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Riding The Space Elevator
savas was one of the folks who sent in the story concerning the possiblities of a space elevator in 50 years time. They make good sense, especially if we are committed to doing something more than the current small commitment to space.
Big, incredibly expensive global projects are usually funded more by American money than anyone else's.
Like, say, the United Nations?
Censorship on Slashdot
Naw. From the point of view of the earth, it's a very tall mountain. Mountains on earth don't get hot from air friction. Airplanes travel faster through the air than the cable would.
Also, don't think of this as a wire. It would probably be 100+ ft around at the earth's surface.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
You've got the wrong picture. This isn't attached to the surface of the earth. Think of it as a very long skinny satellite, in geosynchronous orbit.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
And now I sit back and watch my karma die.
You build it by starting with a space station in geosynchronous orbit over the equator and extending it both down and up simultaneously (to keep the center of gravity in geosync orbig).
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
And oscillate back and forth with gravity until 'caught' (something along the lines of a large net) .. yea.. could be fun.. what if you're never caught though? :)
--
Delphis
I am scared of heights. The State of Liberty was tall enough for me to get dizzy. I don't have any idea what would happen if I had to travel miles into space...
Yes, I've read Red, but not Green or Blue (yet anyway). A space elevator would make a prime target for terrorism. In reality, terrorist would probably attack the base (as apposed to the counterbalance asteroid), so the cable would drift away, instead of coming crashing down in a huge mess.
That would mean patents on the wheel, lever, ramp, etc. are all open and waiting to be exploited.
Jeff Bezos call your office!
DB
You've just designed a perpetual motion machine, but you'll have to build a working prototype before you can patent it. :)
DeanT
How many things in the world once thought to be impossiable are very possiable today?
Was it impossiable to think 50 years ago everyone could have a computer on thier desks?
Was it impossiable to have a network to connect everyone to everyone else linked by light?
Was it impossiable to think man would walk on the moon?
Was it impossiable understand the atom?
Was it impossiable to build a pymind of limestone in the middle of a desert?
Was it impossiable to drag huge stones to a field inright them, and build a circle?
Was it impossiable for the king and queen to lose all meaningful power in europe?
There is so many thing that was once thought impossiable that are very possiable today. Everything you state here can be changed or invented in the next 50 years. Look how far we have come in the last 100 years. Lights, cars, airplanes, computer, nukes, radio, the internet, lasers and so many other things.
Anything with a people with enough will power behind it, is possible.
MarNuke
MarNuke
babelfishes, that is...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I love the idea of taking an elevator to space, and I don't doubt that we'll eventually be able to build one (whether it will ever actually happen is another matter).
However, one of the first concerns I had about such a tower, was how to protect it -- not only from accidental collisions with space junk or an errant airliner, but how about a dedicated terrorist with a bunch of missiles?
The Elevator would definitely be a tantalizing target.
Satellites are falling, which is precisely why they a person on one wouldn't percieve any gravity.
The same thing would occur (briefly) if you were in an normal elevator that was falling down its shaft.
My thoughts exactly. If we can build something like a space tether, I imagine we can just build a sea-floor tether, and slap a platform somewhere above sea level.
Look ma, internationwal waters. The biggest navy owns me.
Casca
I see this article suggests Carbon Nanotubes would be a good material to use. Only the findings reported in the heatsink article contradict this. This is the scientific equivalent of vapourware. Some scientists churn out this kind of story for ever: "We can achieve A using B assuming B has property C, only we don't understand B yet, C is a theoretical phenomenon that has never been observed and we haven't bothered finding out if A is really relevant to anything".
Even better, ship him off for project building in Iraq...
B-)
DB
Name 'em.
Why hasn't anyone done a "MoonBase"? ... A MoonBase would be a lot easier to build and maintain.. wouldn't it?
Maybe. Moon bases are certainly in the 'talking-about' stage. The trick is, of course, getting enough to the moon to be self-sustaining.
Everyone keeps trying to do these space stations that keep failing and falling apart.
Uh, exactly HOW MANY space station has there been? I count one. The International Space Station is not yet commissioned, so the only example I can think of is Mir. To ask why it's falling apart, you only have to look at the government that's running it. One example does not make a trend.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
In a world that loses its collective mind every time a hundred pounds of satellite debris comes down, do you really think anyone is going to be allowed to build a structure that could drop thousands of tons of material across a large swath of the planet if it failed (or the installation went badly)? One doesn't even have to be one of the neo-Luddites to see that maybe this isn't such a great idea, however cool it might sound. By the way, this idea is also known as a "beanstalk" (for obvious reasons), and Analog Science Fiction had a fascinating article some years back on how one might build and install one of these things.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
This is, of course, assuming that the actual act of falling is safe. I don't know enough about things like terminal velocity to know if you run the risk of dying of asphyxiation or burning up as you fall.
....but I was wishiing for a stairway to heaven.....
chucks...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I saw a (BBC?) interview with Arthur C. Clarke a year or so ago. One of the questions they asked of him was what he thought were the exciting possibilities in science for the next century. One of the things he said was the space elevator, and again he pointed out that it couldnt be done with current materials but said that the C60 isotobe in development could allow this, as it is stronger than diamond in certain respects.
