's the most important work I'm doing. It's crucial.

My role is to help build that heavy-lifting infrastructure

because I have the financial assets to do that.

And that will set things up

for this dynamic entrepreneurial explosion

that will lead to this Gerry O'Neill world.

Jeff Bezos has basically been talking the O'Neill vision.

And Bezos has said, "We've looked at the other planets.

This is the best planet.

I'm not leaving the Earth

because the Earth might fall apart.

I wanna go out there to help preserve the Earth."

And this is really important

because I've interviewed 31 astronauts personally

as well as reading a lot of what they said.

I haven't heard one astronaut say:

"Well, what I got out of going into outer space

was let's abandon the Earth."

I haven't heard anybody say that.

What they're saying is, "Oh, my goodness,

I realized how precious our home planet is."

These are terribly critical decades

because we have the capability

to go out into space, to colonize space,

and to make the human race really live forever,

because once we're out there, we're unkillable.

We will be settling the solar system,

ultimately other stars, ultimately the galaxy.

The truth is, right now, as time is going on,

I've been involved in the space business,

and I've looked at the things that I planned to do

and other people planned to do.

This vision of the O'Neill colony,

this rotating habitat, uh,

the magnetic launch of resources from the moon

where we have nickel, iron, and aluminum, and other things,

that is an enduring and realistic practical thing.

Why not do what Gerry suggested,

build a habitat, put it in space.

It can go anywhere, multiple habitats.

Just put one wherever we need a habitat.

If we're gonna live inside something,

let's make it a nice habitat with one G gravity

which our body's designed to manage,

oxygen we can breathe.

And so it's really an enduring idea that is real.

If we can build ocean vessels

that can cross the Atlantic in a storm

and hold 3000 people,

we can certainly build an O'Neill colony in space.

He wasn't saying that it was the only place to live.

He wasn't saying that you, you know, were a ground-pounder

or if you lived on a planetary surface,

but just that you could do more things.

I think that those two visions

are not exclusive of one another.

I do think that the vision of the O'Neill Cylinders

is also one that needs to be pursued.

So I like those visions.

And, again, I think that Gerry,

even though he did prescribe a mean,

it's less about the technology and the way,

and it's more about the idea

that we, as humanity, need to get there.

EDWARD: The mass is there, the ideas are there.

As more people focus on it,

dad's ideas were great for starting them all rolling,

and he had a plan for how it could go.

There's a whole lot of really smart people

out there who can be, you know, inspired by his ideas

or by somebody else's ideas

that just happened to work well in conjunction.

Once people started digging in

to what O'Neill was talking about,

about living in space,

and really looking at the implications of that

from an economic perspective and everything,

people realized that, you know,

throwing the rocket away every time wasn't gonna work.

We need to build rockets in a different way

from what we're doing in the shuttle.

Then it was a matter of how do we step outside

of the constraints of the government

and the government programs.

NASA's gotta give up the past to pay for the future.

One of the things that was really a big push

on this was the DC-X program.

That was something that would really help push through

by a lot of the same kind of community.

So this was the first rocket

to take off and land on a tail of fire.

It served a really... It showed that you can do

this kind of next generation of technology

and be able to do all this.

MAN: Five, four...

Start check engines.

NARRATOR: Code name DC-XA.

This McDonnell Douglas rocket is opening the door

to routine and affordable space travel.

[♪♪♪]

The DC-XA can lift off vertically under its own power.

It has no separate stages or throwaway boosters.

To complete its journey,

the DC-XA performs its most remarkable maneuver.

It lands in its original takeoff position, on its tail.

It can be ready to fly again in just 24 hours.

What they were moving into was a context that was set.

The policies, the conversation, the concepts themselves

that allow Elon, and Jeff, and Richard to do their thing

were already laid out

by the activists spawned directly by Gerry's work.

I would say that you would look around

at the super successful entrepreneurs,

you know, in this country and outside this country.

And I think they share typically

a certain kind of sets of characteristics or qualities.

And aside from long-term success,

I think Dad had a lot of those qualities.

Broadening our capabilities in space

will continue to serve our society

in ways that we can scarcely imagine

because exploration will once more

inspire wonder in a new generation,

sparking passions and launching careers.

We will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies

from young startups to established leaders,

compete to design and build and launch new means

of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.

There are many troubles in the world, of course,

and these are important, and we need to solve them.

But we also need things that make us excited to be alive,

that make us glad to wake up in the morning

and be fired up about the future

and think, yeah, the future's gonna be great,

you know, and this space exploration

is one of those things.

Becoming a spacefaring civilization,

being out there among the stars,

this is one of the things

that I know makes me glad to be alive,

it makes many people glad to be alive.

It's one of the best things.

We're faced with a choice. Which future do you want?

Do you want the future where we become

a spacefaring civilization and are in many worlds

and out there among the stars,

or one where we are forever confined to Earth?

And I say it is the first.

I think we should really do our very best

to become a multi-planet species

and to extend consciousness beyond Earth,

and we should do it now.

PILOT: SpaceX Falcon Heavy go for launch.

[Cheering]

Falcon Heavy is configured for flight.

WOMAN: T-minus 15 stand by for terminal count.

