News
Isaac Arthur’s New Video “Vacuum Trains” Exhibits Tethered Ring Transportation Technologies
New Improvements Made to Digital Twin’s Tethers
New! Graviton Media Releases Video on YouTube
Isaac Arthur’s Interplanetary Infrastructure Video Reveals New Launch Technology
Presentation at the Ascend2023 Conference in Las Vegas
Full Paper Link
ISDC2023 Interplanetary Infrastructure Session Covers Falcon 9, Starship, and Mass Drivers on Earth
About Us
A Tethered Ring is a dynamic structure that can cost-effectively support space launch facilities, transportation infrastructure, and a sizable human settlement at high altitudes. An altitude of 32 km and a population of 250,000 is shown to be achievable using circa 2017 science and technology. The structure resembles a pipeline formed into a ring having a diameter similar to that of Earth’s moon. It stays aloft primarily by generating and properly combining inertial forces with tensile forces to offset the pull of gravity. The inertial forces are produced by the circular motion of magnetically levitated rings within the pipeline, and the tensile forces are generated by appropriately tethering the pipelines to the planet using stays made of strong, light-weight, industrial fiber. The entire structure can be fabricated on Earth and neither its construction nor its deployment depends on a pre-existing space infrastructure or space-based industry. The deployed structure is resilient to catastrophic failure because its precision-guided fast moving components are: a) not exposed to seismic or climatic battering, and b) safely above and thus out of range of tacit civilizational threats, such attacks involving torpedoes or commandeered aircraft. The tethered ring is an optimal “stepping stone” infrastructure for furnishing humanity with a safe, affordable, and sustainable means to escape Earth’s gravity, expand its civilization into space, and ultimately evolve into a multi-planetary species.
The Tethered Ring is a Key Enabling Technology for Helping Humanity Expand into the Solar System
The Atlantis Project’s goals are to:
- Develop the technologies needed to significantly reduce the cost of space launch, making space accessible to ordinary people,
- Increase awareness about the need for transformative change to occur within the space launch industry,
- Educate on the numerous short-term and long-term benefits of successfully developing low-cost and sustainable space launch infrastructure.
Initiatives
Technology
The Architectural Model
A detailed architectural model of the Tethered Ring has been created for you to interact with (See the “Interactive 3D Simulation” link in the menu above.) The code is also available on GitHub for people who have coding skills and who wish to pitch in by doing development work.
The White Paper
Our 100+ page white paper dives into hundreds of topics. It is a collaboratively edited document and we encourage team members to read it and contribute to it. If you have questions about the technology underlying the Tethered Ring and the business models that it supports, it is very likely that you will find the answers that you are looking for somewhere in this document.
A Transit Vehicle Docked at a Habit with Spectacular Crepuscular Rays Visible on the Earth Below
How Space Infrastructure Solves Problems on Earth
Renewable Energy Generation, Storage, and Transmission
Energy Generation
Mounting photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on the ring for the purpose of sustainably generating electricity has several advantages when compared to terrestrial PV solar. Ring-mounted panels will be more efficient since they are above the clouds, above 90% of the atmosphere, and because they will tend to stay clean. With tracking, they will generate at close to full power from sunrise to sunset. At the ambient temperature at 32km altitude of -40˚, the panels will be more efficient and will last longer. They can be made lighter and at lower cost as they will not need to be hardened to withstand hailstorms.
Energy Storage
The moving rings in the tethered ring reference design store 58 TWh of kinetic energy. Generated energy drives liner motors that accelerate these moving rings further. This converts the electrical energy into kinetic energy. Linear generators convert the kinetic energy of the moving rings back into electrical energy.
The moving rings can time-shift energy far more cost-effectively than, for example Li-Ion batteries, which solves renewable energy’s number one problem – intermittency of supply. The rings can also store and release energy over and over again, for many decades, without degradation or capacity fade.
Energy Transmission
Energy can be added in one place and taken out in another, thus the moving rings can both store energy and transport it. Power travels between the ring and the ground either through vertical transmission lines or wires embedded within the tethers.
