Dyson Ring 3: How To Get It Up...

Ok. Go ahead and laugh. I hear laughing is good for the soul AND body. :-)

Seriously, though, assembling a ring made of thousands of miles and a few trillion tons of concrete at 60,000 feet in the air is going to be a neat trick. You won't be doing it with cranes.

My answer? Hot air balloons. Yup. Technology that has been used since AD 200 or so in China. Imagine that, another almost 2,000-year-old technology. Which is also why I figure an altitude of 60,000 feet. According to thus Wikipedia article, the altitude for hot air balloons is several thousand feet higher. See the History tab for that part: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon

Now, clearly, large hot air baloons can carry a lot of weight, if they're big enough. Blimps generally use lighter-than-air gasses to lift immense loads, because they don't want to carry the fuel to keep air hot for an extended journey. A hot air blimp IS possible, however. But the way I'd want to use them for this project, they just have to go up on a tether, position their load, and come back down.

So you could get all the pieces up there with balloons, but how do you KEEP them up there while you're assembling the ring? Answer: You don't put part of the ring up and wait on the rest. You build all the pieces, then put them all up in place at one time. You have one big Launch Day all around the planet. Once they are all locked in place, the ring supports its own weight, just like after you put in the centerpiece of an arch.

Sure, you would test the various components and assembly methods ahead of Launch Day. You'd make several modules, lift them up by baloon, and test assembly at altitude to make sure everything will work on Launch Day.

So, balloons float on the wind. Even with a tether, they'll move with the wind to the limits of the tether. How do you keep the baloons from floating all over on Launch Day so you can assemble the Dyson ring?

Next post...

Dan