Incidentally he said the energy cost of getting a person and baggage into space would be around $100, (the article says $220 so thats inflation for you :). However since you can reclaim most of this energy when the person and their luggage makes the return trip (their weight + gravity will result in energy going back into the system) he was saying that the cost of the return trip would only be $10. I suppose thats $22 now but still a lot cheaper than the $220 mentioned on the page
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Hello? Scientific welfare, if you want to call it that, is probably the most important thing the government does. Even if you're willing to ignore all the incredible scientific advances such funding brings us, you can't ignore these two simple facts: They're smart, and they know how to make really big bombs. Somebody needs to keep them distracted.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
But weren't we told that we'd have flying cars by the year 2000? Where is my flying car!?!?
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
The problem with Ringworld is that for the centripital force to produce "artificial" gravity, the Ringworld would have to be spinning much faster than the rate of its it's orbital revolution. No material that we can conceive of has the tensile strength to hold it together. At least, that's what I read somewhere.
50 years, eh?
Wow, that'll happen even sooner than the stuff that was going to happen twenty years from now in the seventies..
Moon bases, intersteller travel, "an airplane for everyone"... Please, spare me.
I agree. The Mars Trilogy have to be some of the best books in all of Sci-Fi, and deal specifically with this issue.
Kim also says that the average trip up is something like 7 days... That's a long elevator ride.
He also metions that will propper weighting, they can become a quasi-perpetual-motion-machine, in that laden one side of a pulley heavier, and it'll pull the other side up as it falls to the ground.
He goes into great detail, some of which has to be partly true, about hanging the elevator using the proper distance to equal out orbital and gravitational forces. Nothing tethered on each end, just a beautiful balence.
I forget when the books were set, but I do remember the main charactors being born around the same time as me. Does that mean I get to go to Mars and ride the magical elevator? Noooo!
-Josh
Charles Sheffield had a novel, "Web Between the Worlds", that dealt with the orbital tower/ space elevator/ beanstalk (Sheffield's preferred terminology), that was published about the same time as Clarke's "Fountains of Paradise" -- one of those coincedences of simultaneous independent development of similar ideas...
Mashed potatoes can be your friends!
I mean seriously. The risks involved in having something sticking out that far that is in orbit is just outragious.
... but an elevator into space... doesn't seem like a good idea.
I think we need to comeup with a new way to get things into space
Why hasn't anyone done a "MoonBase"? Everyone keeps trying to do these space stations that keep failing and falling apart. A MoonBase would be a lot easier to build and maintain.. wouldn't it?
If it's done like most American funded projects it will be billed to the American public (through tax dollars) and then we (the American public) will have to pay 5x as much as anyone else to use it (because we should have to pay for our right to pay for our right to pay for our right to pay for our right to pay for our right to use it, or something like that).
Bite my yammer.
Cool, I'll be able to drop Shard Squads next to those pesky peacekeepers.
"If you unscrew Bill Gates' navel will the bottom fall out of the software market?"
Ok, lets say that all the obsticles of structral materials, orbital harmonics, etc. etc. can be overcome, and we build this thing. Now, as I understand it, the bottom end is attached to something at this end... in this case, a 50 Km tall building. This is, of necessity, located on Earth's equater. But don't we have plate tectonics? Will it STAY on the equater? Or will we have to relocate the anchor point ever few hundred years?
It is held up by sky hooks.
You know if we do get an elevator to space a bunch of smart ass kids will press all the buttons and it take you 3 hours to get to the top -;)
Well, if it does happen in 50 years or so, I will be more concerned with improvements in denture technology.
2. The tether could most certainly be rigid - it's a straight line connecting GEO and the surface of the Earth. Tidal forces (from the moon and the sun) _may_ induce some sway - but this can most certainly be dealt with by appropriate movement of the balance mass beyond GEO.
3. Not according to my freshman engineering statics class - don't think of it as a large tower, think of it as a very large, flat bridge.
4. You put it in any equatorial country - I prefer South America, because of the Andes, but Africa would do fine. The tether goes straight up, so as long as it isn't within 10km of a border on the ground, nobody can do anything about it.
So, it isn't impossible at all to imagine. I personally think we won't, but not because we can't. The possibility of it crashing to Earth (and thus making a hundreds-of-kilometers-long crater) will guarantee that permits will be very hard to get.
Now, constructing such a tether (I prefer the term 'beanstalk' myself) on Mars would be more feasible - the Martian gravity, being lighter, gives us the advantage of being able to use contemporary materials. The CNTs discussed in the article have incredible tensile strengths, but only in lengths of less than a meter, currently. Additionally, Phobos and Deimos, if moved to Mars synchronous orbit (Mars GEO), would provide an ideal source of materials and a base for construction.
Even considering the above, however, it is unlikely that a beanstalk will be built on Earth. Besides the difficulty in making one in our 9.8m/s^2 gravity, beanstalks are also confined to a two-dimensional plane, because of the need to connect to a point on the equator.
I'd refer you to a webpage with more specifics, but it isn't done yet.
Howard Swan (fenris@nmt.edu)
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever. -Konstantin Tsiolkovskii
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
I wonder where I can get my hands on the drugs that they feed the people at NASA...
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you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
Oh well I have no clue what the hell I'd make it out of
Metal whisker fibers and carbon nanotubes both have the required tensile strength, and have both been produced in the laboratory. It is not a question of the materials existing. It is a question of being able to easily and cheaply produce them in bulk.