High-Speed, Carbon-Neutral, International Transportation
The Situation Today
The current state of the art is sub-sonic commercial aircraft.
The world would like to transition to a carbon neutral economy by 2050, but when it comes to international travel, nobody seems to have figured out a good way to do that. Batteries are not energy dense enough to electrify the kinds of planes that fly the long-haul routes. High speed electric trains are possibility, but high-speed train corridors are costly.
High-Altitude Tube Transport
A Tethered Ring supported, evacuated tube transit system has several advantages over airplanes. Individual vehicles are small, like business jets. They depart frequently, are autonomous, and travel very fast. They travel on maglev tracks, and they are not burdened with heavy components such as wings, engines, fuel tanks, landing gear. They can’t be hi-jacked which means that security screening will be more like train-station security than airport security.
Society and the Environment
Airports and high-speed rail corridors devalue and isolate neighborhoods. High-speed rail corridors can interfere with animal migration. Airplanes do not just generate greenhouse gasses, they deposit particulates directly into the stratosphere.
Evacuated tube transport is more energy efficient because the magnetically levitated vehicles are lighter, cruise with minimal air resistance, and employ regenerative braking. The little energy that they do use is 100% renewably generated.
Broadband Communications
Mega-Constellations
There has been a lot of recent interest in providing internet service by using LEO satellite mega-constellations. In these systems, the customer’s equipment finds, tracks, and connects to satellites. The satellites then connect to ground stations which in turn connect to the Internet. These constellations increase Internet bandwidth and reduce latency for people living in remote communities. However, the constellation’s satellites must be deorbited and replaced when their rechargeable batteries wear out or when their propellent tanks run dry. The professional astronomy community has expressed concerns about their observations being “photo-bombed” by satellites. Many groups are concerned that these constellations exacerbate the orbital debris problem and increase the risk of a run-a-way cascade of collisions, called “The Kessler syndrome“.
The Geopolitics
When Sputnik first passed over the US in 1957, it gave birth to an era of geopolitical concern over machines controlled by other countries flying above the nations we live in. In 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while conducting photographic aerial reconnaissance deep inside Soviet territory. More recently, SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon, and others have jumped into the mega-constellation enabled communications business. Chinese military researchers have published an article that says the country needs to be able to disable or destroy SpaceX’s satellites if they threaten national security. SpaceX implemented anti-jamming technology and delivered Starlink dishes to Ukraine, a country that is at war with Russia (ref).
Is There a Better Way?
It is possible to create a more profitable service by mounting communications gear on a Tethered Ring. Recurring satellite launch costs are avoided. Ring-mounted gear would have a fiber connection to the Internet, so there is no need for ground stations to handle back-haul. Customer equipment no longer needs a clear view of the entire sky – it just needs line-of-site to a transceiver mounted on the ring. User equipment is cheaper because it does not need to track moving targets.
Because ring-mounted gear is 17 times closer to the customers, it can place 17 squared, or roughly 300 times, as many beams on the ground per square kilometer. This means 300 times as many customers can be served in a region before the system’s bandwidth is saturated.
Finally, ring-mounted communications equipment will not exacerbate the space debris problem, it will not photo-bomb any astronomical observations, and it may help to de-escalate geopolitical tension between nuclear super-powers.
Ultra High-Altitude Real-Estate and Tourism
A Lesson from History
As far back as 1209, when the Old London Bridge was completed, project financers figured out that monetizing the real-estate on their bridges was a great way to help pay for the cost of the project.
Real-Estate on the Ring
A Tethered Ring can support habitable floorspace for 250,000 people. This may sound like a lot of people but keep in mind that airplanes typically support around 750,000 people in the air at any given time. The space in these habitats is premium real-estate that can be sold or leased.
Inspirational Views
After Marty Allen returned from his trip to space in New Shephard, he said “Going up I thought that it was going to be 50% weightlessness and 50% the view. When we got up there it became 5% the weightlessness and 95% the view.”
