Skyscraper hanging from an asteroid might become a reality someday

The human population is going up year after year with no sign of slowing down. The amount of land available is not likely to go up. So, it has become more important than ever to build bigger and taller buildings so that more and more people can be crammed into a comparatively small area. To that end, architects have unveiled a plan to build a skyscraper that will be suspended from an asteroid.

The design has been presented by a New York architecture firm. The building named Analemma Tower will be world’s tallest building. It will be hung by air cables attached to an asteroid. The building will be portable, which is why the tower will be constructed in Dubai which is a specialist in constructing tall buildings at low cost. The building upon completion will be moved to New York.

“Analemma inverts the traditional diagram of an earth-based foundation, instead depending on a space-based supporting foundation from which the tower is suspended. This system is referred to as the Universal Orbital Support System (UOSS),” Clouds Architecture Office said in a statement.

The building would be suspended at about 105,000 feet above earth’s surface. The tower will have offices in the lower floors while residential blocks will be on the middle and upper floors. The tower will be powered by solar panels, and rain clouds will be the source of water. The Clouds Architecture Office will depend on NASA to capture an asteroid in about 2021.

The asteroid will be in a geosynchronous orbit that would describe a figure of eight over the Earth. And every day the tower will move over top cities in the world and will come back to its original position at the end of 24 hours. The loop would also include passes over the south east coast of the US, Cuba, Ecuador and Peru. In order for the resident’s of the tower to reach earth, they will have to use parachutes.

The construction cost will no doubt be astronomical, but given the rising costs of land, in the long term, the cost of building the tower might not seem extraordinary. The architects are quite confident that the novelty of the tower will allow them to recoup costs and even make some profit.

(Writing by Ananya Dutta; Editing by Zainab Asif)