Nanotubes were mentioned in the article. Please read it thoroughly, as it may answer other questions you may have. It also cites more technical articles, if you want more detailed information.
Mmmm, Cloud Princess....
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Hmm, I wonder how long it would take for the Mile High Club to find the elevator.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Governmental stability is a separate problem - you not only have to worry about populations throwing out their governments, you have to worry about governments extorting money from the tower. Chances are that any project spending the kind of money that it'd take to build a 50km tower and a stairway to heaven will be able to negotiate how much graft it'll have to pay the local government, given the boost the thing will be to the local economy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Maybe I'm missing something here, but as I understand it, the basic idea here is not a big tower poking *up*, but rather a geosynchronous satellite running a long, hefty cable *down* to somewhere inside the earth's atmosphere that can be reached by more-or-less conventional means.
So, why try and get all the way down to the ground? Just have the terminus be a big hanging heliport somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Something high enough to be above most storm systems, but reachable by something not much more outlandish than an SR-71.
Of course, the leaps of engineering required to build a structure like the space elevator are entirely over my head, so I'm just kind of assuming that if you can build an elevator that reaches all the way from LEO to the ground, you must be able to build one that reaches halfway...
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
The problem with launching a rocket is that all of the energy comes from burning some sort of fuel. Fuel has mass. So for every kilo of payload you have, you need to add (for instance) 5 kilos of fuel. But to get that extra 5 kilos of fuel up to the point where it will burn off, you need to add another 4 kilos of fuel. But to get that...
With a track/tower/cable, you can use massless energy sources. Like electricity. Generate on the bottom (or top) and use that to power the elevators. All of a sudden, you eliminate the cost of launching all of that fuel all or part way into space, and you save a lot of money.
---sheath
And it's common sense that quantum physics must be wrong, cause it just doesn't make sense that something could be like a wave or a particle at the same time!
And it's just common sense that no one will ever be able to make a fabric that could stop a bullet.
Oh wait, they did - it's called kevlar. Hey! that's your alias!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
What, you mean the Earthlings and the little green men?
My guess is that they've already got translators.
:wq!
IIRC, the axial tilt of the Earth doesn't flip-flop with the seasons. If the Earth is tilted to the 'Left' in June with the sun to the 'Left', it's still tilted 'Left' in December, but the sun is now on the 'Right'.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
OK, If I remember correctly there will be a lot of energy in the form of electricity being generated by the friction of the cables through the atmosphere. I am assuming that the main cable materials would be non-conductive but wouldn't it be beneficial to add some cables for power generation? The shuttle experiment generated 2700 watts (going by memory so correct me if wrong) for the few seconds that it was functioning on an ultra thin coppper wire. Does anyone know what kind of numbers this thing could possibly generate?
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
It looks like these guys really have this idea together well. Hopefully they will be successful..
I wonder, though, how do they keep it from being destroyed by space debris? It can't maneuver around space junk. It would seem that making sure to keep the orbit clear so that floating chunks of steel don't whack a cable at some insane speed and snap it. I guess they could have robotic controlled guns on the some of the cables to blast the shit out of any nearby debris. Then again, in 50 years they might just have robots that can zip around space clearing out all the crap in the way 24/7....
Thank goodness all of those space engineers and guys with PhD's and years of experience designing and builing stuff like this have you around! Think of all of the resources (and perhaps lives!) we would have wasted if they foolishly tried to actually pursue this...
Hmm, I wonder how long it would take for the Mile High Club to find the elevator.
They'll probably have to start some new, um, 'qualifications' - LEO, GEO, etc. Everybody likes TLAs, you know.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Structures of any type do not survive any signifigant length of time without maintenance. Large projects in particular often require more resources in maintanence than in construction, and if the construction takes any length of time at all, then maintenance costs start on the parts of the structure that are complete.
Worse yet, this would be a structure that you would have to maintain. Consider what would happen if this puppy precessed a little and fell over (excuse me, deorbited...) I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it, and in this case "near" is a pretty big place.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
I'm not precisely certain that the ESA space centre in Kourou has been funded by US Dollars.
(not that it doesn't make profits out of US Dollars nowadays, but...)
Actually, they grabbed a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid and settled it into the areosynchronous orbit it would be in when it became the space station Clarke.
SPOILER! Phobos was blown up by Nadia after being boobytrapped by Arkady, and Sax sent Deimos off into space to keep the UNTA from building a new base on it.
Not exactly. They induced wobbles into the cable to make it avoid Deimos when it came by.
If you have any questions, fire away. Daniel
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator was a great book .. ..
nice to know that world may finally catch up with Willy Wonka
If the technology exists to build such a thing, including moving the asteroid to tether the other end, the technology certianly exists to build the Island to tether the other end.
I would also say it is rather short sighted to believe that in a hundred years time the unstable governments of today will still be unstable and that stable governments today will still be stable. Compared to the empires of centuries gone by, Western Democracy is still so new that one could say it is still in beta testing.
This is a boring sig
I think Brazil qualifies as "Somewhat Reasonable," and they have a vast stretch of equator running across their country. If we could build it there without tearing up more rainforest, that should work. It could even be used as a"carrot" to encourage rainforest conservation.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Venezuela...
