Satellite Pic Shows Saudi’s Sci-Fi Megacity Is Actually Being Built

Saudi Arabia’s weird new megacity, “The Line,” goes full steam forward. While building started on the undertaking in October, new satellite tv for pc pictures have revealed how a lot floor the undertaking has lined, the dimensions of town’s size, and the structure of its building web site.

MIT’s Technology Review reviewed satellite tv for pc pictures of The Line’s building web site from an Australian firm known as Soar, with a photo of the main base camp having been taken by a satellite tv for pc from Chang Guang Satellite Technology Corporation on October 22, 2022. This major base camp is situated at 28.10 levels latitude and 35.30 levels longitude on the jap facet of the Saudi Arabian peninsula, however Soar user Urban uploaded a number of pictures of building occurring all alongside the size of the Line.

The color-coded version of the bottom camp reveals the footprint of The Line being dug into the sand of the dessert, about 200 ft (60 meters) extensive, in response to Soar’s scale bar. Red dots point out not less than 425 excavation autos at work carving out the longer term metropolis’s footprint, with an estimated 1.7 million cubic meters of rock and sand being dug up at this web site alone. Urban’s picture additionally characterizes completely different components of the development web site, similar to a major building camp in pink that’s getting used to deal with staff and arrays of photo voltaic panels in inexperienced.

Another picture reveals building within the metropolis’s western web site, which is situated at roughly 28.15 levels latitude and 34.68 levels longitude. The picture was taken on September 10, 2022 utilizing a satellite tv for pc from Singapore’s Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Company, and reveals 103 excavation autos with an estimated 0.7 million cubic meters of earth having been excavated from this explicit portion of The Line. Urban additionally uploaded a standing replace with an image taken on November 18 that compares the world that has been excavated thus to the deliberate space.

The Line formally broke floor this previous October, although Urban’s pictures clearly point out that building began not less than a month earlier. The megalopolis will function a mirrored exterior that incorporates a very self-contained metropolis that’s 546 yards (500 meters) tall, 218 yards (200 meters) extensive, and a whopping 105 miles (170 kilometers) lengthy. With building underway, the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hinted at a possible completion date round 2030 in a Neom press release.