Apollo-era space colony dreams inspire Musk’s moon transport plan   

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced a pivot from Mars to the moon, one detail of his plan caused eyebrows to raise. Musk plans to build something called a mass driver on the lunar surface to deploy AI data centers into Earth orbit. These facilities would be built on the moon before being launched into space using the device.

What is a mass driver? It turns out that the technology has a storied history going back to just after the Apollo moon landings.

It all started when a physics professor at Princeton named Gerard K. O’Neil, inspired by the Apollo program, asked his students to write papers describing the problems of building a human space habitat. Urged by his students’ insights, he published his own paper in Physics Today entitled “The Colonization of Space.” He would later expand his ideas in a best-selling book called “The High Frontier.”

The idea of space colonies has been around for many decades, largely a topic of science fiction. All of the extraterrestrial settlements were depicted as being on the surface of another world, say the moon, Mars or someplace more Earth-like orbiting another star. Musk’s vision for cities on the moon and Mars is an attempt to make science fiction a reality.

O’Neill hit upon the notion of building space colonies in space itself, in the form of free-flying cylinders that rotated to create gravity for people living inside. The “O’Neill Cylinders,” as they were called, would be built of material........

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