The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

Dyson, Freeman John (1923–)
An English-born theoretical physicist, a president of the
Space Sciences Institute, and a professor emeritus at the
Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, who has had a
lifelong interest in space travel and space colonization. In
the late 1950s, Dyson became involved with the Orion
Project to develop a nuclear-powered spacecraft. He is
also well known for his audacious 1960 scheme of plane-
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tary engineering, which would involve processing the
materials of uninhabited planets—including Jupiter—and
satellites to fashion many habitats in heliocentric orbits.
A shell-like accumulation of such habitats has been called
a Dyson sphere. 83 The concept became modified by science
fiction writers to include a rigid, monolithic sphere;
however, this is probably unrealizable on dynamic and
structural grounds.