People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it. The talking point was that it would be a larger evacuated space than the largest vacuum chamber ever built by NASA and therefore impossible, not considering that a very long tube is not comparable to a huge dome. You dunked on me before but I am vindicated!
2 points
People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it.
Nah it’s been kicking around since maybe 1904: https://web.archive.org/web/20140630081422/https://black-cat-studios.com/goddardstory.pdf
Gerard K. O’Neill really popularised the idea in the 1970s