Increased high-altitude tourism should increase public support for the environment through a well-documented phenomenon called “The Overview Effect”. This is potentially an enormous benefit if it convinces billions of people to make lifestyle changes, and to vote for those leaders who will work the hardest to protect the environment.
Low-Cost, Sustainable Space Launch
Launch Costs Today
The latest data we have shows that in the 2024 to 2026 time frame it will cost NASA and the taxpayers 72 million/person to send someone to the ISS. A SpaceX Crew Dragon can deliver 3310 kg to the ISS; therefore, this equates to 86,793 USD/kg.
The Falcon9 and Crew Dragon system is a very competitive and roughly 90% reusable rocket system. The system supports a high launch cadence – possibly as many as 100 launches per year.
But there is another, sometimes overlooked, cost to NASA and the taxpayers. NASA’s current strategy involves placing additional “bets” on Boeing and Sierra Nevada because they do not want to be cut off from the ISS in the event that any one of their commercial suppliers suffers a major setback which takes their launch system out of service. Because these other investments have yet to pay off, NASA actually spends considerably more per kilogram than what it pays to SpaceX for its ISS commercial resupply services.
Electromagnetic Launch
Electromagnetic launch is a truly transformative idea. The concept here is to accelerate a vehicle up to orbital speeds inside an evacuated tube by using a linear motor. This can be done at an estimated energy cost of around $2 per kilogram.
But there’s a catch. If such a launcher were to be built on the ground, the vehicle would burn up in the atmosphere before it reached space.
However, with a Tethered Ring, then you can put the launcher up in the stratosphere, and this makes the electromagnetic launch idea technically feasible.
Colonizing The Solar System
Presently, North, Central, and South America account for 30 trillion of the 85 trillion dollar per year global economy. It is not hard to imagine a future where off-world colonies contribute tens of trillions of dollars to the solar system’s economy. But what about that first city on Mars?
Imagine a New City On Earth
First, imagine we were building a land-locked city for one million people here on earth…
Transportation Requirements
Imagine that you are a hitchhiker standing on the side of the only highway into the city. How many semi-trucks per minute do you see passing by? Got the number? Now, multiply by: 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, and 36,000 kg per semi-truck.
For example, of you estimated 10 trucks per minute, then this would equate to 189 billion kg/year.
Cost to Mars
If our goal is to instead send mass at the same rate to Mars, and if we want to estimate how much that will cost, we need to multiply our mass rate by:
a) The cost per kg to LEO, and
b) Another factor of, say, 6 to account for refilling in low-earth orbit.
Therefore, the cost will be N x 60 x 24 x 365 x 36,000 x 6 x 86,793 USD/kg x S, where:
‘N’ is the number of trucks-per-minute, and
‘S’ represents the amount that we can reduce launch costs to LEO by making further advances in chemical rocket technology.
If we want N x S to give us a result where the launch costs are less than 1% of our current global GDP, we need…
N x S < 0.01 x 85 trillion / 9082 trillion
N x S < 0.00009
Realistic Expectations
Let’s suppose N is 9. In that case we would need S to be 1/100,000. Such a plan assumes that after roughly 70 years of investment in chemical rocket research, which has been heavily funded by the defense departments of the world’s super-powers, that there is still room to improve upon the very best operational rocket system we have in service today by an additional factor of 100,000.
Is this a realistic expectation?
Enormous Future Value
Colonizing Mars and the rest of the solar system will unlock enormous value and will, without a doubt, pay off in the long run. However, attempting to reach this goal by using chemical rockets is just not economically viable. It is not likely to be good for the environment either.
Infrastructure is Key
The key to unlocking the enormous value of the solar system is sustainable space launch infrastructure.
It is also critical that we focus our efforts on infrastructure proposals that are technically, economically, environmentally, and geopolitically viable, such as the Tethered Ring.
Send us an email via the contact page to let us know if you agree. We would love to hear your thoughts!