Orbital Ring, Mass Driver, and Space Elevator Engineering
Astronomy's Shocking Twist, Technical Book AST-T1
Mass transit to space: orbital ring, mass driver, and space elevator engineering.
Volumes
A three-volume engineering treatment of the orbital ring, the most credible architecture for moving mass and people between Earth's surface and the rest of the solar system at industrial scale.
What the series covers
The orbital ring concept dates to 1870. The physics has been worked out for over a century. The materials science is on a credible development path. What has not existed until now is a single engineering reference that sizes every component, balances every force, and accounts for every thermal and power load in a single internally consistent design.
This three-volume series is that reference.
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Volume I: The Economic Case for Space Mass Transit. Why an orbital ring. What rockets can and cannot do. What alternative launch systems exist, on their own terms. How the economics close. Written for a general educated reader. Math is light and conversational; every equation that appears is explained in words first.
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Volume II: Mass Transit Launch Technologies from First Principles. The physics and engineering of each launch system, derived from scratch. Rockets, skyhooks, mass drivers, launch loops, non-synchronous space elevators, rotovators, and orbital rings. Written at the level of an undergraduate textbook. Every result is derived. Every derivation is shown.
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Volume III: Space Mass Transit Complete Design Review. A full design review of an integrated orbital ring with mass driver and space elevator. Materials, power, control, orbital mechanics, construction sequencing, failure modes. The volume that engineers will read at a desk with a pencil.
A fourth volume on construction logistics is planned for after the companion fiction series is complete.
Volume I is available first
Volume I ships in 2026. It is the starting point. Readers who want the engineering before the framing can begin with Volume II when it publishes, but the argument is built on Volume I, and most readers will get more from the series by reading it in order.
What makes this series different
The series is written in the tradition of Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars: rigorous enough that the numbers can be checked, readable enough that a motivated non-specialist can follow the argument.
What sets it apart from its predecessors is the math. Zubrin argues passionately for Mars but hand-waves the hardest engineering. O'Neill was writing in 1976, before carbon nanotubes, before Starship, before the commercial-launch revolution. This series takes the O'Neill ambition and the Zubrin persuasion and adds what both books lacked: a complete, internally consistent engineering treatment, carried from first principles to a buildable design, with every number derived or cited.
The simulation code is open source. The references for every factual claim are published online. Errata are publicly tracked. If a number is wrong, the author wants to know.
Companion science fiction series
The technical series is paired with a five-book hard science fiction series titled Astronomy's Shocking Twist. The fiction and the technical volumes share a single universe grounded in the same physics. The novels tell a story that could happen, using the infrastructure the technical books describe. Other science fiction authors are welcome to use this material in their own work.
The fiction series is in advanced planning. Titles will be announced as they are written.
Resources
About the author
Paul G. de Jong is a long-time student of space infrastructure and the author of the Astronomy's Shocking Twist series. More about Paul