¶ Floating City
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Index Entry
Floating City:
"In due course there would be my floating cities. Strange as it may be, they are impractical to build on Earth due to the gravitational effects and the winds. As a consultant to the advanced structures team at NASA we developed a geodesic sphere two miles in diameter. But this is really a delicate network–ball to ball-- and they would be centrifuged in space, weightlessly; and in that form they are going to be crystallized. They will be locally loaded.
“If you have spheres a mile in diameter then you can fortify them to any extent you want, but when you let it down into the atmosphere, it would be like a ping-pong ball landing in Niagara Falls. Because of its structure we would have it reflecting, so it would reflect its heat out and the structure would weigh so little that it would be lighter than the atmosphere around it. It is simply a cloud-- just the way clouds float in the sky because they dismiss the heat outwardly. But they are a practical thought: Housing in Space.”
