7 EPILOGUE

2IN one of his ‘‘extraordinary moments of purely poetical lucidities,’’ Fuller has ventured boldly into the unknown could-be’s of the future:

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4With major dimensional expansion in unimpeded environment controls, which are automatically self-erected in remote, rocket ferry-reached, installation locales, it may well be practical, and possible, to install within giant Tensegrities all the component phenomena which enter into the regenerative cycles of complementary chemical event patterning governing local exchange balancing of oxygen and carbon molecules alternately favorable to respective metabolic environments of animals and vegetables.

5A Tensegrity sphere, suitably skinned, may be capsule-folded for rocket-borne release outside of earth’s envelope with automated opening. So that, if still within Earth’s gravitational domain, it would return to the atmospheric envelope as a Ping-Pong ball thrown upon the ocean, decelerating in approximately frictionless subsidence to exquisite equilibrium, to float around the outer atmospheric surface, as a ship upon the sea, gradually leaking and submerging only if its skin sieve mesh is not everywhere smaller than the air molecules. If such a Tensegrity is of adequate magnitude, it can be ballasted, contain importantly large man activities and apparatus, and be rocket-propelled in directional control for progressive positioning. It can contain a small 100 ft. Tensegrity, in turn having an air concentration tolerable to man, without important altitude loss.⁰

6 Such is the vision of a heavenly body created by man himself—a hollow Tensegrity sphere floating sublimely upon earth’s atmospheric ocean as revealed to the mind’s eye of Richard Buckminster Fuller, much as once upon a time there was revealed to Jules Verne the vision of man flying within that atmospheric ocean in poetic ‘‘Argosies of magic sails, Flying down with costly bales.’’

7 Fuller here reveals the power of comprehensive, searching analysis as, with careful attention to the applicable scientific considerations, he extrapolates from his established Tensegrity discoveries. Having harnessed tensile force to better purpose for life in Earth’s lands and seas, he now foretells how tensile integrity structures may one day provide a life for man beyond the skies.

8 Foreseen by Fuller as early as 1960. Portfolio & Art News Annual, No. 4, 1961