:-). But having the influx of money and jobs would be nice. Plus I'd bet it would be cheap labor for you guys :-)
:-). Yes, there are some of us left. It's just hard to find a job with all the companies closing down)
Well, around here things are not going very well. We have a stupid president who is more interested in appearing on TV than governing. He tries to get the masses to rebel. (against what? who knows). He changed the constitution to whatever he wanted (well, it's a little more complicated, but that's the bottom line). His economic plans are laughable to nonexistent. All international investors are avoiding us like the plague. All Venezuelans who have the money are fleeing the country. Unemployment rates are the highest it's been in the history.
Oh, and he was just reelected for 7 more years (I am not going to express my opinion on whether he cheated or not).
With all that said, yes, Venezuela would be a good place. Set up in the Bolivar state, (Yes, near rain forests and national parks, sorry). You'd be on the guayana shield (Basically a REALLY big rock) so there are no earthquakes. You'd be very close to many different rivers which are being or will be exploited for hidroelectirc power. Iron and aluminum industries are in the area, plus the biggest oil exporter outside the middle east is (take a guess....) Venezuela. (there is also diamond, gold and I think a little bit of radiactive materials, I'm not sure if it'd help)
You have sea/river transportation as far as Puerto Ordaz, a few hours away, and if you are going to build a space elevator, you might as well build a nice highway from it to Puerto Ordaz.
Yes, Venezuela is having problems. Hopefully Chavez will be overthrown soon
(And thanks for the technologically clueful vote
Yes, definitely. Such a location would also be safer if the cable ever broke. There would be fewer people around (although the base station would still have a lot) and the water would take the energy of the fall.
--Phil (The best solution, of course, would be to not have the cable break in the first place.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
It's spelled T-O-W-E-R-O-F-B-A-B-Y-L-O-N! I think we should elect Donald Trump president of the USA, so he can build one of these and put his name on it in gold letters. Yeah!
>A segmented elevator cable in earth orbit plus orbit mechanics allows you to get around with only 1/7 of the height in actual cable segments. You coast between cable segments.
Don't know this one. Do you have a URL?
>A tower from the ground several tens of km tall saves you most of the losses that a rocket like the shuttle sees from trajectory inefficiency and atmospheric drag. You simply launch from the top of the tower.
Problem with this is it doesn't help much. (93% of the energy to get to LEO is going sideways; only 7% is altitude.) The cost of the tower would be trillions; and probably very wobbly.
> Existing high strength carbon fiber (1 million psi strength) is sufficient for economically rational space elevators. Carbon nanotubes are strong enough for a 35,000 km space elevator, but they would also make possible ultra-light rockets that would eliminate the cost justification for such a large elevator.
In other words, rockets are actually too cheap for space elevators to every be practical on economic grounds. There was a design for a rocket in the 60s that could launch over 100 tonnes at orders of magnitude lower cost than the current price. Its a little known fact that the fuel needed to get across the atlantic in Concorde is comparable for that to get to low earth orbit (per payload.)
Tethers look very much more promising in the short term.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I disagree that the 'space elevator' is impossible to build but I still don't think we'll be seeing one built anytime soon. Here's why...
It's Too Vulnerable
Any type of 'space elevator' is inherently vulnerable to attack, either by a hostile nation or a terrorist group using conventional explosives or nuclear weapons. With 35,900 kilometers of target length it's difficult at best to defend, perhaps impossible. And it will be a target. Destroying a space elevator will certainly make an impact on the nation(s) or organizations that own it and at some point someone will see advantage for their group or nation to be the one to do it.
It's Too Big
The construction of a space elevator would be the most difficult and expensive construction project ever undertaken on Earth, by several orders of magnitude. Imagine building a bridge across the Atlantic and you get some idea of the scope of the project. It will also require an extensive human presence in near Earth space to build and maintain the cable and counterweight. In order for a space elevator to be economically feasible and to carry out the actual construction there must be an extensive and thriving space economy to support it. We simply do not have strong and compelling reasons now or in the foreseeable future to build a space elevator.
It's Too Dangerous
Imagine the consequences if a space elevator were to fail. At a cable length of 37,900 kilometers if the cable were to break for any reason the results would be catastrophic for anyone underneath the cable. The damage and destruction would be felt on a global scale and would likely be impossible to protect against. The cable might break due to intentional action (as discussed above), accidental events (something smashes into the cable), weather effects (storms), and structural issues (design or materials failures).
While I do think the space elevator is an incredible concept I do not believe it will be technical problems that prevent us from building one. I would in fact agree that the technical challenges would likely be resolved in the next few decades. But still I do believe that the most serious problems with the concept are political and economic issues that are unlikely to be solved anytime soon. Still, it would be something to see...
A tower attached to a cable that ascends into the heavens. This is by no means a "NEW" idea.
It's great that my grandchildren may actually see it happen, but it's not new.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You have to remember, however, that rocket propulsion is extremely inefficient, when compared to climbing up an existing structure. A space elevator would result in at least an order of magnitude of savings, probably several. And you could generate and store power on the way down.
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Mod that up as funny.
