You were serious enough about this to presumably hire someone to make concept art of a bad idea centered around another bad/impossible idea? Hell yeah you were!
Somewhere in Silicon Valley, NYC: "OK, OK! The architects want to ignore orbital mechanics! Alright! Let's make it happen, team. Park that sucker right up there, c'mon guys, I know we can do this, just middle-manage out, guys, split it up amongst you, delegate, delegate!!"
The only reason I'm posting this is because those morons have just given me an idea: An equatorial* space elevator tethered to a captured asteroid in geosynchronous orbit. Ideally, the tether is infinitely light, but in reality, half of the thing is continuously running up a supply of fuel for constant orbital boosting. An array of ion thrusters spread out across the Earth-facing surface make it happen. Devac, someone should do a perturbation/small-oscillations analysis to determine the regime of asteroid mass to target (considering how much more difficult it is to orbitally inject a fatty). Find out how sensitive the thing would be to lunar perturbations over some mass range, assuming (for example) 20 kiloton payload delivery up from Earth's surface over 12 hours, think about methods of damping oscillations in the tether, etc. etc., so much fun. Way cooler project than parachuting every day to go to work, Jesus, guys.
We really need to clean up space, though. My idea in this department is a device(s) either built on the moon or in geo that de-orbits near-Earth space junk with photon momentum. I remember when one of Virgin Galactic's darlings told me that the insurance companies in the space tourism industry would have the incentive to clean things up. Let's see how many millionaires we can kill in the process.
Most days, my mind is in space.
*I would like to stress that an orbiting asteroid "centered" above anywhere NOT at the equator is impossible. Please ask a physicist next time.
Edit: LOL, I finally read the article. Got clickbaited so hard, bro! Doesn't matter; Had idea.
Just for the record, I worked on an AIA-award winning project where the architects slowed us down a month because the client had the nerve (the nerve!) to insist that their fourth-floor rooftop garden pavilion include guardrails.
And for the record, architects (not all, but enough to give the profession a bad name amongst engineers) are big on "my job is to come up with the ideas, your job is to make it happen." SEE: Frank Gehry and his CATIA-designed I-beams that had to be shipped in pieces in order to make the Experience Music Project possible.
But for the record, this was design student you've never heard of, light on work, that gets to demonstrate just how "outside the box" they can think. And I mean, c'mon. They drew a daily circuit that goes from NYC to La Paz and back in 24 hours. That means that mammerjammer is averaging over 300 mph. Kinda makes that whole "transfer station" thing pretty dramatic. I mean, the stall speed of a C-130 is 115mph. Here's a Fulton in full funmode:
So... set aside the whole "asteroid capture" bit, as well as the 35,000km of unobtanium monofilament necessary to drag the thing around, and the fact that they wanna build a "building" over 20,000m tall. It doesn't take much of an architect to understand that 300mph winds are a thing and that really, they wanted to put some cool pictures together.
I for one applaud their audacity.
posted 2583 days ago