Showing posts with label lifeboat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lifeboat. Show all posts

Thursday, November 3, 2016

The O'Neill Cylinder


The O'Neill cylinder (also called an O'Neill colony) is a space settlement design proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. O'Neill proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.

An O'Neill cylinder would consist of two counter-rotating cylinders. The cylinders would rotate in opposite directions in order to cancel out any gyroscopic effects that would otherwise make it difficult to keep them aimed toward the Sun. Each would be 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter and 20 miles (32 km) long, connected at each end by a rod via a bearing system. They would rotate so as to provide artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces.

While teaching undergraduate physics at Princeton University, O'Neill set his students the task of designing large structures in outer space, with the intent of showing that living in space could be desirable. Several of the designs were able to provide volumes large enough to be suitable for human habitation. This cooperative result inspired the idea of the cylinder, and was first published by O'Neill in a September 1974 article of Physics Today.

O'Neill's project was not completely without precedent. In 1954, the German scientist Hermann Oberth described the use of gigantic habitable cylinders for space travel in his book Menschen im Weltraum – Neue Projekte für Raketen- und Raumfahrt ("People in space – New projects for rockets and space travel"). (read more)


Friday, July 8, 2011

lifeboat


Spinning around in space...

we are all...

in the same lifeboat.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Spinning Lifeboat


We are spinning around on earth at 1,000 mph...

while we are orbiting the sun at 67,000 mph...

while we orbit the milky way galaxy at 483,000 mph...

are you dizzy yet?

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Lifeboat

This is a photograph

taken by Apollo 8 at the moon

Enlarge the image

and experience that feeling

when they saw their precious

lifeboat

Friday, July 10, 2009

My Precious


Life is short

Life is hard

Life is precious