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E_NOSIG
As far as the Stephenson comparison between the Philippines and America, I haven't read the book but the comment sounds true. The Philippines was a US colony for about 50 years and up to a few years ago was the one of the most pro-US countries in the world. Then around 1992 they traded in their two US bases (Navy: Subic, Air Force: Clark) for a handful of nationalism. Most Filipinos emulate Americans and want to be like them or look like them or move to the US or all of the above.
Anyway, I digress. Short summary: 1. No, you don't want to build the tether there; 2. The Cyrptonimicon comment is on the money. (In this case, a peso. ;-)
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The thing would fly perfectly well without an anchor; it's just a matter of putting it in a stable orbit with one end of the cable near the surface. It could be kept out of the lower atmosphere, and if needed a small difference from geosynchronous orbit would allow it to circle the equator slowly. One could also put aerodynamic forces to good use in adjusting the thing down or up.
Anchoring it to the earth would only be necessary if more downward force is needed, but it seems to me that down-force is to be avoided. Keeping the thing up with minimal additional tension in the cable would be better.
One should also look at what happens if the cable breaks. The greater the tension, the greater the energy released, and the larger the perturbation on the circular orbit. If the thing can be kept up without a lot of external force (i.e. yanking on the string), it's probably more stable.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I get the same feeling riding on Wild Thing at Valley Fair, and still my wife and I jump right back in line.
So, my point it basically that people enjoy a thrill every now and then, and that includes the fear that is instrinsic to the thrill.
I'd jump at the chance to go on a space elevator. I want to visit space terribly. Maybe this would give me an affordable way to do it. Of course, it won't probably happen in my lifetime. But still...
Bite my yammer.
All of which is to say that whatever figures are given for riding the big upilator would include the energy to gain orbital velocity. That energy isn't free, but it's paid for in the initial toll. Once at the top, you need delta-V to increase that speed (to achieve a higher orbit, for instance), but you do have a good start.
Am I making sense to anybody besides myself?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
the link just changed on me ..
"But if they're so fierce and dangerous," Charlie said, "why didn't they eat us up right away in the Space Hotel? Why did they waste time twisting their bodies into letters and writing SCRAM?" "Because they're show-offs," Mr. Wonka replied. "They're tremendously proud of being able to write like that." "But why say scram when they wanted to catch us and eat us?" "It's the only word they know," Mr. Wonka said.
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Friday came out when I was in high school, which would be in the mid-80's. A quick check at alibris shows an unread, signed, first printing edition for the low, low price of $492. Friday is probably my favorite late-era RAH novel, but he was using other people's ideas for some of the BG.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
I can't help but worry.. what if somebody bombs the bottom? That'd be an awful lot of falling to do.
Can you imagine listening to elevator music for a couple hours??
And what if you got stuck up in it during a power failure? =)
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
Two. Possibly three. I'm not sure if the third of that height has been opened yet. There's also Superman the Escape. A rollercoaster track that is a DemonDrop style go-up-and-fall ride.
Exactly why does it need to be near the equator? is it just me or wouldn't the rotation of the earth on a tether that large be a real pain. either have a huge tensile strenght or rocksts almost contnually fireing to keep the top where it should be.
my suggestion: build it in antartica... find a stable base and build there then you only need to worry about the rotational pull to twist the tether.
And I thought I was the only one that still thought about Transoformers.
And by the way, Starscream wouldn't try to prevent the Deceptacons from using it for reinforcements, he wanted to lead the Deceptacons. Even during his 'battle' with Megatron most of the other Deceptacons didn't give a crap who was in charge (well, other than Galvitron).
And to finish off that little bit of dignity that's clinging to me (get off damn it!). Did you perhaps mean Jetfire? He was the first and arguably the most powerful of the Autobot jets.
Pardon me, I have a date with a rope.
Bite my yammer.
Making it of insulator would not eliminate the effect. I can't proove it (I'm theorist, not techy) but I feel something about surface currents and suchlike. Confirm/disprove if you know better.
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Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
Yep - particularly effective description of what happens when tens of thousands of kilometres of a structure comes crashing down to earth oops mars. The article fails to mention Robert A. Heinlein - in at least one of his books [Friday which my copy says was first published in the UK in 1962] his main character regularly uses what he calls a Beanstalk to get too and from L-5 to a base station in Kenya. The story also references a disaster at another Beanstalk in Quito - so the many of the concepts were well formed in fiction before either the Pravda or Science articles put some theory into them.
Kim Stanley Robinson had the coolest, most detailed space elevator in his Red, Green, Blue Mars series. Some of the details:
They moved one of Mars' moons to geostationary orbit and built the cable down from the moon to the surface.
The whole cable was in orbit. The bottom of the cable actually floated above the base on Mars!
The cable rotated (like a jumprope) so it would pass AROUND the other moon as it came near the elevator.
SPOILER! - When terrorists cut the cable at the top, it wrapped around the equator of Mars as it fell at an amazing velocity and created one of the coolest disasters in sf.
Read a good book lately?
Read a good book lately?
Actually I suspect that this thing would cost enough that it's cost couldn't be borne by one single nation. Ideally IMHO, this would be constructed by private interests. Ideally some combination of Russia's Energia, Airbus, and some American, Japanese, and other aerospace companies. Where I could see some government involvement is carving out a special zone for protecting the elevator. Paying the Host nation for the zone.
My Weblog
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have a feeling that the loss of rotational velocity of the Earth could be easily countered with an occasional blast of pressurized gas out of the side of the counterweight...
