Where’s My Orbital Habitat?

Gerard O’Neill was used to seeing the world from above. During the weekends, the Princeton professor spent his time flying over northwest New Jersey in a glider. From that height you can make out a patchwork of corn, soy, and horse pasture framed by dark trees and winding roads. You might see rectangular fields punctuated by smatterings of ponds, or clusters of suburban cul-de-sacs surrounded on all sides by long stretches of green. 

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, O’Neill joined the US Navy as a radar technician immediately after high school, finding himself deployed to the Pacific theater before World War II drew to a close. After swapping his uniform for civilian dress, O’Neill studied physics and mathematics at Swarthmore College and Cornell University. He eventually landed a professorship at Princeton, where he built one of the first colliding beam storage rings, a system that paved the way for famous descendants like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. 

In 1965, NASA opened the astronaut corps to scientists, and O’Neill threw his hat in the ring. He passed the early tests but was cut before the final list. With space out of reach, O’Neill settled for the next best thing: taking to the sky as a glider pilot on the weekends and teaching during the week. A few years later, he was still thinking about humanity’s place in the stars as he worked on methods to beam electricity to Earth via space-based solar power. One day in the classroom, wondering about whether other industries might migrate to space, he scribbled a question on the blackboard: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?” 

That thought experiment found institutional backing thanks to Hans Mark, the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. In 1975, Mark funded a 10-week summer faculty fellowship that included 19 professors, six students, and three volunteers. Their brief was to determine whether it was possible to build “settlements” on the final frontier. O’Neill served as technical director.

NASA had begun thinking about crewed exploration outposts as early as 1969, when its post-Apollo plan envisaged a program that included space stations, a lunar surface base, and a later Mars expedition. But in each case, NASA looked to stations and bases as mission infrastructure rather than self-sufficient civilian settlements. 

The result of the fellowship, published in 1977 as Space Settlements: A Design Study, is a beautiful thing to look at. The illustrations feature shimmering aluminum surrounded by purple-hued nebulae, inky shuttle silhouettes and spacewalking astronauts, and pages of graphs and diagrams to emphasize the mathematical rigor behind what was an ambitious vision for the future.  

Over several hundred pages, the document shows us what orbital civilization might look like. It describes how thousands of residents live, work, and play on a 1.8 kilometer diameter torus strategically placed between Earth and the moon. Individual chapters take turns explaining the mechanics of lunar mineral extraction, describing how the station simulates gravity through rotation, and even mulling over the reality of schooling and socializing far from home.

But the most striking aspect of the book is how green it remains. The communities imagined in Space Settlements are peaceful and idyllic, a design choice made by the project’s leadership as the work progressed. When the first concept painting was complete, O’Neill told illustrator Rick Guidice he wanted future versions to include “five hundred square miles of green fields, like an idyllic French countryside.” 

New Jersey it was not, but it looked just as verdant when seen from high above.

Since its release, the iconography has become a touchstone for utopian visions of space exploration spanning video game franchises like Mass Effect and Hollywood blockbusters like Interstellar. Its legacy tells us about the staying power of its visual language, but Space Settlements also teaches us about how the machinery of NASA functions. 

Each year, the agency negotiates with the White House budget office for the following year’s funding. The president sends Congress a request, but only the appropriations committees write the checks. If new bills aren’t passed on time, continuing resolutions freeze NASA near last year’s level. In the case of Space Settlements, NASA’s budget for all follow-on work was cut after the project caught the eye of policymakers who felt the agency needed to carefully allocate its funds. In some ways, this was the outcome they hoped for. Its leaders liked to unveil bold plans to signal ambition before trading away the most speculative pieces during mark-ups to protect its flagship initiatives. 

It’s a pattern that repeats across the agency’s history, from nuclear-powered rockets (proposed in in 1955, cancelled in 1973), to the Space Station Freedom plan (proposed in 1984, watered down in 1993), to the Asteroid Redirect Mission (proposed in 2013, scrapped in 2017). In each case, NASA planned an array of eye-catching ideas that gave way to a handful of marquee projects like Apollo or the shuttle initiative.  

