The LEO archipelago

A few months ago I ran across Andrew Meulenberg (and Karthik Balaji) on the LEO Archipelago. This has footnotes "accessed" August 2010 which I take as the final edit; Meulenberg followed up in 2011 with the Sling-on-a-Ring.

Meulenberg takes Paul Birch with a few moderate tweaks. If the tether doesn't have to enter the stratosphere, then the tether can be spun. This means the orbital ring doesn't sweat the mass of the tether itself, as Birch had to; sometimes the rope weighs down but sometimes it weighs up. We still must worry about the weight of the cargo but we'd be worrying anyway. That cargo, by the way, is no longer going up only to the ring but is being slung into a higher orbit in the Van Allen belts.

We are then concerned with getting the cargo into such an over-the-atmosphere position. I cannot see balloons up there. Hypersonic aircraft are mooted.

Or maybe shooting it up there with the SpinLaunch^TM, or with Jules Verne's cannon? Another issue is, once it's in the sling, that's "10-G" that is (still rounding) 100 m/s². Meulenberg and his cowriters think we can buffer semifragile cargo in a water bath, whose destination then gets the water too. (Event Horizon wins again.)

Then there's the tensile strength / toughness of the tether, now pulling mass at ten times the G. Last I looked, I was assuming Zylon for the cable, on account muh karbun nannotoobs are science fiction. Meulenberg and Balaji agree; instead, predicting something called a "carbon colossal tube".

Given the unobtania Meulenberg thought we could get part way there, with an equator-orbiting fibre-optic. It would be narrow enough not to annoy stargazers more than all those satellites do already. This would deliver a short(er) return on investment, such that nongovernments might actually want it. With ring experience we could get on with building the sling(s).

Meulenberg and Balaji desired, finally, to shade the Earth and solve global warming thereby. I wasn't sold on this much; especially when those two babbled about propagandising this to the public meaning, to soyboys. But one prospective service they suggest is to shade specific points of the Earth. There exist Siesta Cultures along the greater Sahara (Spain, Arabia, northwest India) where, in the summers, nobody does squat because it's too hot in the afternoon. Ramadan especially is hell when it bumps into summers. So a ring might be slightly angled to cover the edge of the Islamic Belt when our Earth herself angles said belt into the Sun. Also they thought building the ring ever outward might push back Van Allen thus opening now-irradiated "MEO" to habitably LEO.

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