Low Orbit Real Estate – are you ready for a real estate agent selling you a home out in space? Can you imagine showing a home where the sky is literally the limit? I’m fascinated by the topic of low orbit living, and scientists have been talking about how to make it work for over 100 years.
Today, we’ll take a deep dive into some proposed low orbit real estate options. We’ve been living with low-orbit living since the 1950s, with astronauts of many countries living in 60 to 2,000 km (99 to 1200 mi) above Earth’s surface – AKA ‘Low Earth Orbit’ (LEO). There are many challenges to be solved by living up there, but when we do (not if, we’re doing this), we’ve got some exciting options to play with. Here are some:
Types of Low-Earth Orbital Habitats
Bernal sphere – A Bernal sphere is a type of space settlement filled with air rotating at 1.9 RPM to produce a full Earth artificial gravity at the sphere’s equator. The result would be an interior landscape that would resemble a large valley running all the way around the equator of the sphere. (Fun fact: The video game Mass Effect features a fictional Bernal sphere space colony “Gagarin Station,” named after Yuri Gagarin.)
O’Neill cylinder – An O’Neill cylinder consists of two counter-rotating cylinders. Each cylinder has six equal-area stripes that run the length of the cylinder; three are transparent windows, three are habitable “land” surfaces. Furthermore, an outer agricultural ring, 32.2 km (20 mi) in diameter, rotates at a different speed to support farming. The habitat’s industrial manufacturing block is located in the middle, to allow for minimized gravity for some manufacturing processes.
Bishop Ring – A Bishop Ring is a hypothetical rotating wheel space station where atmosphere retained by artificial gravity and atmosphere retention walls some 200 km (120 mi) in height. You wouldn’t need a roof, so part of the ring is exposed to outer space – I don’t know how I feel about that. (Fun fact: we saw Bishop Rings in Iain M. Banks’ The Culture novels, Elysium, and the Echoes of the Eye expansion of the video game Outer Wilds.)
Dyson sphere – A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. Dyson-style energy collectors around a distant star would absorb and re-radiate energy from the star. Although Dyson sphere systems are theoretically possible, building a stable megastructure around the Sun is currently far beyond humanity’s engineering capacity.
McKendree cylinder – A McKendree cylinder is a type of hypothetical rotating space habitat that spins to produce artificial gravity by way of centrifugal force. The design uses carbon nanotubes instead of steel, allowing the habitat to be built much larger. In the original proposal, the habitat would consist of a cylinder approximately 460 km (290 mi) in radius and 4,600 km (2,900 mi) in length, containing 13 million km2 (5 million sq mi) of living space, nearly as much land area as that of Russia.
Why Would We Live in Orbit?
One reason is simple – since human population growth is potentially exponential, we’re going to eventually run out of resources here on Earth. We could adopt something called Neo-Malthusianism – which is human population planning to ensure resources and environmental integrities for current and future human populations as well as for other species, but experiments in this area have led to many bad social outcomes. Rather than arguing that humans should reproduce less, low orbit real estate gives us more room to grow.
Low Orbit Real Estate also gives us more options for ‘experiments that are impossible to conduct on Earth , so this kind of research leads to progress in fields such as materials science, biology, and physics. The controlled environment of space habitats enables researchers to carry out long-term studies without the influence of Earth’s changing conditions.’ New discoveries in technology unlocked by solving the low-earth orbit real estate problems could lead us into amazing new eras of human development.
Why would we want to develop into this area? I answer this question by pointing out that historically, humans need a place to go when things aren’t working out where they are. Economic opportunities, income inequality, relief from poverty and war, these drive people to leave ancestral homes to find new places to live and exist. Think about the mass expansion of the United States: it was was driven by people who could not achieve social mobility where they were. Expansion into low earth orbit is a natural extension of humanities ever-increasing desire to improve itself.
Why aren’t we doing this yet?
“Okay, I’m sold. Why can’t I live in low orbit real estate now?” Two reasons: It costs a lot of money and it’s really hard to survive out in space. We know how to live in space, we just haven’t figured out how to do it without bankrupting ourselves. All the mechanical and biological challenges we’ve discovered so far CAN be solved with a sufficient amount of money, and no one has that much – not even Elon Musk. The hope is that humans eventually solve all those problems and bring the cost down – we’re not there yet.
The Mike.Sierra.Echo Connection
My novel Mike.Sierra.Echo talks about life in low-earth orbit as it happens, the project to build the world’s first space elevator. But how did we get there? Chapter Two answers the question for us:
“Eighty years ago, Grandma’s family business transitioned. They started out with stuff like genetically-engineered wood products – floors for uber-Patriots – and airlines. They decided to change to rocket science. Guess what else happened around that time?
You got it, the first nuclear fusion powerplants. Moon dust has large amounts of 3He or Helium-3, a helium isotope. Suddenly, every rocket that could make a roundtrip to the Moon was a golden ticket. Rocket4 rode the wave of a new Industrial Revolution for eight decades.” – Mike.Sierra.Echo
In a nutshell, the next driver of human progress is based on the development of fusion reactors. One of the drivers in exponential growth is energy, and if helium-3 reactors are developed as expected, we could easily see a space ‘gold rush’ to harvest these valuable little isotopes from the regolith on the moon. Along with that, the engineering problems of a space elevator, could also be solved.
“Let me explain how we reached NeoDiamond cable,” Dad said. Waited nearly two centuries to arrive. Stronger than any known material – natural or man-made.”
“You can’t make something stronger than diamond. That’s … impossible.”
“That’s science!” Dad’s eyes twinkled.
“What did you do?”
“Someone developed a new material. Strong, flexible, and self-healing. NeoDiamond cable has multiple skins. One of them is a metal organic framework that passively collects water from the air and stores it.
While I’m not a professional prognosticator, I can see human technologies coming together to make the future an exciting place to live. Along the way, we’ll still wrestle with other human problems – loss, happiness, discovery. Mike.Sierra.Echo is a vehicle for exploring all those topics in a way that everyone can relate to.
Wrapping Up
When it comes to low orbit real estate, I’m excited and hopeful. It’s becoming more and more apparent that since we don’t have a Planet B and we are losing control of Planet A, a Planet A.2 option might be more attractive and give us some breathing space as a species. My hope is that we’ll figure this out together.
Write on!
