FUTURE TECH
These megastructures could ring around Earth to provide global transport systems
Today, transporting people and cargo into space is an extremely expensive, dangerous and time-consuming enterprise. It relies on rockets that can only take relatively small loads into Earth orbit. To make space more accessible, scientists have put forward the idea of building space elevators. These would consist of cables made of carbon nanotubes that would carry an elevator from the Earth’s equator to a geostationary space station linked to a counter-mass. Linked to the space elevator is the concept of creating an orbital ring or orbital ring systems. As early as the 1870s, inventor Nikola Tesla thought that a solid structure built around the equator would “float freely and could be arrested in its spinning motion by reactionary forces”. Using this orbital ring, he predicted that passengers could travel at a speed of around 1,600 kilometres per hour (990 miles per hour) around the globe.
A simple orbital ring could be made from cables or inflatable modules that could be constructed in space or transported in a space elevator. As this orbits the equator, ring stations ride on superconducting magnets to keep them positioned over the same point on Earth. By this means, space elevators can be attached to the ring stations. A better method of keeping the ring stations in a geostationary orbit is to attach them to the ring and accelerate the ring eastwards to counteract the motion of the rotating Earth. The benefit of this is that you can obtain a geostationary orbit without having to travel almost 36,000 kilometres (22,000 miles), as satellites have to do today to remain over the same ar
