A Dream Renewed: Space Settlement in the 21st Century

Since 1977, when Gerard K. O'Neill's book The High Frontier was first published, there have been few attempts to push for new developments in large-scale, orbital space settlement, which remains an under-investigated subject. The most significant attempt to conduct this work, the Princeton Space Manufacturing Conferences established by O'Neill, ended in the late 1990s, and the systematic work conducted since then has mainly focused on peripheral topics such as lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), avoiding direct consideration of the possibilities of life in orbital space.

In 2021, the National Space Society, in collaboration with NASA Advanced Innovation Concepts (NIAC), hosted the NSS Space Settlement Workshop to revisit the idea. Over the course of two days, more than fifty academics, engineers, NASA officials, and high-level leaders in the space exploration industry worked in tandem to perform a careful review of plans for major space settlement. This contemporary update dove deep into previously overlooked and lightly addressed subject areas and introduced many new and unique approaches to living off-Earth. A compendium of the results, A Dream Renewed: O'Neill's Vision of Space Settlement in the 21st Century is an exclusive report of that work and is the first comprehensive update since the 1970s.

Through curated chapters by the most brilliant and forward-thinking scientific minds in the industry, A Dream Renewed offers a window into the possibilities of human expansion into the final frontier.