Ten, nine, eight... PILOT: Side booster ignition.

WOMAN & CROWD: ...six, five, four, three, two, one...

WOMAN: Ignition.

Liftoff of the Falcon Heavy.

Building on the history of Saturn V-Apollo,

returning Pad 39A to interplanetary missions.

WOMAN: And the Falcons have landed.

WOMAN: And a smooth controlled hover back home.

And touchdown.

And there is the New Shepard capsule.

The drones have been deployed

and there are the main parachutes.

And touch down.

Just beautiful.

It's almost as if Gerry articulated the finish line,

and left it to people like us, and Jeff Bezos, and Elon

to figure out what was needed to get us there.

And we may not wake up every day thinking:

"I'm inspired today by Gerry O'Neill,"

but we're really just following through on what he laid out.

He showed us not only the vision but the corporate structure

and the infrastructure, and the way to do it.

And... And I think we're off to the races.

And, logically, we'll begin to manufacture in space.

We'll begin to have stations around the moon. Uh...

Private vehicles will take private people

to and from space.

And what's next is up to the next few generations.

One of the really great things happening now

is that a lot of young people are getting into aerospace.

And they are also starting companies.

This right now is, without doubt,

the golden age of rocketry development.

And everybody and their mother's uncle is building rockets.

This is exactly what you need for a space settlement.

One of the things I valued about his vision

is just how hopeful it is.

It really had a powerful optimism to it.

You know, if we could have the resources and energy

to take care of the basic needs of all humanity,

then we would have the bandwidth to be better people

and to, you know, maybe not fight over resources.

I believe that during our lifetime

that we're irreversibly moving off the planet.

And everything we hold of value on Earth,

metals, minerals, energy, real estate,

is near-infinite quantities in space.

We're here to create the first trillionaires in space.

You know, whatever we evolve into,

thousands of years from now,

we're gonna look back at these next couple of decades,

as the moment in time

that we moved irreversibly off the planet.

With the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos

pioneering these reusable rockets,

all of a sudden, it's highly disruptive to the old model.

And everything we're doing is opening this up

to more experimentation, more people being involved.

And I believe Gerry wanted that.

I mean, he was talking about

space settlements of 10,000 people

And Bezos and Musk were talking about millions of people

living and working in the solar system.

So I think he'd look at it and say:

"This is what we've been waiting for."

I'm sorry he's missed it. It's very exciting.

Earth is the best planet.

We do need to protect it. It's essential. It's our job.

We're now big enough to hurt this planet.

We have to use the resources of space.

And it's this generation's job to build that road to space

so that the future generations can unleash their creativity.

You will see amazing things happen,

and it will happen fast. I guarantee it.

People are so creative once they're unleashed.

I think a future world is inclusive,

where everyone does have that opportunity

is vital for the future of our civilization,

especially when... What the...

What space is is something that unites us

and brings us together.

I think to honor Gerry's legacy,

and the idea to go and build habitats,

we need to do that in a peaceful manner.

The idea is for humanity to come together.

That's what Gerry's legacy is about.

And so it's important that we also use their terms

that will define this corporation.

It's not, as he said, about national vagaries of politics.

It's not about just one country,

it's about private individuals, private industry,

all of humanity coming together,

and building that vision and making it happen.

Gerry would be delighted with all that's going on now,

and, I think, would feel a great sense

of having fostered much of it.

And he, like many of us, are going, "It's about time."

Gerry's vision

that many of us were blessed to share with, in personal...

In a personal exposure, but anyone can read the book.

That will change how you think about space forever.

And so, yeah, I say it makes a huge difference

and still makes a difference today

and can make more of a difference in the future.

And that what he would want us to do is,

you know, write the next chapter and keep writing chapters.

We were Gerry's kids. You know, he...

He was the father of the future that we were manifesting,

therefore we were Gerry's kids.

It's our job, even now,

to go out and create more Gerry's kids.

It's our job right now to enable the next generation

to have that same permission to dream that he gave us.

It's almost 50 years ago since Gerry O'Neill

posed the question to his students:

"Is the surface of a planet the right place

for an expanding technological civilization?"

And the answer was no.

The world was ready to hear a hopeful message.

We would open up the High Frontier

and make space accessible to live, work and play in.

And here you are,

many of who have worked with Gerry in the early years,

you have picked up the gauntlet that he threw down

and followed your dreams and passions

to make his dream become a reality.

You are his sons and daughters in spirit,

doing what you do best in your varied fields of expertise.

As I stand here,

I can assure you that Gerry would be so very proud of you.

Throughout all of human history,

there has been nothing

that has ever looked so absolutely rigid,

so absolutely eternal,

as an establishment

just before it's about to break apart completely.

It's been true in every revolution

that you can think of.

Rigidity is characteristic of a system,

which is just about to be replaced by something better.

And I think that's going to happen in the space program

because of the dedication,

the hard work, the contributions,

all of the ingenuity that you are bringing to it.

You are the people who are going to make it happen.

It really is a revolution. It's a peaceful revolution.

It's a revolution for the good of everyone in the world.

It's not a revolution that's going to hurt people.

It's gonna help them instead.

It's a revolution into which we can all

throw ourselves and all of our energies

with full hearts.

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