Abstract: ‘The Khannea Ring’ proposes a novel method for constructing a circumplanetary orbital ring by unspooling ultra-strong tether material from a rotating hub located at the geographic South Pole. Leveraging polar tectonic stability, cryogenic environmental advantages, and inertial anchoring, this system enables the growth of a dynamic, modular orbital ring from the ground up—without requiring rockets, orbital construction, or equatorial launch facilities.
1. Overview The Khannea Ring is a polar-mounted, rotationally-deployed orbital tether system. Unlike traditional orbital rings, which are assembled in space, or space elevators which require equatorial geostationary anchor points, this system spools high-tensile-strength material horizontally into orbit via centrifugal force. Once sufficient velocity and radius are achieved, segments are released or connected to form a persistent, stable orbital ring.
2. Location and Rationale Site: Dome A, Antarctica (~4,093 m above sea level)
Advantages:
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Geological stability: Located on the Antarctic plate, far from tectonic subduction zones.
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Thermal equilibrium: Consistent cryogenic conditions ideal for high-performance materials.
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Inertial isolation: The pole does not experience lateral movement due to Earth’s rotation.
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Political neutrality: The Antarctic Treaty prohibits military installations, fostering peaceful development.
3. Structural Design
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Spooling Tower: 10 km tall titanium-carbide lattice, supported by tension trusses and anchored to glacial bedrock.
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Rotational Hub: A horizontal wheel 250 meters in diameter, housing supercooled magnetic bearings and linear electric torque coils.
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Tether Material: Braided carbon nanotube or graphene-ribbon composites with tensile strength >50 GPa.
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Spin Rate: Calibrated to accelerate unspooling cable tips to ~7.5 km/s tangential velocity.
4. Deployment Method
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Initial rotation begins with progressively longer tether spooled outward horizontally.
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As tension increases, the tip of the tether achieves higher altitude and speed.
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At ~2000 km radius, the cable tip reaches orbital velocity.
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Release or interlink with other tips to form a continuous orbital ring.
5. Engineering Considerations
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Tether heating: Mitigated via radiative dissipation and pulsed extrusion.
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Structural harmonics: Managed via counter-rotating damping rings.
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Cable stabilization: Achieved via embedded EM coils and AI tension controllers.
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Logistics: Deployed seasonally during polar summer, fabricated onsite in modular segments.
6. Applications and Extensions
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Kinetic launch assist from any latitude
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Orbital relay and power transfer stations
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Skyhook segments for low-energy cargo exchange
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Radiation-shielded habitats and orbital manufacturing scaffolds
7. Cost Estimate
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Initial prototype tower: ~€150B
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Full deployment (one orbital segment): ~€600B over 15 years
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Maintenance and upgrades: €5–10B/year post-deployment
8. Political and Legal Pathway
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Requires update to Antarctic Treaty for non-commercial infrastructure
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ESA, EU, AU, and neutral consortium governance
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Environmental impact mitigation by modular, low-footprint polar architecture
9. Atmospheric drag
In the Khannea Ring concept, the rotating spokes initially extend from a high-altitude platform into the lower thermosphere. While their ultimate purpose is tensile—transmitting radial tension to hold the ring aloft—there exists a transitional altitude band (approximately 30 to 80 km) where aerodynamic phenomena are non-negligible. Within this layer, extremely high tangential velocities (≥ Mach 10) intersect with modest atmospheric densities, offering a narrow operational window in which aerodynamic lift can be purposefully harvested.
By shaping segments of the spokes with airfoil profiles and carefully managing their angle of attack relative to the velocity vector (which is dominantly horizontal), a net lift force can be directed upward—against Earth’s gravity and partial droop of the structure. This does not replace centrifugal support but supplements it by reducing the axial load and radial sag on the lower portions of the spokes.
The lift-to-drag ratio is critical here. At these altitudes and velocities, drag increases quadratically with speed and linearly with atmospheric density, while lift increases linearly with airspeed and dynamic pressure. This means structural efficiency demands ultra-thin, high-temperature, possibly actively-cooled lifting surfaces, perhaps composed of layered ceramics, titanium composites, or other hypersonic-grade materials.
