Orbital ring

An orbital ring is a concept for a space elevator that consists of an artificial ring placed around the Earth that rotates at an angular rate that is faster than the rotation of the Earth. It is a giant formation of astroengineering proportions.

The structure is intended to be used as a space station or as a planetary vehicle for very high speed transportation or space launch.

The original orbital ring concept is related to the space fountain and launch loop.

In the 1870s Nikola Tesla, while recovering from malaria, conceived a number of inventions including a ring around the equator, although he did not include detailed calculations. As recounted in his autobiography My Inventions (1919):

Another one of my projects was to construct a ring around the equator which would, of course, float freely and could be arrested in its spinning motion by reactionary forces, thus enabling travel at a rate of about one thousand miles an hour, impracticable by rail. The reader will smile. The plan was difficult of execution, I will admit, but not nearly so bad as that of a well-known New York professor, who wanted to pump the air from the torrid to the temperate zones, entirely forgetful of the fact that the Lord had provided a gigantic machine for this very purpose.

Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Fountains of Paradise (1979) is about space elevators, but an appendix mentions the idea of launching objects off the Earth using a structure based on mass drivers. The idea apparently did not work, but this inspired further research.

Paul Birch published a series of three articles in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1982. Anatoly E. Yunitskiy also published a similar idea in Russia in 1982 and later explored it in detail in his book published in 1995.

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