Goal: as a personal hobby project, find a way for every person to have the opportunity for access to vast space resources to provide a new place to thrive.

Result: found a possible way to do it: an electrically powered transportation structure which lifts people and other payload all the way from ground to space, along an Orbital Transfer Trajectory kinetically supported elliptical structure to continuously link the Earth surface with GeoStationary Earth Orbit.

Potentials: There, many large-scale space habitat cities could be built to live in, and abundant solar-electric power then becomes feasable for both space habitat cities and for ground commercial electric power grids.

As a personal project, I have been making a space transportation/colonization project's concept in which the Geostationary Earth Orbit plays a key role, due to its relatively fixed physical position relative to the earth's surface at the equator, a property essential to the success of my proposed project. Use locations in GeoStationary Orbit are limited, and my proposed use of it would initially conflict with others' current and projected uses of it. I say "initially conflict" because the the transportation aspects of the application I propose would actually make GeoStationary Earth Orbit extremely accessable, and the communications relay applications would be absorbed into the new use of GeoStationary Earth Orbit in time.

Contemplate the possibility of, ignoring the atmosphere's effects for the moment, of an Orbital Transfer Trajectory ellipse which grazes the Earth's surface at the equator and grazes GeoStationary Earth Orbit at its high point, (perigee and apogee), and which precesses about the earth synchronous with the sidereal day, with a perimeter of about 131,000 km. This is the conceptual seed of an unusual form of space transportation system's concept, which would deliver electrically-derived kinetically-stored transportation lift energy to vehicles travelling all along its semi-elliptical path between ground and GeoStationary Earth Orbit, thus elliminating the need for vehicles to carry fuel for the trip between ground and GSO, which could greatly transform the commerce between earth surface and immense solar system resources. This earth-rotation-synchronous trajectory initially defines the shape of a transportation structure which would deliver kinetically-stored electromagnetically-coupled lift energy all along its path for payload-carrying vehicles continuously traveling between ground and GSO. Although it (the orbital transfer trajectory) initially defines the shape of the structure, it does not define the velocity of the armature segments which store the energy within the structure, as these armature segments must travel much faster than orbital velocity all along the trajectory so as to both have reserve kinetic energy to deliver to lift the vehicles travelling along the outside of the structure, and also to have the excess velocity which will provide the outward centrifugal force on the underside of the earth-encircling semi-elliptical structure so as to balance out most of the weight of the structure and that of the vehicles travelling along its upper side. Unbalanced contra-rotating armature mass stream velocities, along with unbalanced forces from solar-electric mass stream thrusters placed below GeoStationary Earth Orbit on the structure would hopefully be adequate to ensure the sidereal day rotation of the entire structure. The perimeter of such a somewhat elliptical-shaped transportation structure I estimate to be about 131,000 km seems huge, yet not unthinkable.

This is an electrically powered space transportation system; note that electrically expressed, theoretically only 15.72 kWhr/kg energy is added to move a kg from the equator up into GeoStationary Earth Orbit, that is, at 10 cents per kWhr contemporary electrical energy cost, this is only $1.57 worth of electrical energy per killogram of mass moved from the ground up to GeoStationary Earth Orbit. (my calculations can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~jedcline/ets.html .)

Such a transportation system opens up GeoStationary Earth Orbit to the emplacement of huge solar-electric powerplants to thereafter provide the earth commercial power grids with abundant clean non-petrochemical-derived electrical energy, and opens up GeoStationary Earth Orbit for the construction of large space habitats starting with such types as designed in the mid-1970's for use at L5. As you can see, these power satellites and large space habitats would initially compete with the existing form of communication satellite's usage, but then would greatly expand upon it, and thereafter greatly alter the form of the industry from its present configuration.

Appearant interference by rival technology businesses

So my second thought here is not a directly technical one. It is more one of possibly rivalrous-attitude technologies in a competitive business-oriented civilization, and even of egos and reputations. My proposed concept could both interfere with present-day type usage of space in GeoStationary Earth Orbit and also with ground-to-space reaction engine based transportation technology business, say for the next 20 years, but thereafter both kinds of businesses would be immensely benefited by my proposed concept. It also would convert the basic space industry to the much less prestigious field of Civil Engineering. Struggling to compose the question to you properly, I come up with this: In your opinion, would present-day influential business interests act to suppress a space project that could be important for the near-and-distant future development of civilization, yet which would obsolete their current short-term business aspirations? In other words, in your opinion, would the majority of intelligent people in the space industry sacrifice the future in exchange for their own short term gain in their struggles to survive?

My involvement

My development of this personal project over these many years has shown that there are an enormous number of ways to do this project wrong ways, resulting in more harm than good done, and thus perhaps if it cannot be done correctly it ought not to be done at all. I believe that my pool of creative thoughts could be invaluable to the long term success of such a project, yet I find only interference by the space industry and by others; possibly they fear a change in the status quo resulting from such a drastic change in the paths of civilization, especially when proposed by someone essentially outside the acknowledged academic esteem circle.

If mankind has sufficient intelligence, wisdom and motivation, Geostationary Earth Orbit conceivably could soon become a major stepping stone for civilization moving into space, and even relieve the stress of civilization on the Earth's ecosystem by becoming a major site for human civilization itself.

References: 1. "Kinetically Strengthened Transportation Structures" by James E. D. Cline (myself), in the proceedings of ASCE's "Space 2000" conference, pp 396-402.