The history of American space exploration is a negotiation between optimism and realism. Space Settlements proves how precarious this balancing act really is. Critics on Capitol Hill attacked what they saw as a deeply unrealistic plan when the document was featured in the press. NASA reacted by throwing its own work under the bus. Only then, once it convinced the politicians it was appropriately clear-eyed about its mission, could NASA  secure new funding and continue to tread the line between scientific potential and political reality. 

The nuclear age that began in 1945 promised salvation and annihilation; its spirit was one of unbounded possibility and grim existentialism. The USSR took an early lead in 1957 with the successful deployment of its Sputnik satellite, in part thanks to the appropriation of German rocketry at the close of World War II. It followed that feat by putting the first man in space in 1961. 

But America had help from German engineers too. Wernher von Braun, who became the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was the architect behind the American space program that would go on to overtake the Soviet Union after President Kennedy’s famous call to action in 1962. NASA’s Project Mercury (its first human spaceflight program) showed that astronauts like Alan Shepard and John Glenn had — as Tom Wolfe would call it in his 1979 book — the right stuff. The Gemini effort refined rendezvous and spacewalking techniques. And finally, Apollo signaled the end of superpower competition in space when the program culminated in six lunar landings between 1969 and 1972. 

But this potted history misses something important. The United States was forced to react to the USSR and reconfigure its strategy. It did so only by leaving existing plans on the table. In the popular imagination, the USA won the Space Race by speeding up; in reality, it won by changing direction. 

Before Kennedy made the moon the mission, engineers expected to orbit a small laboratory in the 1960s, then upgrade to a larger workshop once routine flights were possible. Beyond that lay Earth‑orbit assembly, where dozens of launches would lock propulsion stages into a lunar craft, culminating in a 10-million-pound thrust superbooster called Nova under study at Langley and Marshall since 1959. (Compare this with the 7.5-million-pound thrust Saturn V rocket that would actually launch in 1967.) 

That sequence would have put the first American footprints on the moon in the mid-late 1970s, a timeline that was hastily rewritten when the administration decided that the only way to demonstrate scientific supremacy was to beat the USSR to lunar soil. To make it happen, NASA threw out the orbital assembly logic, canceled Nova, and adopted a lunar‑orbit rendezvous approach that needed only one launch.

For US policymakers desperate to outdo the Soviets, nonessential projects like the orbital laboratory were a diversion from the stuff that mattered. NASA knew that funding flowed from ambition, but that ambition needed to seem realistic to keep the cash coming. After sidelining space stations, the agency’s appropriations increased from $1.8 billion in 1962 to $5 billion by 1965, more than 4% of all federal spending (a real-terms high that would never again be matched).

The moment Armstrong stepped off the ladder and onto the Sea of Tranquility, the fiscal tide turned for American space exploration. Annual outlays fell from $5 billion in 1967 to slightly over $3 billion in 1974, a 40% cut in nominal terms. Inside the Nixon White House, Budget Director Robert Mayo was instructed to model futures in the vicinity of $2.5 to $3 billion, and staff even sketched a $1.5 billion scenario that would have scrubbed piloted flight after Apollo 14. 

During this period, NASA looked to practical activities that might provide taxpayers with tangible returns on their investment. One way to do that was through reintroducing the space station as a sensible, practical, and economically viable next step for the agency. Congress wanted visible payoffs in the afterglow of Apollo, so NASA reimagined old space station concepts as infrastructure for Earth observation, materials research, weather, telecoms, and satellite servicing. 

George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for manned flight, suggested in 1969 that the United States could have a space station that “would provide us with direct television broadcasting and direct radio broadcasting to the homes of all people in the world, as well as providing us with great stellar observatories and a viewing platform for air traffic control, navigation and for a permanent weather watch” — all before the end of the 1970s. In practice, the concept of an enormous “space base” gave way to Skylab’s single workshop and then, eventually, to modular, shuttle-serviced labs.

The plan for life after Apollo still centered on a single launch station the size of a Saturn V second stage. NASA commissioned aerospace firms McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell to design a 12-person laboratory that would orbit in 1977 and operate for a decade. It was conceived as the keystone of a much larger 100-person installation to follow, but the signs were already ominous for the project. 

On Capitol Hill, the 1970 appropriations debate reminded NASA that it must make a case for every dollar spent. President Nixon was loath to part with more cash as members lumped space stations in with worrisome “ambitious new goals,” forcing NASA leadership to circle the wagons around a single project: the reusable shuttle. 