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
2061 has to be one of the worst books in all creation. Ugh.
For some unknown reason I eventually read 3001 anyway. It was actually sorta cool until Clarke realized 2/3rds the way through that he should put a plot in... and it was just so *lame* from that point on. Ugh. Crappy crappy crappy.
But you're right, when I saw this article, the first thing I thought of was 3001. However, to make it work in the book, he not only had to use diamond and nannotubes, but also come up with an 'inertial damper' that can utterly remove the sensations of accelleration and decelleration within a confined space.
And frankly, I just don't see that *ever* happening.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Think of the bass string this thing would make if only we had a large enough soundboard. Maybe a solar sail would do?
-Gary
"Sigs cause cancer"
Putting a large counterweight on a space-side tether with a quick release would allow you to save the station pretty easily. Or, just have the station be a seperate satelite. Have the top of the tether be a very simple 'port'.
In either case, the majority of the mass at the top could be simple chunks of rock. These could be easily snagged extra-terrestially. Maybe chunks of Moon or something. Or ice.
Has anyone actually read the Arthur C Clarke story? He at least got some of the specs right. Geo-stationary orbit IS NOT 50km. I dont remember at the moment (and will dig out the calculations later) but it is much much much greater. #2, he used fiber made from diamond as his support. I don't know about any diamond fiber now, nor do I know about the possibility of it in the next 50 years, nor do know whether it can support thousands of km worth of its own weight (much less the passengers!) Space elevator sounds like a nice idea, until you realize what you need to do it. And this is not to mention all of the various other problems associated with it, that people have mentioned here!
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Please, bring up some more irrelevent arguments for this article. Here's a thought: I'm going to make this super strong material that'll let me build a space elevator that'll let people get there on $222 each way! Oh well I have no clue what the hell I'd make it out of, and I have no clue how much it'd truely cost, but if it cost X, and you split it up by Y, etc. etc.
Give me some facts. Research it. Show the material. Do some tests. Put up some data. None of this assumption crap. The Scientific Method is what defines science and helps us describe our environment. I see no evidence of that here. Just a bunch of assumptions and "cool shit". What I'd love to know the most is: How the hell do they go about constructing this? Obviously from the top down. How many rockets does it take to put this amount of crap in space? How the hell do they expect to get an asteroid... thats a big deal... How do they expect to build it? People, machines? etc. etc. etc.
Its a long into space; not nearly as far as your brain however... its out there somewhere.
Hairy Potter, woefully clueless American, wrote:
Looking at the equatorial slice, you have Central and the northern part of South America. That's close to the US, but the only country in that area that sounds somewhat reasaonable is Venezuela. I think they're stable, and at least somewhat technically clueful.
Hairy, you may want to read the newspapers once in a freaking while.
First of all, you're completely wrong about South America, which has come a long way in the last twenty years. Not only have most countries turned from military dictatorships or nationalistic juntas toward multiparty democracies, most are fully industrialized and modern. Brazil even has its own nascent space industry with a launch site at Alcantara, and an aeronautical industrial center calling itself Space Valley.
Brazil has skyscrapers, subways, and even computers. (What, did you think they lived in mud huts?!)
Venezuela, on the other hand, has recently turned into as close to a rogue state as you can get and not actually be one. The President has endured the censure of the United Nations, the Organziation of American States, and others, and has deliberately met with pariah leaders like Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein. Venezuela is heavily Western-invested due to its oil industry, but many companies are reconsidering its long-term political stability.
A shame there aren't more, as close to the US is a major plus, since American will probablly pay for most of it.
Why would you assume that Americans will pay for most of it? Why would you assume that taxpayers will pay for most of it? More likely it will be built by an international consortium supported by investors and ultimately funded by the companies that buy its services. (Look at the Chunnel, or any modern major toll bridge, for examples.) Of course, that's assuming that stick-in-the-mud American industry is interested, which they may not be. (Our economy goes through phases during which it will throw money any and all innovation, no matter how inane, and during which the very word innovation is considered poison. Look at high-tech from 1999 to 2000 for an example.)
Going East, we get to Africa. Enough said there, I wouldn't invest a significant amount in Africa until it gets more stable.
Africa's a pretty big place, kiddo. Some parts are stable, others are not. That said, the industrialization there in 2000 isn't that convenient for a space industry. That could change, though.
Further East is India and Sri Lanka. India would certainly be a possibility, they have high tech, they speak English.
What kind of incompetent school did you go to, that you believe speaking English is a pre-requisite for mastering high technology? India is not only a land of breathtaking scenery mixed with breathtaking poverty, it is also a land that has made a leap to the cutting edge of high technology. The computer industry is supplied by a steady stream of incredibly smart and motivated people from India, many of which I've been proud to work with.
While Singapore has a harsh dictatorship, it is stable and high tech. Indonesia and the Phillipines have too many trouble.
Singapore's Asian-style strongman semi-democracy isn't what I would call open and free, but I wouldn't call it a dictatorship either.
Basically, I think you have a view of the world that is informed mainly by 30-second sound bites on CNN Headline News. Get out of the house once in a while. Talk to people who look different from you. Read a book or a newspaper. The rest of the world is a little more interesting and capable than you think -- and not all decisions about the future are made in the United States.
Good grief.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Whatever happened to the SSTOs?
