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A Bishop Ring
[Rain Noe]
"Space Colony Form Factors, Part 3: The Stanford Torus and Beyond"
''Core77'', Aug. 07, 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2018. is a type of hypothetical
rotating space habitat originally proposed in 1997 by
Forrest Bishop
Forrest may refer to:
Places
Australia
*Forrest, Australian Capital Territory
*Forrest, Victoria, a small rural township
*Division of Forrest, a federal division of the Australian House of Representatives, in Western Australia
*Electoral distric ...
of the Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering.
[Forrest Bishop]
"Open Air Space Habitats"
Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering, 1997. Retrieved 28 May 2018. The concept is a smaller scale version of the
Banks
A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets.
Becaus ...
Orbital, which itself is a smaller version of the
Niven ring
''Ringworld'' is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. ''Ringworld'' tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, a ...
.
[Adam Hadhazy]
"Could We Build a Ringworld?"
''Popular Mechanics'', Sep 4, 2014. Retrieved 28 May 2018. Like other space habitat designs, the Bishop Ring would spin to produce
artificial gravity
Artificial gravity is the creation of an inertial force that mimics the effects of a gravitational force, usually by rotation.
Artificial gravity, or rotational gravity, is thus the appearance of a centrifugal force in a rotating frame of r ...
by way of
centrifugal force
In Newtonian mechanics, the centrifugal force is an inertial force (also called a "fictitious" or "pseudo" force) that appears to act on all objects when viewed in a rotating frame of reference. It is directed away from an axis which is paralle ...
. The design differs from
the classical designs produced in the 1970s by
Gerard K. O'Neill
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (February 6, 1927 – April 27, 1992) was an American physicist and space activist. As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments. L ...
and
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
in that it would use
carbon nanotubes
A scanning tunneling microscopy image of a single-walled carbon nanotube
Rotating single-walled zigzag carbon nanotube
A carbon nanotube (CNT) is a tube made of carbon with diameters typically measured in nanometers.
''Single-wall carbon nan ...
instead of steel, allowing the habitat to be built much larger. In the original proposal, the habitat would be approximately 1,000 km (620 mi) in radius and 500 km (310 mi) in width, containing 3 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) of living space,
[ comparable to the area of ]Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
or India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
.
Because of its enormous scale, the Bishop Ring would not need to be enclosed like the Stanford torus
The Stanford torus is a proposed NASA design for a space habitat capable of housing 10,000 to 140,000 permanent residents.
The Stanford torus was proposed during the 1975 NASA Summer Study, conducted at Stanford University, with the purpose o ...
: it could be built without a "roof",orbit
In celestial mechanics, an orbit is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an object or position in space such as a p ...
, with either an arrangement of mirror
A mirror or looking glass is an object that Reflection (physics), reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror will show an image of whatever is in front of it, when focused through the lens of the eye or a camera. Mirrors reverse the ...
s to reflect sunlight onto the inner rim or an artificial light source in the middle, powered by a combination of solar panels on the outer rim and solar power satellites.[
Also unlike the 1970s NASA proposals, where habitats would be placed in ]cislunar space
Outer space, commonly shortened to space, is the expanse that exists beyond Earth and its atmosphere and between celestial bodies. Outer space is not completely empty—it is a near-perfect vacuum containing a low density of particles, pred ...
or the Earth-Moon L4/L5 Lagrangian points, Forrest Bishop considered other possible positions, including the much more distant Sun-Earth L4/L5 Lagrangian points
In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the influence of two massive orbiting bodies. Mathematically, this involves the solution of th ...
, positions closer to the sun, and positions in the asteroid belt or beyond.[
]
Bishop rings in fiction
* Bishop Rings are a common type of habitat in the fictional universe of the Orion's Arm
Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA and formerly known as the Orion's Arm Worldbuilding Group) is a multi-authored online science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kaz ...
worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task fo ...
project;[M. Alan Kazlev, Todd Drashner and Steve Bowers]
"Bishop Ring"
''Encyclopaedia Galactica'' website, October 8 2001. Retrieved 28 May 2018. their radius varies from as little as 100 km to as much as 1000 km (62–620 mi).
* The eponymous ring installations of the ''Halo'' video game series are essentially Bishop Rings with slightly divergent proportions.
* Orbitals in Iain M. Banks' ''The Culture'' novels are a similar concept but much bigger and thus would require much stronger materials.
* The ''Echoes of the Eye'' expansion of the video game ''Outer Wilds'' is primarily set on this type of habitat.
See also
*
* , another name for O'Neill cylinders
*
*
* Orbital (The Culture)
The Culture is a fictional interstellar post-scarcity civilisation or society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks and features in a number of his space opera novels and works of short fiction, collectively called the Culture series.
...
*
* Rotating wheel space station
A rotating wheel space station, also known as a von Braun wheel, is a concept for a hypothetical wheel-shaped space station. Originally proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, the idea was expanded by Herman Potočnik in 1929.
Specifications
...
References
External links
"Bishop Ring"
in the ''Encyclopedia Galactica'' at Orion's Arm
Worldring
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bishop Ring (Habitat)
Carbon nanotubes
Megastructures
Space habitats