L5 Society

Artist's conception of a space habitat called the Stanford torus, by Don Davis.

O'Neill's first published paper on the subject, "The Colonization of Space", appeared in the magazine Physics Today in September 1974. A number of people who later became leaders of the L₅ Society got their first exposure to the idea from this article. Among these were a couple from Tucson, Arizona, Carolyn Meinel and Keith Henson. The Hensons corresponded with O'Neill and were invited to present a paper on "Closed Ecosystems of High Agricultural Yield" at the 1975 Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing Facilities, which was organized by O'Neill.[3]

At this conference, O'Neill merged the Solar Power Satellite (SPS) ideas of Peter Glaser with his space habitat concepts.[4]

The Hensons incorporated the L₅ Society in August 1975, and sent its first 4-page newsletter in September to a sign up list from the conference and O'Neill's mailing list.[5] The first newsletter included a letter of support from Morris Udall (then a contender for US president) and said "our clearly stated long range goal will be to disband the Society in a mass meeting at L₅."[6]

The peak of L₅'s influence was the defeat of the Moon Treaty in the U.S. Senate in 1980 ("... L-5 took on the biggest political fight of its short life, and won").[3] Specifically, L₅ Society activists campaigned for awareness of the provisions against any form of sovereignty or private property in outer space that would make space colonization impossible and the provisions against any alteration of the environment of any celestial body prohibiting terraforming. Leigh Ratiner [a Washington lawyer/lobbyist] "played the key role in the lobbying effort, although he had energetic help from L-5 activists, notably Eric Drexler and Christine Peterson."[7][8]

Although economic analysis [9] indicated the SPS/space colony concept had merit, it foundered on short political and economic horizons and the fact that the transport cost to space was about 300 times too high for individuals to fund when compared to the Plymouth Rock and Mormon colonies.[10]

NASA concept art from 2001 of an envisioned lunar mining facility.

In 1986, the L₅ Society, which had grown to about 10,000 members, merged with the 25,000 member National Space Institute, to form the present-day National Space Society. The National Space Institute had been founded in 1972 by Wernher von Braun, the former German rocket engineer of the WW II Nazi V-2 rocket/ballistic missile program, and of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Project Apollo program manager.[11]

While the L₅ Society failed to achieve the goal of human settlements in space, it served as a focal point for many of the people who later became known in fields such as nanotechnology, memetics, extropianism, cryonics, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and tether propulsion, such as K. Eric Drexler, Robert Forward, and Hans Moravec.[12][13]

The L5 News[14] was the newsletter of the L₅ Society reporting on space habitat development and related space issues. The L₅ News was published from September 1975 until April 1987, when the merger with the National Space Institute was completed and the newly formed National Space Society began publication of its own magazine, Ad Astra.