Orbital Ring - Birch's Model

Birch's Model

In the simplest design of an orbital ring system, a rotating cable or possibly an Inflatable space structure is placed in a low Earth orbit above the equator, rotating at faster than orbital speed. Not in orbit, but riding on this ring, supported electromagnetically on superconducting magnets, are ring stations that stay in one place above some designated point on Earth. Hanging down from these ring stations are short space elevators made from cables with high tensile strength to mass ratio materials.

Although this simple model would work best above the equator, Paul Birch found that since the ring station can be used to accelerate the orbital ring eastwards as well as hold the tether, it is therefore possible to deliberately cause the orbital ring to precess around the Earth instead of staying fixed in space while the Earth rotates beneath it. By precessing the ring once every 24 hours, the Orbital Ring will hover above any meridian selected on the surface of the Earth. The cables which dangle from the ring are now geostationary without having to reach geostationary altitude or without having to be placed into the equatorial plane. This means that using the Orbital Ring concept, one or many pairs of Stations can be positioned above any points on Earth desired or can be moved everywhere on the globe. Thus, any point on Earth can be served by a space elevator. Also a whole network of orbital rings can be built, which, by crossing over the poles, could cover the whole planet and be capable of taking over most of freight and passenger transport. By an array of elevators and several geostationary ring stations, asteroid or Moon material can be received and gently put down where land fills are needed. The electric energy generated in the process would pay for the system expansion and ultimately could pave the way for a solar-system-wide terraforming- and astroengineering-activity on a sound economical basis.

If built by launching the necessary materials from Earth, the estimated cost for the system in 1980s money was around $31 trillion if launched using Shuttle-derived hardware, whereas it could fall to $15 billion with bootstrapping, assuming a large orbital manufacturing facility is available to provide the initial 18,000 tonnes of steel, aluminium, and slag at a low cost, and even lower with orbital rings around the moon. The system's cost per kilogram to place payloads in orbit would be around $0.05.