Will we finally deploy the O'Neil mass driver?

In 1937, Edwin Northrup wrote about an "electric gun" in his (terrible) novel "Zero to Eighty." The book contained diagrams and the author actually built some prototypes at Princeton to prove out the idea, demonstrating it works well. Gerard O'Neill scaled up the concept and proposed a mass driver, aka "coil gun" in 1974.  That same year, O'Neill's "Colonization of Space" paper came out in Physics Today.  Reading that article changed my life. I joined the L5 Society (our song). It seems Jeff Bezos is also one of "Gerry's kids," embracing O'Neill's vision of human space colonization.

Among the key elements in O'Neill's vision is the use of mass drivers to move materials in space and also as a form of propulsion.  Land solar-powered mass drivers on a small asteroid, and use some of the mass of the asteroid itself as reaction mass to push the rock through space and park it in an orbit you want.  Robots assemble a large mass driver on the moon, then send the lunar regolith to a Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon, where solar smelters turn the ore into aluminum to build space colonies (and oxygen to breathe).  As O'Neill said in his lecture tour (that I attended), "The calculations [proving viability] are simple freshman physics."

If you are a "space nerd" like me, you should really read the book or watch the 2023 documentary "The High Frontier." I attended the MIT independent activities period (IAP) where they built a mass driver. I was a founding member of the L5 Society.

The military developed a rail gun for ships and the system is operational, but it will be phased out in favor of other systems that are superior for the military's purposes.

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A new Space company, "Moonshot Space" just came out of stealth and will develop a terrestrial mass driver to move fuel and cargo to low earth orbit. The payloads must be able to survive extremely high acceleration and the scale-up to send over 100 Kg per launch will be interesting to watch.