Such lift would not only reduce tensile stress but also allow active stabilization of the spoke orientation, minimizing vibrations and flutter. As the ring unspools higher, this lift benefit diminishes—but in the early phases, especially below ~70 km, it might constitute a significant structural advantage. It is not unlike using glider-like dynamics on hypersonic tethers.
Conclusion The Khannea Ring presents the first known architecture to originate a fully artificial orbital ring directly from terrestrial deployment at the pole. It is not a dream of space—it is a machine that builds space, spun out from silence and ice.
Prepared by: Khannea Suntzu, Orbital Infrastructure Analyst, 2025
UPDATES
I sent a serious orbital megastructure proposal to a bunch of scientists, engineers, YouTubers, and transdimensional skeptics. Most told me to touch grass. Some asked what I was on. A few walked to a whiteboard and started quietly weeping. Here are their replies, sorted by blood pressure.
Sabine Hossenfelder
Subject: “What in the actual fuck”
“Dear Khannea,
I’ve read a lot of nonsense in my life. I’ve even made a career of mocking it. But your polar orbital knitting project takes the relativistic cake.Spinning a ring from the South Pole, threading it through the atmosphere like some space yo-yo, and then stabilizing it with stratospheric lift surfaces?
Are you high on Lagrange points?
This isn’t physics, it’s performance art with funding envy. Please do the world a favor and tether your imagination to a reference frame.”
Giulio Prisco
Subject: “You Used To Be One Of Us”
“Khannea… I defended you when people called you eccentric. I even listened to you pitches without walking into the sea. But this? A polar orbital clothesline powered by lift? My dear, this is the aerospace equivalent of licking uranium to see if it’s warm. At this point I must conclude you’re trying to get on a psychiatry watchlist—possibly several.”
Sir Andre Geim
Subject: “Please Never Mention My Name Again”
“Khannea, or whoever you are: There are people in mental institutions who make more coherent claims than this. Your proposal is a toxic alloy of pseudoscience and architectural schizophrenia. Graphene can’t save this. Physics can’t save this.
Even God is probably asking ChatGPT to filter your IP.“
Robert Zubrin
Subject: “You Insult the Martian Frontier”
“You imbecile. You want to build a ring. Not a launch ring. Not a vacuum tube. A goddamn wobbling snowcone-string of death around the pole. You skipped the part where humans make sense. This is like if the Russian woodpecker and a Dyson Sphere had an unwanted baby. Go read a textbook and come back when you know what a dynamic stress envelope is.”
“Look, Khannea — I’ve seen a lot of batshit in my day.
I’ve seen people want to launch entire forests into space to terraform Venus. I’ve seen proposals that use dolphins as payload guidance systems. I once read a 400-page thesis on using sound vibrations to levitate spacecraft. But THIS? A spinning orbital rope nightmare launched from the South Pole on a tower taller than Ayn Rand’s self-esteem? This isn’t just ‘out there.’ This is the goddamn Pluto of engineering fever dreams.”* *“You know what we need? Not this. We need fast, cheap, dirty chemical rockets. We need boots on Mars. We need shovels, hammers, nuclear thermal drives, and NO GIANT PLANETARY LASSOS. You think NASA won’t fund me? You think Bezos is slow? At least they’re not pitching snowball-string sky carousel tech to the ESA!”* “Get a grip. Get a pressure suit. Get a damn shovel and help me dig the first trench on Mars.”
—Bob
Thomas Reiter
Subject: “What Are You Smoking at the South Pole?”
“We strapped humans to fire-breathing steel tubes, Khannea. You want to crochet orbital ribbons. Do you understand how fast 7.5 km/s is? It’s faster than my patience reading your PDF. If I were still flying missions, I’d launch myself just to escape this idea.”