As I recall, MacD(?) was working on one called the Delta-Clipper, or some such....
But I haven't heard anything in about 3 years... Anyone got any information? All the web articles I find are from three years ago, or I wouldn't ask...
NecroPuppy
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
It's impossible. The tether will have to be flexible, or it'll snap. (Remember, s = d/t, and the circumference of low-orbit is quite a bit greater than that on the surface.) Even then, the stress will be fantastic.
Hey, Thanks! This explains why when I was a kid the wheels on my trike would always come apart! I'd get pedalling so fast that the outer edge of the wheel would explode away from the axle. Little did I realize that it was because the circumference at the outer edge of the wheel was so much greater than at the axle, therefore the outer edge had to spin much faster than the axle it was attached to. Now I see that those rigid metal spokes should be replaced with something more flexible like Twizzlers. Fresh ones, though, not the ones that have been in that open bag in my glove box for a couple months. Likewise, we should be ready for the Earth to break up from the stresses caused by the equator rotating so much faster than the poles. Bye-bye Scandinavia!
If you don't think the materials science people are capable of creating materials strong enough to work, that's certainly a valid point, but there's nothing inherently impossible about different parts of the same object rotating at different speeds - in fact, it's basically required for anything of any respectable size, be a planet, Frisbee, or trike wheel.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Let me try this again.
Big, incredibly expensive global projects (assuming you're willing to concede that a 50 KM tower will be monstrously expensive) are usually funded more by American money than anyone else's. The ESA space center is not quite on the same level of scale as this tower would be, let alone the elevator.
Also, wouldn't you be able to recover some of the energy cost when you bring the elevator back down (regenerative braking) ?
Also, how about the energy generation possibilities of a vary long cable moving through a magnetic field...
I'd wager you'd fall to the ground. The cable, space station, etc would all be connected to the asteroid, but since your elevator car was magleved to the cable, you'd just drop. And this would happen anywhere, in or out of the Earth's asmosphere. Asmosphere=/=gravity field. Only outside of the atmosphere you'd have to deal with re-entry
...so when you get to the top, you'll still be walking (not floating) and won't be able to drink those cool balls of water.
Yep, you'd drop no matter what. Required orbital velocity for all orbits below GEO is greater than the velocity you'd have by virtue of the Earth's rotation. You're pretty much fscked in or out of the atmosphere.
Not true, you'd still be in freefall. Do you think satellites in GEO experience gravity? If so, why don't they fall?
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Unless you have been stuck in an elevator before you might not know the feeling... 5 minutes seems like hours. What would happen if the elevator breaks half way to the moon? Hit the emergency button and wait for the maintenance crew to arrive... at least 2.5 hours for the lunar colony or earth... provided the problem could be easily repaired. I think I will wait until Stargate(tm) technologies are developed.
Just my $.02
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
Note that the basic physics requires the center-of-mass point to be in geostationary orbit; that requires a huge mass to be tied down to the other end. The article suggests an asteroid. People have often mentioned moving asteroids into Earth orbit for mining purposes, but that is just incredibly unlikely, not from a technical perspective (where we can always speculate on future technologies) but rather from a political one. Just imagine the public backlash if one suggested to move a few-km sized rock, capable of a 100 hydrogen bomb explosion, and able to wipe out most of life on Earth. Sure, you may have the technology, but one minor slip-up...
Given our previous experience with small missions (think Challenger, Galileo, Mars missions...), there is a significant probably of disaster...
There are ways around this; the most obvious being importing lunar regolith for both the elevator and the counterweight. However, even the moon has a small gravitational field, even though it is much less than the Earth's. The net impact is one must still boost billions of tons of mass into place before _any_ useful work can be done with the elevator. You will need some _very_ large scale projects in mind to justify its existence.
To me, it seems much more feasible to use the moon or the asteroids themselves as the launching point for large-scale projects. Almost all of the basic materials are already there. Water and other volatiles can be shipped up from Earth when necessary.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
There seems to be a lot of concern about the lack of a decent place on land to locate the tower, which the article suggested would be O(50km) tall. Why not build it starting on the ocean floor? Heck, the ocean is only about 5km deep in most places in the Indian ocean. I also recall a bunch of Ayn-Randy devotees discussing designs for the construction of artificial islands- build one around where the tower exits the ocean and you have simultaneously avoided the problem of soverignty. jay-
Well lovely, you've dismissed an interesting idea with a one-liner. Wow. I wish we had more naysayers like you around to keep those damned foolish "idiot" inventor types in line.</sarcasm> Okay then, you just keep hiding under your rock and let us get on with the cool shit. "Inertial forces" might be a problem now (*might*), but you, nor anyone else, knows what our building materials will be like 50 years from now. You can either whine about potential problems, or fix them. Your choice. I bet I can guess what *you've* chosen. :)
Read my stuff.
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it. " - Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
This would have to be exactly on the equator, so India, Sri Lanka, Singapore or the Phillipines are out. Maybe an artificial island in mid-Atlantic, conveniently close to the US. Surely, if a 50 km. building could be done, a synthetic island shouldn't be too much trouble. Of course, it need not be close to the US, market-wise. It's awfully presumptuous to assume that in fifty years the US will still be rich enough (or stable enough) to afford or need this. Maybe, when the time comes, the Chinese will get to decide where they want to put their space elevator.
for some reason i just don't see this ever becoming a reality (as much as i'd like...). IMHO we (the usa) should be spending more money on our so called space exploration programs. i mean sheesh we haven't been to the moon in quite a while...
