Hi there,

its been a while since I followed your discussions.
But from a quick glance the discussion group is doing well.

What I did do during the last months was to get myself a copy of
High frontier 3rd edition. 20 years or so ago I found this book
in the local city library. It was a German translation, of course.
(These days I hated English. I'm not good at learning vocabulary and
school lessons didn't motivate me.) So I don't know which edition,
but I would guess the first one.

Anyway, the book made a hughe impression on me 20 years ago and I was
looking forward to read it. But I was disappointed. Quite some
of the technical details seemed to be missing and philosophical
points seemed to be emphasized. I liked the book exactly because
of these many technical details which made it believable to me.

Okay, there is the NASA Summer Study in the attached CD, containing
(most?) of the details I missed. And reading between the lines I
realized that those details removed from the book seem to be ideas
that turned out to be difficult or to have better solutions.

As an example take the mass catcher system related to the mass thrower.
It is crucial to the plan, but seemed to be omitted from the book.
(Maybe it is mentioned in a short remark. But at least some
pictures are missing.)

Reading in the summer study I found the mass catcher I remember
as an option discarded from the plan: "Uncertainty about achieving
the accuracy of launching required for this catcher, and also some
doubt about whether the material would break up and be contained
as planned, led to the rejection of this alternative."

Okay, the proposed alternative catcher is much more
complicated in comparision and lacks a lot of details. But
I feel omitting the original plan AND the currently best found
alternative from the book doesn't make it more credible.

All of O'Neills original work gives me the impression of a honest
man and scientist doing a great job. Of course he couldn't find
the very best technical solution for every problem. His big
achievement was to prove that a plan for such a settling of space
existed and was well within the level of technology already available.

Why not freely say that there still are a lot of problems to solve
and invite the reader to take part in solving them?

[By the way, I reckon I could suggest a possibly better solution
for the mass catcher system, if anyone cares to discuss it.
But maybe there already is a better solution around?]

Pruning and cutting down O'Neills work to keep only the "optimal" parts
gives the impression of going from sound scientific work to
a manipulative sort of public relation work. This impression
is amplified by one of the added articles where the "movement"
is described as some sort of "conspiracy" against the establishment
using slogans as "social missiles". O'Neils vision is admirable,
but it shouldn't become a religion-like movement.
Or else it will loose credibility.

Futhermore I'm sorry to say that the added papers don't seem to
have the quality of the original work. While O'Neill is careful
to present facts as facts and speculations as speculations, some
of the added papers are not so meticulous. I dare to say so at
least from the paper about robotics, which is the area where I
did my Ph.D. Also claiming that kinetic energy in the solar system
is much larger than solar energy output is a clever fact, and
it's sure fun to know. But any relation to the High Frontier is
not very credibly presented. (Okay, that's worth a different posting
and this one is becoming already quite lengthy. So I stop here.)