The Atlantis Project

The Atlantis Project - Reimagining the Future Using Today's Technology

News

Isaac Arthur's New Video "Mass Drivers versus Rockets" Showcases Variable Pitch Screw Launch

Phil Swan discusses Variable Pitch Screw Launch Technology on
The Space Show

The British Interplanetary Society's "Reinventing Space - Beyond The Moon" Conference Presentation

Isaac Arthur's Interplanetary Infrastructure Video Reveals New Launch Technology

Presentation at the Ascend2023 Conference in Las Vegas
Full Paper Link

ISDC2023 Interplanetary Infrastructure Session Covers Falcon 9, Starship, and Mass Drivers on Earth

About Us

The Atlantis Project is a research organization dedicated to uncovering transformative ideas made possible by today’s science and technology. Our mission is to evaluate whether these ideas are receiving the right level of attention and to advance and promote the most promising concepts.

A Tethered Ring is an example of such a technology. It is a dynamic structure that can cost-effectively support space launch facilities, transportation infrastructure, and a sizable human settlement at high altitudes. An altitude of 32 km and a population of 250,000 is shown to be achievable using circa 2017 science and technology. The structure resembles a pipeline formed into a ring having a diameter similar to that of Earth’s moon. It stays aloft primarily by generating and properly combining inertial forces with tensile forces to offset the pull of gravity. The inertial forces are produced by the circular motion of magnetically levitated rings within the pipeline, and the tensile forces are generated by appropriately tethering the pipelines to the planet using stays made of strong, lightweight, industrial fiber. The entire structure can be fabricated on Earth and neither its construction nor its deployment depends on a pre-existing space infrastructure or space-based industry. The deployed structure is resilient to catastrophic failure because its precision-guided fast-moving components are: a) not exposed to seismic or climatic battering, and b) safely above and thus out of range of tacit civilizational threats, such attacks involving torpedoes or commandeered aircraft. The tethered ring is an optimal “stepping stone” infrastructure for furnishing humanity with a safe, affordable, and sustainable means to escape Earth’s gravity, expand its civilization into space, and ultimately evolve into a multi-planetary species.

The Atlantis Project’s goals are to:

Develop the technologies needed to significantly reduce the cost of space launch, making space accessible to ordinary people,
Increase awareness about the need for transformative change to occur within the space launch industry,
Educate on the numerous short-term and long-term benefits of successfully developing low-cost and sustainable space launch infrastructure.

Initiatives

Technology

A Transit Vehicle Docked at a Habit with Spectacular Crepuscular Rays Visible on the Earth Below

How Space Infrastructure Solves Problems on Earth

Renewable Energy Generation, Storage, and Transmission

Energy Generation

Mounting photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on the ring for the purpose of sustainably generating electricity has several advantages when compared to terrestrial PV solar. Ring-mounted panels will be more efficient since they are above the clouds, above 90% of the atmosphere, and because they will tend to stay clean. With tracking, they will generate at close to full power from sunrise to sunset. At the ambient temperature at 32km altitude of -40˚, the panels will be more efficient and will last longer. They can be made lighter and at lower cost as they will not need to be hardened to withstand hailstorms.

Energy Storage

The moving rings in the tethered ring reference design store 58 TWh of kinetic energy. Generated energy drives liner motors that accelerate these moving rings further. This converts the electrical energy into kinetic energy. Linear generators convert the kinetic energy of the moving rings back into electrical energy. The moving rings can time-shift energy far more cost-effectively than, for example Li-Ion batteries, which solves renewable energy's number one problem - intermittency of supply. The rings can also store and release energy over and over again, for many decades, without degradation or capacity fade.

High-Speed, Carbon-Neutral, International Transportation

High-Altitude Tube Transport

A Tethered Ring supported, evacuated tube transit system has several advantages over airplanes. Individual vehicles are small, like business jets. They depart frequently, are autonomous, and travel very fast. They travel on maglev tracks, and they are not burdened with heavy components such as wings, engines, fuel tanks, landing gear. They can’t be hi-jacked which means that security screening will be more like train-station security than airport security.

Society and the Environment

Airports and high-speed rail corridors devalue and isolate neighborhoods. High-speed rail corridors can interfere with animal migration. Airplanes do not just generate greenhouse gasses, they deposit particulates directly into the stratosphere. Evacuated tube transport is more energy efficient because the magnetically levitated vehicles are lighter, cruise with minimal air resistance, and employ regenerative braking. The little energy that they do use is 100% renewably generated.

