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posted by on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-why? dept.

Designers Ostap Rudakevych and Masayuki Sono have unveiled a design for a skyscraper that would hang from an orbiting asteroid:

Clouds Architecture Office has unveiled plans for a futuristic skyscraper dubbed the "Analemma Tower." The building would hover majestically above the ground because it would be attached -- wait for it -- to an actual asteroid, in space, that is forcibly put into orbit around the earth.

If that's not enough to digest, consider that your exact address in this pendulous pad could be anywhere on Earth. The tower will be suspended via high-strength cabling from an asteroid and placed in "eccentric geosynchronous orbit". In other words, it would be always moving -- residents and visitors would take a daily journey between the northern and southern hemispheres with a prolonged visit over a main "home" point like New York City or Dubai (it's always New York City or Dubai, isn't it?)

[...] Analemma Tower's designer Ostap Rudakevych told CNN that the tower could be made of durable and lightweight materials such as carbon fiber and aluminum. Advances in cable engineering would be needed to achieve the cable strength required to support the structure. Power would come from space based solar panels that have a constant exposure to sunlight. Water for the tower will be captured from clouds and rainwater and maintained in a semi-closed loop system.
As proposed the top of the tower sits at 32,000m and would be expected to reach speeds of 300mph as it travels through the sky.

Elysium 1.0?

Also at NBC and BGR.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:51AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:51AM (#486358)

    To start with since this building would be atmospheric it wouldn't be orbiting. Air resistance makes atmospheric orbits impossible. Our skyscraper is going to be constantly slowing thanks to air resistance and exert a consequently downward/backward force on its orbiting anchor. So let's get to the specifics. I decided to check out 101955 Bennu [wikipedia.org] for a random anchor possibility. That's the target of OSIRIS-REx and a big boy. We're looking at 60 billion kg mass from a 500 meter diameter. How heavy is a skyscraper? No idea. I'll take Mr. Man Parvesh Singh Randhawa at his word [quora.com] when he gave a response of about 222,500 tons of WEIGHT (as opposed to mass). That's about a 200 million kg downward force at the bare minimum ignoring the backward forces thanks to the air resistance.

    Okay, so now we have a = f/m. So the downward acceleration of our meteor is going to be 200 million / 60 billion = 0.003 m/s/s.

    So now we have the downward acceleration. Naturally as the meteor starts accelerating downward so too will our skyscraper. So let's calculate the time to impact. We know it's orbiting at 32,000 meters so we have:

    32000 = 0.5 * 0.003 * t^2
    t = sqrt(32000 / (0.5 * 0.003)) = 4618 seconds

    Put another way our skyscraper will be crashing into the earth about 77 minutes after it starts 'orbiting'. And hopefully we haven't distorted the anchor's orbit enough to change it to suborbital. If we did then get ready for a much bigger boom to follow. I'm simplifying the math by assuming it has a horizontal velocity of 0 at the start and so I can use its downward force as a direct downward force on the anchor, but air resistance will ensure that eventually anyhow unless we're talking about a giant skyscraper with giant engines.

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  • (Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday March 30 2017, @07:11AM (2 children)

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Thursday March 30 2017, @07:11AM (#486360)

    Checked TFA, and learned that it was crazier than I imagined from the summary. At the heights shown in the renderings, it will interfere with air-traffic. If you can get the base that low to the ground, a space-elevator is in our future as well.

    The answer is that Architects come up with fantastic ideas, then the structural engineers tell them what they need to change. I am not a structural engineer, but IMO the bottom of the tower can not dip lower than 40,000 ft or so (in order to avoid air-traffic -- neglecting strength calculations)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:06AM (#486377)

      Can't the air traffic just avoid it, like they avoid the thousands of other moving objects tracked by air traffic control daily? Analenema Tower can get a special skull and crossbones symbol for its blip.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday March 30 2017, @11:03AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday March 30 2017, @11:03AM (#486424) Journal

      Checked TFA, and learned that it was crazier than I imagined from the summary. At the heights shown in the renderings, it will interfere with air-traffic. If you can get the base that low to the ground, a space-elevator is in our future as well.

      If you could build it (big if!), then it would actually be more interesting than a space elevator. That low and you could get very cheap (in energy terms) flights up to the base, but you could also have it meander around a bit, so the total cost of getting to the bottom terminus would end up being cheaper than getting people and cargo to the base of a fixed equatorial anchor point. The energy cost of getting up the elevator would be slightly lower, but not significantly.

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 30 2017, @07:21AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 30 2017, @07:21AM (#486364) Journal

    Okay, so now we have a = f/m. So the downward acceleration of our meteor is going to be 200 million / 60 billion = 0.003 m/s/s.

    The problem is f=0 here. The whole point of having it suspended from a tether is to counter the force of gravity. The actual drag would come from the motion of the cylinder in that figure eight pattern through upper atmosphere which it will trace out in 24 hours. That's significant drag, but something you could engineer against by having some good thrusters on your counterweight in deep space - a detail that architects aren't too worried about.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:10AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:10AM (#486379) Journal

    A geostationary satellite is always above an unchanging point on the Equator, because its orbital period matches the Earth's rotation.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit [wikipedia.org]

    Now imagine unfurling two cables from such a satellite, one cable going farther out into space and one trailing downward toward the Earth's surface. The cable going downward will tend to pull the satellite down, but the cable going upward will tend to pull it up. Add a heavy object on the upward end, and the upward force increases. With strong enough cables, it ought to be possible to have a structure of that sort that is geostationary and doesn't fall: a space elevator. The low end of the cable would be in the atmosphere, but wouldn't be moving relative to the Earth's surface. The foremost reason we don't have such structures is that we don't know how to make cables that are strong enough. Theoretically it should be possible. Having a "skyscraper" at the lower end would increase the tension on the cable still more, in comparison to a conventional space elevator.

    I don't understand the orbit this thing would have (some of the pages don't open properly for me) but you're right when you say that its motion through the atmosphere would cause loss of energy. It could be replenished, I suppose. With a truly geostationary orbit that would be much less of a problem. Not anchoring the lower end to the Earth doesn't make the structure impossible, but the inconvenience of having to fly to it and the need to keep the end at a high altitude so mountains could be cleared would seem to outweigh whatever advantage its motion is supposed to have. I gather from the summary that the purposes of the structure are not to send people or objects into space but to provide transportation from one spot on Earth to another and to provide lodging with nice views. Living aboard a zeppelin would be a far more practical way to achieve that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:15AM (#486400)

    We'll just use more duct tape. Obviously you're not an engineer.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:45PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:45PM (#486443) Journal

    Thanks for doing the math. I had the same thought, "Won't atmospheric drag on the building either cause the asteroid to de-orbit as it slows, or rip the building off the asteroid thanks to shearing forces?" Or perhaps it would cause the whole thing to start spinning around the asteroid as the skyscraper whacks into the atmosphere, like the handle of a sledge hammer hitting a tree while the head wants to keep moving forward.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 1) by Type44Q on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:05PM

    by Type44Q (4347) on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:05PM (#486592)

    Geosync is pretty high up; perhaps they're planning to Dangle their Dingleberry sufficiently high above the upper atmosphere? No, I didn't read TFA but this could be viable...