UST: News

The June issue of the Soviet popular science magazine "Tekhnika Molodezhi" ("Technology for the Youth") published an article by Anatoly Yunitskiy "To the space... by wheel" (in Russian).

The author proposes to move the industrial production out into orbit by means of the General Planetary Vehicle (GPV). As a result, transportation traffic on the route "Earth - space - Earth" should amount to about 10 billion tons of freight annually. The GPV with the diameter of about 10 meters shall be arranged on a special viaduct passing along the whole equator. The total mass of the GPV is 1.6 billion tons (40 tons per running meter), capacity of 200 million tons (5 t/m), passenger capacity - 200 million people. The estimated number of GPV rises into space for a fifty-year lifetime is 10 thousand.