One day in the near future, we may be living in floating towers suspended from asteroids in orbit, and that day may not be as far off as you think.
If you plan to live in a city like New York, London, Tokyo, Dubai, or any other location where space is at a premium, you can expect a fight to get the best housing. There are only so many spaces available, and that’s not even considering the price. But what if there were suddenly a whole new, massive building that needed occupants? And what if it were not in the city, but rather above it?
That’s the concept the New York based design firm Cloud Architecture Office recently put forward with its “Analemma Tower,” a futuristic skyscraper that would hover over a city and connect to an asteroid in orbit. The asteroid would then stay in an “eccentric geosynchronous orbit,” meaning the residents of the apartment would constantly travel around the world, with fixed points that it would frequently pass and “anchor” above it for a few minutes at a time. These cities would be the primary access points for the floating tower, so people could leave in the morning and then wait for their home to return when its orbit passes overhead.
The top of the tower would be positioned at about 32,000 meters; that would be high enough to require a protective suit to survive the -40 degrees Celsius and near-vacuum temperatures outside the top floors, but the view would be incredible. Technically, it wouldn’t be high enough to be considered as living in space, but it would be close.
The building would also be mostly self-sustaining. Food would mostly be imported from the surface, although hydroponic floors could help cut that need. Water would be filtered and recycled in a semi-closed loop system, with new water being captured from clouds and rain.
Residents could travel from floor to floor thanks to electromagnetic elevators that would do away with the need for cables – and height limitations. Power would come entirely from solar panels, which would be on the far side of the asteroid and would receive enough direct sunlight to power it, and store energy as well. It would also be the tallest building in the world – by a fairly significant margin.
At the moment this is all still just theoretical, of course – the big hold ups are the cables and the asteroid. The tower would connect to an asteroid by a series of cables, but unfortunately the type of material needed to make cables that strong doesn’t exist yet – at least not in a form that could be made into a cable. The idea of placing an asteroid into a controlled orbit is also still theoretical, but NASA is planning an experiment called the “Asteroid Redirect Mission,” which would take a boulder off of an asteroid and then attempt to place it in orbit.
This isn’t the only space-based housing plan in motion either, but it might be the one that has the most connection to Earth. There are plans (in the very early stages) to build commercial space stations, and there is talk of building a lunar base using 3D printing technology in the near future.
If, or maybe when, the Analemma Tower does get closer to reality, the first tower will likely be built above Dubai. Assuming it goes well – and assuming it doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount to buy or rent a space in one – they could pop up around the world soon after.