Portal:Spaceflight/Selected biography/October 2008

Gerard K. O'Neill (February 6, 1927–April 27, 1992) was an American physicist and space pioneer who in the 1970s developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space. His space habitat design, known as the O'Neill cylinder, was first published in a 1974 Physics Today article. O'Neill also founded the Space Studies Institute, an organization devoted to funding research into space manufacturing and space colonization. (more...)