Without the promise of a major station, Saturn V production lines were shut, and work on space stations was once again cut back. Those who previously worked on the project were told to curb their enthusiasm for anything with room for more than a couple astronauts. America’s first space station, the dinky Skylab, did manage to survive –– but only because it was a holdover from the Apollo applications program and already under construction when the axe fell.

By the opening years of the 1970s, NASA was reckoning with the legacy of its own success. Apollo won the Space Race, but that victory forced the organization to scramble for a new organizing mission. The shuttle program promised cheap, routine access to orbit — 50 flights a year, quick turnaround, a single system to lift science, commercial cargo, and military satellites. Yet it never captured the public imagination in the same way that the moon landing did.

Meanwhile, the mood was souring on Capitol Hill. The Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth report argued that the global population would collapse at some point in the next 100 years as consumption outpaced resource generation; the 1973 oil shock quadrupled crude prices and made energy security a nightly news item; and wartime spending in Vietnam left Congress hunting for domestic savings. This is why NASA administrator James Fletcher told Congress the shuttle was “the linchpin for all civil and defense activities in space,” and proponents reimagined it as “a commercial truck” that would tow satellites into orbit and pay for itself through launch fees. 

Against that backdrop, funding Space Settlements made a kind of sense. NASA needed only a token sum to pay visiting academics for a few weeks, and in return it got an environmentally resonant shuttle destination that fit the Limits to Growth narrative that stressed overpopulation. The study was a low-cost hedge that let NASA claim it was thinking beyond near‑Earth trucking without committing a dollar more than the logic of austerity would allow. There were few downsides, so long as the work didn’t stray too far from its proper context. 

But stray far it did. The study escaped containment in October 1977, when 60 Minutes aired a segment titled “Space Colonies,” produced by CBS News, based on the study. The report opened with sweeping panoramas of the illustrations and O’Neill explaining the ins and outs of life in space. Viewers saw lunar mass drivers hurling rocks and gigantic mirrors beaming sunlight into the imagined space station. At one moment, O’Neill was shown in discussion with engineers, while at another the segment cut to renderings of rolling farmland, smiling families, and little rowboats under a rotating sky. 

Not everyone liked what they saw. Senator William Proxmire, subcommittee chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee that set NASA’s budget, reacted with a mixture of horror and incredulity. He faxed CBS a short note that made his position clear: “It’s the best argument yet for chopping NASA’s funding to the bone … not a penny for this nutty fantasy.” Three months later, answering a constituent who asked why he opposed colonies but not solar power satellites, Proxmire sharpened the point: “What I do not favor is developing a program that, in my view, would cost hundreds of billions and perhaps trillions of dollars to place a relatively few people –– 10, 15 or 20 thousand –– in a space capsule.”  

During the markup of NASA’s funding for the following year, “Darth” Proxmire (as he came to be known to space exploration enthusiasts) moved to strike all mentions of “space industrialization” from the budget. It was a modest $5 million request that would have funded follow‑up design work on mass drivers and life support, but the committee supported Proxmire and moved to withhold funding. The group at NASA’s Ames center that sponsored the work, the Advanced Programs Office, was dissolved around this time. 

It might sound as if NASA was on the back foot, but historians suggest the agency was all too happy to turn space settlement research into a sacrificial lamb. Howard McCurdy, in Inside NASA, describes how post‑Apollo managers “learned to trade away blue‑sky studies to show Congress they grasped the new age of restraint.” And in The Visioneers, Patrick McCray reports that many within the organization came to associate O’Neill’s space stations with a “giggle factor” that undercut the importance of its mission. 

Paul Werbos, a pro-space exploration organizer best known for his work on the backpropagation machine learning algorithm, wrote in L5 News[^ The magazine of the L5 Society, which would eventually become the National Space Society, a civilian group that advocates for the expansion of civilization beyond Earth.] in 1978 that “people in NASA are almost paranoid about the public relations aspects of the idea; no one expects Congress to commit us to O’Neill‑style habitats.” In that light, the report had two very different uses. It was ambitious enough to prove the agency could still dream but expendable enough to be slaughtered when Proxmire came looking for cuts. 