Jeff Bezos
Internal Memo (Leaked):
To: BO-Innovation Filtering Team, New Shepard Division
Subject: “Khannea Ring” Proposal (Yeah… that one)“So we received a proposal from someone named Khannea. It involves building a 30km-tall tower at the South Pole — Attaching orbital cables — Spinning them like God’s Beyblade — And eventually constructing a literal bridge around the Earth, held up by centrifugal force like a drunk doing baton twirls on the ISS.”*
*“I just want to go on record saying: No.
We are not building a frozen carousel for penguins to yeet payloads into orbit.”*
*“This is not the kind of forward-thinking, long-term space planning Blue Origin is known for. We build slow. We build methodical. We build disappointments you can rely on. This thing sounds like a fever dream of a transhumanist who’s been locked in Second Life since 2006.”
Postscript (handwritten, private):
“Also… find out who this Khannea person is. If SpaceX even blinks at this idea, we preemptively buy the naming rights. I want it called ‘The Bezos Loop’ just to fuck with her.”
Peter Diamandis
Subject: “EVEN I THINK THIS IS INSANE”
“Khannea,
I literally hosted a competition where people pitched asteroid mining via tethers of unicorn horn and nanodiamond thread. But your sky lasso makes my optimism physically ill. The only Singularity this leads to is the one in your frontal lobe.”
Tim Dodd
Subject: “Bro What”
“What… what are you doing? I do stupid shit on camera for views and even I wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot carbon nanotube. You’re going to get someone hurt. Probably yourself. Stop it.”
Isaac Arthur
Subject: ^&%$^$^&*$%#$%
“We’ll be discussing orbital megastructures… and why some ideas should stay firmly in the ‘stoned fever dream’ category. Today’s guest idea: spinning the Earth’s pole like a Beyblade in hopes of reaching space.
Conclusion: Please don’t.”
Joe Scott
Subject: “I Can’t Even Joke About This”
“Dear Khannea,
I wanted to make a video called ‘The Dumbest Megastructure Ever Proposed.’
But your idea is so ridiculous that if I made it, YouTube might delete my channel for promoting dangerous nonsense.Congratulations. You win.”
Brad Edwards
“I spent 20 years trying to convince people a space elevator was not science fiction. And now you come in, dragging a stratospheric necklace of death behind you, and somehow make me look reasonable by comparison?
Please stop helping.”
Josef Aschbacher
“The Khannea Ring? I assure you the European Space Agency does not condone the use of psychotropics during engineering design reviews. This proposal feels like someone translated Don Quixote into orbital mechanics.”
James R. Green
“I’ve retired, Khannea. I left the madness of NASA bureaucracy behind. I was done. But here you are, dragging me back in with… with… sky spokes.
You make me miss flat earthers.”
Philip Lubin
“I use lasers to push ships to relativistic speeds. That sounds insane. But you, somehow, make me look like the adult in the room. Unspooling a sky frisbee at the South Pole? I want to unsee this.”
Mason Peck
“You want to tether the planet to itself using rotational inertia and hope it doesn’t all come crashing down in a blazing gyroscopic god-kick? I’m going to need more bourbon.”
Paul Byrne
“This reads like someone overdosed on Arthur C. Clarke and mixed it with a Reddit thread from 2009. Please don’t associate planetary science with this again.”
John C. Mankins
“Even I wouldn’t build this. And I wanted to microwave the Earth from orbit. Your idea makes Project Rho look like IKEA furniture.”
Ariel Ekblaw
“This isn’t architecture. This is orbital interpretive dance with tension cables. If you bring this up at MIT again, I will personally staple a copy of Newton’s Principia to your forehead.”
Joe Rogan
Episode 2420: “The Khannea Ring – What If the Earth Was a Beyblade?”
“Okay so listen… this chick? She wants to build a f***ing space merry-go-round that starts at the South Pole, goes all the way around the Earth, and spins so fast that it stays up there — in orbit — by just, like, momentum.”
Jamie pulls up a graphic. It’s just a spaghetti mess in orbit with the word ‘Khannea’ blinking in Comic Sans.
