Designs for a Space Elevator Base Station

In the Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Professor Michael Fox had his students do a very cool and relevant project, a design of an ocean-based base station for a Space Elevator.  As far as I know, this is the first time that people from the Architecture world have had a go at this.  When the time comes to actually design a real base station, we will need the Architects to work along with the Engineers in order to design this right.  Yes, we could just have a floating platform that looks like an ocean-based oil rig, but why not make it aesthetically pleasing as well?  Plus, architects are going to include amenities and other practicalities that would not be obvious to engineering-type designers.

There are 11 designs in all – each of them really outstanding.  I invite you to visit the main project website and look at the effort each of these teams have put into this project and the level of thought and detail that they have included.  I hope to be writing more about this project in the near future.

The two picture thumbnails in this post are cut from two of the projects.  The topmost one is from the INTERFASE project, created by the team of Ehsaan Mesghali and Owen Liu.  The bottom one is from another project (I’m unsure of the team that created this one, but I’ll find out ?).  Click on either of them for a larger version of the picture.

I urge you to visit the main website and then spend some time browsing the individual designs – there really is lot of fine work here and all of the students are to be commended for their efforts.