Seeking to show it meant business, NASA doubled down on the shuttle program. By 1979, the vehicle’s development absorbed roughly 70 cents of every R&D dollar the agency received. Administrators sold the shuttle by talking up the high flight numbers and modest launch costs, plus capabilities like satellite repair, laboratory deployment, and various military uses. 

Congress bought it because the promise fit the pragmatic tenor of the post‑Apollo era. Within five years engineers who had once drafted lunar base habitats were redesigning payload mounts and thermal tile. Everything else waited on the assumption that, once the shuttle flew, America’s next great push would follow.

The shuttle was an attractive idea in principle, but the program never lived up to its potential. After the triumphant first flight of Columbia in 1981, NASA maintained that its fleet could manage a cadence of 50 launches a year by the late 1980s. In reality, the shuttle effort peaked at nine flights in 1985 and never again reached that figure. Challenger’s loss in 1986 froze the fleet for over two years, exposed the booster joints as a design compromise driven by cost, and forced rocket segments to be rebuilt. 

When the shuttles were once again ready, the launch price had ballooned from a projected $10 million per shot to roughly $1.5  billion in fully loaded costs, a number the agency itself acknowledged in internal audits. They managed eight missions in 1997, followed by a handful a year until in 2003 a faulty panel on Columbia’s left wing ended the dream of airline‑style operations for good. Retirement came 135 flights and $196 billion later in 2011. 

As the shuttle was getting underway, NASA’s topline jumped from $6.9 billion to $9.1 billion between 1983 and 1988 in the heat of renewed competition with the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration wanted a space station to compete with the Russian Mir orbital habitat, which unlocked extra cash for the proposed Space Station Freedom shortly before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and America’s moment of unilateral power. 

As estimates for the program continued to rise and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger imposed a new wave of costs on the shuttle effort, Space Station Freedom morphed into what we now know as the International Space Station. Served by the shuttle, the project represented a new era of cooperation between NASA and partners at the European Space Agency, Japan, Canada, and the Russian Federation. From a resource management perspective, the station endured only because its price was spread across multiple space agencies. As soon as the shuttle fleet retired, the underlying logic of consolidation reasserted itself as NASA looked for its next moonshot. 

In 2005 Constellation became that project when its Ares I and Ares V rockets promised a path back to the moon. Yet in 2010, the Obama White House cancelled it after costs doubled and schedules slid –– leaving NASA without a human launch capacity for almost a decade. Congress insisted on a replacement, and the agency locked onto the Space Launch System, a single architecture on which Mars, lunar return, and NASA’s deep space dreams would depend.  

The NASA we know today lives in Apollo’s long shadow. The success of the moon landing is the reason the agency likes to champion one megaproject to keep the money flowing and trade-in its options through the theater of fiscal restraint. The shuttle program showed the hidden cost of that reflex. Its eventual cancellation left satellites stranded, ISS crews reliant on Russia’s Soyuz, and Congress looking at an empty launch pad. Those shocks persuaded NASA to build for redundancy, beginning with Commercial Cargo in 2006 and Commercial Crew in 2010. From then on the agency awarded fixed-price launch contracts to at least two private firms, with NASA as anchor-tenant rather than owner‑operator. SpaceX became the beneficiary of that shift, flying cargo to the ISS in 2012 and crew in 2020.

The commercial launch boom that followed was the end result of the same impulse that started and eventually shuttered the speculative work of the 1970s. Both flowed from a tension between vision and pragmatism, the familiar dynamic that has animated every strategic choice since the dawn of the space age. Space Settlements epitomizes that mediation. The document represents a foundational vision of utopian space exploration, one that still gets referenced by academics, concept artists, hobbyists, and technologists thinking — and dreaming — about space. Initially useful as a source of inspiration aligned with the prevailing cultural climate, it was discarded by NASA when it crashed headfirst into political reality. 

The agency sacrificed O’Neill’s station designs to prove it had the discipline to focus every spare dollar on a marquee project, a strategy that banished jokes about pulp sci-fi futures. Seen in this light, NASA’s history is a negotiation between the need to dream big enough to ignite the public imagination and the need to appear credible, disciplined, and worthy of American tax dollars.