Bishop Ring (habitat)

A Bishop Ring[1] is a type of hypothetical rotating wheel space station originally proposed in 1997 by Forrest Bishop of the Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering.

[3] Like other space habitat designs, the Bishop Ring would spin to produce artificial gravity by way of centrifugal force.

In the original proposal, the habitat would be approximately 1,000 km (620 mi) in radius and 500 km (310 mi) in width, containing 3 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) of living space,[2] comparable to the area of Argentina or India.

Because of its enormous scale, the Bishop Ring would not need to be enclosed like the Stanford torus: it could be built without a "roof",[1] with the atmosphere retained by artificial gravity and atmosphere retention walls some 200 km (120 mi) in height.

The habitat would be oriented with its axis of rotation perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, with either an arrangement of mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the inner rim or an artificial light source in the middle, powered by a combination of solar panels on the outer rim and solar power satellites.