Gerard K. O'Neill proposed the
Island 3-style space habitat in his 1976 book
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. The colonies were designed to take advantage of existing or easily achievable technology of the era, and would have made use of weightless, orbital construction techniques using raw materials mined from asteroids. The construction of even a few of these colonies could have begun as early as the 1980s, and would have ensured Humanity a permanent toe-hold in outer space, and a beachhead for Human expansion into the rest of the cosmos.
This project, which after endorsement by NASA entered a very tentative research phase, became the keystone of the argument used by
William Proxmire to slash NASA funding in the 1970s, which stated that such a project was nothing more than a "nutty fantasy", despite the fact that the program was entirely feasible from a technical standpoint and would have been a major boon to American prestige in the post-Apollo era.
If Proxmire hadn't used NASA funding disputes to further his political career, the world might have seen a technological an economic boom which would have put the gains from Apollo to shame.
O'Neill died in 1992, without ever having seen any progress toward his grand vision.
Proxmire died in 2005, and nobody in the space community shed a tear.
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