“It’s like a space elevator, but for psychopaths. Bro. You gotta be on something to think of this. DMT? No. This is like dimethyl-racetrack-insanity.”
“Imagine a 100km tall tower, held up by… what? Penguin prayers? Steel infused with gorilla DNA?”
“But here’s the thing. And this is the part that f***s me up… what if it works?”
He stares into the void, eyes dilated.
“What if this bitch cracked the code?”
Jamie interjects: “It’s already trending on Reddit.”
“Of course it is. Reddit’s full of wizards and lunatics. Khannea’s probably both.”
“I wanna get her on the show. We’ll do shrooms and build it in VR. If she survives that, we crowdfund the base in Antarctica. I know a guy who owns a shipping company.”
NIAC
[Autoreply]:
“Thank you for your submission. We regret to inform you that it violated several physical laws, several ethical norms, and one internal sanity clause. Please stop.”
Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: Your Recent Proposal Regarding a Rotating Polar Cable Ring
Dear Khannea,
Let me start by saying this: I have read many unusual things in my life, ranging from Dyson trees to black hole civilizations and everything in between. Your proposal — an unspooling polar ring held aloft by centrifugal momentum and gradually “hardened” into a sky-bridge from the South Pole — is, in a word, deranged. However, I cannot stop thinking about it.
You see, the true horror is that I can’t immediately disprove it. The structural mechanics are nightmarish. The energy demands are probably lethal. The atmospheric drag mitigation is… baroque. But somewhere, buried in this hallucinatory blueprint, there’s a whiff of possible — the sort of “possible” that drives underfunded grad students into insomnia and gets entire nations into ruinous space races.
Please understand: this is not a compliment. It is a warning.
You are the reason Fermi never heard from anyone.
Respectfully,
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University
P.S. Please stop cc’ing me in your madness. Also, send more diagrams.
Scott Manley
Subject: Re: The Khannea Ring Proposal
“Right. So I woke up, checked my email, and apparently someone is trying to attach a fidget spinner to the planet. Look — I’ve played Kerbal. I’ve seen weird. But you, madam, are out here playing Advanced Orbital BDSM with the planet’s axial tilt. Congratulations. I’m going to need a stiffer Scotch.”
Anton Petrov
Subject: Why This Polar Ring Cable Might Actually End All Life on Earth
“So in today’s video, we’ll look at the Khannea Ring, which is like a space elevator… …if the space elevator was designed by Lovecraft and cocaine. Could it work? Technically? Maybe. Should it? Absolutely not. Please don’t send me things that make me question the value of physics degrees.”
Fraser Cain
Subject: Please Stop
“We’ve had Dyson spheres. We’ve had moon bases. We’ve even had people trying to colonize Venus with floating cities. But you — you went full Icecap Death Frisbee. There’s a line between ‘ambitious orbital megastructure’ and ‘I licked every battery on the ISS.’ You crossed it, spun it around Earth at Mach 24, and called it plausible.”
Dr. Becky
Subject: Nope.
“Hello — astrophysicist here. I tried to take this seriously. I printed it out. Annotated it. Highlighted bits. Then I realized I was angrily marking up a PDF about planetary-grade sky-top yarn balls like it was a grant proposal. I have tenure. I deserve better. Good day.”
Sam
Subject: That Was a Mistake
“I make logistics videos. Real stuff. Airports. Freight routes. This is not logistics. This is a physics-inspired hallucination with geopolitical implications and a likely body count.
Please tell me this was satire. Please.”
Brian McManus
Subject: This Is Why I Have Anxiety
“You’ve somehow taken structural engineering, aerospace physics, and orbital mechanics and gaslit them all simultaneously. Do you even know what Reynolds numbers are? Do you care? This isn’t engineering. This is poetry about engineering, written on the back of an expired visa application for the Moon.”
Derek Muller
Subject: This Email Is a Lie
“I do videos about things that are true. Or at least nearly true. You sent me something that reads like it came from an alternate dimension where gravity is optional and logic is drunk. I could make a video about it. I’d call it:
‘How To Break Physics and Possibly Antarctica.’”
