Orbital Rings

What people said

K0SM0S · 2019-10 · Strong recommendation

This is totally right. You might really like Isaac Arthur on YouTube if you don't know him already. "Orbital rings" [1] in his "Upward Bound" series might be just right your alley. Of course, there's so much more he produced, it's even hard to keep up. I personally dream of some "Megastructures" he suggests... Actually already began myself to think of a Dyson Swarm around Earth (for starters) which could then serve as a positional basis for future orbital rings. He really inspired me to think bigger, now. [1]: [VIDEO]

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cletus · 2022-10 · Recommendation

Here is my hope (and my belief): the ultimate end here is orbital rings [1]. To summarize the video, you can put copper cabling in orbit, run a current through it and keep things in place (relative to a point on Earth) with magnetic levitation. The most important part of this is that you can have things in LEO that are fixed to Earth points. Why does this matter? No longer do you have to speed up to Mach 30 to reach orbital speeds. You could technically run a cable from 150km up and carry people and goods from Earth into LEO and back. This could revolutionize long-distance travel on Earth too. It's estimated that a space-based power collector could create about ~7 times the energy of an Earth based collector due to less power loss from the atmosphere and night (to be clear, a solar collector in orbit would still occasionally be occluded by the Earth but it won't be half the time). You can get power down to Earth in two ways: you can transmit it. This is actually viable but is not ideal. Alternatively, if you have an orbital ring, you can attach it to that and just run cables down to Earth. We use longer power transmission lines than that on Earth already. All of this requires no new physics, no magical materials (eg space elevators do) and are just (admittedly massive) engineering projects. If you can get solar panels into orbit for <$10/kg payload costs and run cables down to Earth, you'll solve the variance issue with solar and create cheap power on a massive scale. And non

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cletus · 2022-03 · Recommendation

For another view on how this will change things, consider the delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. As an example you need 45km/s to reach Saturn, roughly 20% of that is just spent getting to Low Earth Orbit. Now consider the long-term trend in the payload cost (by weight) of getting to LEO [2]. This is why people such as myself are so bullish on spaceX (despite quite reasonable qualms about Elon Musk as a person). The impact this has had and will continue to have on reducing this number cannot be overstated. But all of this are still interim steps and we can potentially get the payload to LEO cost under $10/kg. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of this, I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur's Upward Bound series [3], I consider the ultimate end to this to be Orbital Rings [4]. Even if you don't believe there's a reason for humans to go to space en masse (which I disagree with), this will greatly impact life on earth, for example with space-based solar power collectors. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [VIDEO]

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