This is L5 News, a newsletter about settling the space frontier.
Shown above is the Sun-Earth system and the five LaGrange points, which are solutions to the three-body problem in two dimensions. The objects are not in the same scale, but are shown for purposes of illustration.
An object with a negligible mass compared to the Sun and the Earth would tend to stay at positions L4 or L5 with minimal station-keeping effort. Celestial objects such as satellites or space colonies or asteroids would be somewhat stable at L3 and statically stable but dynamically unstable at the L1 and L2 positions. The same set of solutions applies to the Earth-Moon system, and to the Sun-Jupiter system. In the case of the Sun and Jupiter there are groups of asteroids found at the L4 and L5 positions in Jupiter’s orbit. We call these the “Trojan” asteroids because they are named for Greek and Trojan heroes from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.
In the 1970s many space settlement enthusiasts joined the L5 Society which at the time was one of the two largest and most effective space advocacy groups in the world. The other was the Space Studies Institute founded by Princeton scientist Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill whose book on the High Frontier described how to build artificial space colonies in orbit and provide them with gravity through rotation.
Later, a well-known and enthusiastic member of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party named Werner von Braun formed a group called the National Space Institute. It was created as part of his legacy after his passing funded in part with a bequest from his last will and testament. The group von Braun founded was entirely dedicated to the nationalist and socialist cause of having a giant space programme funded by and controlled by the national government. In 1988 it was merged with the L5 Society and, as predicted by members of both groups, the leadership of the L5 Society connected with effective local and pro-private enterprise space activities was purged from the new “National Space Society” as the merged groups were known.
Since that time, the terms “L5 Society” and “L5 News” have not been in use by the nationalist socialist group. News about the L5 orbit and the LaGrangian mechanics involved in understanding orbital stability is the subject matter of this substack. Let the cards fall where they may.