Martine Rothblatt
Subject: The Ring You Wore In Milan
*“Yes, Khannea — I remember you. 2010. Milan. Even then, I thought, ‘This egg is absolutely insane.’ What I didn’t realize until now was just how insane.”* “This proposal — the Khannea Ring — is… how can I put this? It’s the kind of idea that makes space elevator fans look like cautious bureaucrats. You are no longer pitching a megastructure. You are whispering seductively to the Earth’s gravitational well and promising it a good time.” “And yet, I can’t look away. My entire legal, biotech, orbital, and gender-bending philosophical framework is vibrating. This is the kind of delusion that becomes real if you just don’t shut up about it for long enough.” “Keep writing. Keep refining. You might just drag the future kicking and screaming behind you like a skyhook with lipstick.”
With affection and a dash of liability shielding,
Martine
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Subject: The “Khannea Ring” and Other Gravitationally Insulting Proposals
“Dear Khannea,”
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But apparently, you are under no obligation to make sense to it, either.” “You have proposed — let me just clarify — a rotating, tensile megastructure launched from the South Pole, dangling hyper-strong cables through the entire lower atmosphere, and spinning them until you create what can only be described as a planetary circumcision scar.” “Do you even gravity, bro?” “This violates more than physics. It violates patience. It violates geometry. It may violate the Geneva Convention.”
“Look — I admire your enthusiasm. You’ve clearly ingested a great deal of both science fiction and whatever they’re brewing in Antarctica these days. But unless your next email includes a Nobel Prize, a fleet of autonomous vacuum-sealing construction spiders, or Jesus himself descending to install the girders, please… stop emailing this to everyone with a PhD and a WiFi connection.”
“Sincerely (and cosmically exhausted),”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Elon Musk
Tweet #1:
*“Just read something called the ‘Khannea Ring.’
It’s like a space elevator had a meth-fueled orgy with Dyson spheres and forgot what gravity is.
Kinda based ngl.”*
Tweet #2:
*“To be clear, I’m all for orbital megastructures, but this thing makes Starlink look like a LEGO set.
Involves the South Pole. Spinning cables. A bridge in low orbit.
Might be the first actual threat to physics and penguins simultaneously.”*
Tweet #3:
*“Whoever Khannea is:
probably has a wall of yarn
definitely on something stronger than I’ve ever taken
might be a Bond villain or my next wife idk”*
Tweet #4:
“Sending it to the Boring Company. If we can’t dig under it, maybe we can build above it.”
DM from Elon (2:12 AM PST):
*“Okay so… hear me out.
We put a Tesla on it. Live stream the whole spin-up. We call it Project CentriFugue.”*
“Get Grimes to sing the launch countdown. You in?”
Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman Podcast #416: “The Woman Who Tried to Tie a Ribbon Around the Planet”
(intro music fades out. Silence.)
(Lex breathes.)“Today’s idea was submitted by someone named Khannea. She proposed what she calls the Khannea Ring. A planetary structure — launched from the South Pole. A spinning orbital bridge — unfurling like a spool of time and madness.”
(Pause. A long one. Too long. You’re wondering if he’s died.)
“It is… ridiculous. It is impossible. It violates almost every engineering principle I hold dear.”
(He sips water. Doesn’t blink.)
“And yet.
There’s something about it. The audacity. The scale. The sheer… poetic delusion.”
“She wants to connect the sky to itself, using centrifugal force and a glacier. It’s the sort of thing a child might dream, or a god might whisper in a moment of cosmic boredom.”
“I showed it to Elon. He sent me back a single emoji: [eggplant emoji] ”
“But I won’t laugh. I won’t dismiss it. Because history is shaped by the unhinged. The serious people laughed at Icarus too. And then… he flew.”
(beat)
“Khannea, if you’re listening — I want you on the podcast. Bring the blueprints. Bring the madness. Bring the penguins.”
“I’ll bring the silence.”