New satellite images show progress on Saudi Arabia’s 75-mile long mega city, The Line

Satellite images show progress is being made on Saudi Arabia‘s futurist 75-mile long megacity The Line.

The newly released photos were taken on October 22 by Australian company Soar and show excavators digging the foundations for Mohammed bin Salman’s £440billion vanity desert project.

The building site runs ‘straight as an arrow’ across the sand and through the mountains of the kingdom, with foundations up to 33ft deep for the self-contained metropolis with a mirrored exterior.

The Line will be part of the vast desert complex of Neom, which will also feature an artificial ski resort, an octagonal floating port city, flying elevators, a swimming lane for commuters and robots and AI to serve its future residents. 

More than 400 excavation vehicles are on site, the satellite images show, with thousands of workers housed in bases on the project whose end date is scheduled for 2030, although engineers fear it could take 50 years.

Construction workers broke ground in October and despite some doubts that the futuristic high-tech city would ever be fully realised, the project is well and truly underway.

The satellite images were reviewed by MIT’s Technology Review, who said the Line being dug is around 200ft wide, with an estimated 1.7million cubic metre of rock and sand excavated at the site already.

The trench currently being dug out is expected to have the foundations for the city built within it, although there are also plans for an underground transport system.

The megacity, which could house up to nine million people, was announced last year. 

It will consist of two 1,600 feet tall buildings that run parallel to each other across 75 miles of desert, coastal, and mountain landscapes. 

The building is so long that it will sit on struts to take the curvature of the Earth into account, and will also have a high speed train line running underneath its length.  

Design plans for the linear city show the sci-fi inspired interiors, with angular glass structures contorting in different shapes over an artificial river.

Trees climb up over the futuristic designs which will be fully powered by renewable energy in the sprawling tropical metropolis that looks like it could serve as a Star Wars set.

Bin Salman said he wanted his country to house a construction project as iconic and timeless as the Pyramids of Egypt. 

‘The Line is a project that is a civilizational revolution that puts humans first,’ he said at the time. 

If fully completed, the skyscraper will run from the Gulf of Aqaba, through a mountain range, and then extend along the coast into a desert ‘aerotropolis,’ the Wall Street Journal reported. 

Bin Salman also said that the project aimed to allow a million residents to meet within a five-minute walk and to travel end-to-end within a 20-minute stretch.

The futuristic buildings feature a silver shine and an intricate inside, with stairwells and greenery and homes to create a linear community. 

The community of millions will also be fed through vertical farming that will be integrated into the walls of the shiny buildings and residents will reportedly pay a subscription for three meals a day.

The Line will also feature a sports stadium that is set to be 1,000 feet above the ground. 

Bin Salman is also hoping Neom, as a whole, will create thousands of new jobs and let the oil-rich country stop being so dependent on the resource for wealth. 

However, foreign investments in Neom have not been so forthcoming as many Western countries continue to boycott the country over alleged human rights violations. 

Bin Salman has been accused of ordering the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, but the Crown Prince has denied any involvement. 

Others who have fewer political scruples have questioned whether the projects devised are just too ambitious. 

Saudi Arabia previously abandoned plans to build a mile-high skyscraper that would have been the world’s tallest after getting into funding difficulties.

The project’s completion date is set for 2030, but builders and urban planners are struggling to resolve many questions. 

The project was originally set to be completed in 50 years. 

Planners are struggling to answer if residents would consider living in a high-rise building after the pandemic, the migration of animals and birds, and how to deal with the structure impacting the flow of groundwater.

Environmental planners say the sheer size and length of the Mirror Line will disrupt migratory bird patterns – and the mirrored glazing of the building could further confuse them, pouring water on the project’s desire to be planet-friendly.