Broadband Communications

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Mega-Constellations

There has been a lot of recent interest in providing internet service by using LEO satellite mega-constellations. In these systems, the customer's equipment finds, tracks, and connects to satellites. The satellites then connect to ground stations which in turn connect to the Internet. These constellations increase Internet bandwidth and reduce latency for people living in remote communities. However, the constellation's satellites must be deorbited and replaced when their rechargeable batteries wear out or when their propellent tanks run dry. The professional astronomy community has expressed concerns about their observations being "photo-bombed" by satellites. Many groups are concerned that these constellations exacerbate the orbital debris problem and increase the risk of a run-a-way cascade of collisions, called "The Kessler syndrome".

The Geopolitics

When Sputnik first passed over the US in 1957, it gave birth to an era of geopolitical concern over machines controlled by other countries flying above the nations we live in. In 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while conducting photographic aerial reconnaissance deep inside Soviet territory. More recently, SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon, and others have jumped into the mega-constellation enabled communications business. Chinese military researchers have published an article that says the country needs to be able to disable or destroy SpaceX’s satellites if they threaten national security. SpaceX implemented anti-jamming technology and delivered Starlink dishes to Ukraine, a country that is at war with Russia (ref).

Is There a Better Way?

It is possible to create a more profitable service by mounting communications gear on a Tethered Ring. Recurring satellite launch costs are avoided. Ring-mounted gear would have a fiber connection to the Internet, so there is no need for ground stations to handle back-haul. Customer equipment no longer needs a clear view of the entire sky – it just needs line-of-site to a transceiver mounted on the ring. User equipment is cheaper because it does not need to track moving targets. Because ring-mounted gear is 17 times closer to the customers, it can place 17 squared, or roughly 300 times, as many beams on the ground per square kilometer. This means 300 times as many customers can be served in a region before the system’s bandwidth is saturated. Finally, ring-mounted communications equipment will not exacerbate the space debris problem or photo-bomb any astronomical observations.

Ultra High-Altitude Real-Estate and Tourism

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Inspirational Views

After Marty Allen returned from his trip to space in New Shephard, he said “Going up I thought that it was going to be 50% weightlessness and 50% the view. When we got up there it became 5% the weightlessness and 95% the view.”
Increased high-altitude tourism should increase public support for the environment through a well-documented phenomenon called "The Overview Effect". This is potentially an enormous benefit if it convinces billions of people to make lifestyle changes, and to vote for those leaders who will work the hardest to protect the environment.

Low-Cost, Sustainable Space Launch

Launch Costs Today

The latest data we have shows that in the 2024 to 2026 time frame it will cost NASA and the taxpayers 72 million/person to send someone to the ISS. A SpaceX Crew Dragon can deliver 3310 kg to the ISS; therefore, this equates to 86,793 USD/kg.
The Falcon9 and Crew Dragon system is a very competitive and roughly 90% reusable rocket system. The system supports a high launch cadence - possibly as many as 100 launches per year.
But there is another, sometimes overlooked, cost to NASA and the taxpayers. NASA's current strategy involves placing additional "bets" on Boeing and Sierra Nevada because they do not want to be cut off from the ISS in the event that any one of their commercial suppliers suffers a major setback which takes their launch system out of service. Because these other investments have yet to pay off, NASA actually spends considerably more per kilogram than what it pays to SpaceX for its ISS commercial resupply services.

Electromagnetic Launch

Electromagnetic launch is a truly transformative idea. The concept here is to accelerate a vehicle up to orbital speeds inside an evacuated tube by using a linear motor. This can be done at an estimated energy cost of around $2 per kilogram.
But there's a catch. If such a launcher were to be built on the ground, the vehicle would burn up in the atmosphere before it reached space.
However, with a Tethered Ring, the evacuated tube can extend into the stratosphere, making the electromagnetic launch idea technically feasible.
The economics of electromagnetic launch can be improved as well with the Variable Pitch Screw Launcher. This mass driver technology reduces the capital cost of infrastructure-based launch, making it affordable to undertake flagship-class space programs that will establish a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Cost to Mars

If our goal is to instead send mass at the same rate to Mars, and if we want to estimate how much that will cost, we need to multiply our mass rate by:
a) The cost per kg to LEO, and
b) Another factor of, say, 6 to account for refilling in low-earth orbit.
Therefore, the cost will be N x 60 x 24 x 365 x 36,000 x 6 x 86,793 USD/kg x S, where:
‘N’ is the number of trucks-per-minute, and
‘S’ represents the amount that we can reduce launch costs to LEO by making further advances in chemical rocket technology.
If we want N x S to give us a result where the launch costs are less than 1% of our current global GDP, we need...

N x S < 0.01 x 85 trillion / 9082 trillion
N x S < 0.00009