Go back and reread the end of Fountains of Paradise. The answer is obviously, all of the above, add in a few towers to sea platforms, for good measure. Then in the ring at GSO, put in a race track, and we can have the, "A.C.Clarke 140,115 Race" every year.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
NASA is already publishing plans to have a 16KM tall launching rail. The links are at the end of the story. Such a tall tower would radically reduce launch costs, but not as low as the elvator would.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Great.
All of those extreme sport cliff divers will be wetting themsleves over this.
More to topic. If we can go 35768 km into orbit, whats another few km to the bottom of the ocean. The deepest the ocean goes is the Marrianas Trench at 11,000 km, and most of the ocean is less than 100 km deep.
The lawyers will have a field day, when people get upset over that thing ruining their view. BTW. What happens when on of these things collapse? Talk about whiplash.
Wow, I never really expected to see this reported on seriously within the next decade or two...
;) A base station sounds like a great idea, but you don't want to take a risk of pulling the tether down with tension - the Mars trilogy points out exactly how dangerous a "wrap-around breakage" event could be... Not pretty.
After reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), I was awed by the reality with which he approached so many "hyper-advanced" ideas. Everything from solar sails to solar lenses were put into use in the series, and he made it all sound doable - if not viable. If you're interested in the space elevator concept, do yourself a huge favor and pick up at least Red Mars.. It really offers quite rational insight on why an elevator would be useful (espically for Mars) and how it could be done.
For those that can't grasp the concept (which took me months to really get a hold of), it's something that really requires a thick amount of understanding... It's not an "elevator" as much as it is a string to pull things along. It makes it possible to carry any amount of matter into orbit without the use of propellant or fast acceleration - like the freight train of space travel. It's not glamorous, and "tourists" may not find a use for it due to the long time it would take for human (low acceleration required) travel, but it would advance industry in space faster than any other advance I could think of.
Basically, it takes sending some self-controlled robotic factories along with a small army of robotic workhorses out to a carbon-based asteroid (of which there are many). You'd plant them there and build more robots out of the materials on the asteroid. Then, you build a mass driver to basically spew out chunks of carbonous mass at high velocity - to change the direction and orbit(s) of the asteroid. As this is happening, ya just start some robots working on a "tether" factory to extrude some buckey-ball goodness and you're set until ya hit earth orbit.
The toughest part is actually getting the massive asteroid into a stable orbit and finding out how to stabilize the tether with all that tension on it. It'd also produce huge ammounts of electricity due to it's travel through the earth's atmosphere... Hmm... Free power, anyone?
Oh well, I tried. Just pick up the books and let Mr. Robinson explain things in his extremely-descriptive way... After reading through that and putting some massive thought into it, it certainly seems possible for Mars for so many reasons, and it'd be useful on Earth only after it's in use someplace else as a proof of concept..
Anyway, too much coffee for me... Some food for thought.
I have a question...if the elevator pushes itself up along the cable, won't the cable be pushed towards the earth? I suppose this will especially happen with light cables so one will 1) need heavy cables and 2) have to move the cable higher into orbit every now and then...how does this work? The way I look at it, the amount of energy needed to get and keep the system in orbit is incredibly huge. I suppose the scientists must have thought about this, so can someone try to explain?
0x or or snor perron?!
OMG that is soooo true!
Kinda makes you wonder if we have the power to wake a seemingly asleep diety.
If you look at all the science going on, and how only impoverished countries seem to worship regularly, I have to ask...
If God is watching us always, why is it that true believers seem to be so poor and lowly?
It seems that great thinking men and women all believe that a 'greater being' exists, yet many of them refute God as being nothing more than a supersition.
If I was God, I would have kicked human ass long ago. According to scripture, God agrees with me, because that's WHEN he kicked our asses... long long ago.
Does that mean we are free to do as we please?
I can only imagine the Hell that lives in the collective human consciousness. What if you could tap into that?
Would you remain sane?
Well according to scripture, God can and does tap that every day. Perhaps God is insane?
Or perhaps sleep is his only choice.
mcmonkey wrote: .5 Km, so they're talking about something 100 times taller. In the 60-odd years between the Empire State Building (1931) and the Petronas(1996), the height of the tallest building increased less than 20%. So...last 70 years, 20% growth, next 50 years, 10000% growth.
... not because we couldn't (we probably could), but because nobody wanted to pay for it; one building that size would double the commercial real estate in downtown Chicago all by itself; the higher the building, the greater a percentage is devoted to dead space in elevator tubes that serve higher floors; and just logistically getting everyone who worked there to their desks in the morning would take all the transportation capacity of a modern major city, all pointing at maybe four square blocks, and taking six hours to fill and then empty the building.
Where are they going to get a base tower 50 Km tall? The tallest buildings are the Petronas Towers, both under
The reason we haven't built bigger buildings has a lot more to do with economics and logistics than with technology. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high tower called The Illinois that was never built
And what happens when something flies into this thing? Heck, birds have trouble avoiding wind mills, so I expect this will generate a fair amount of road kill. I certainly wouldn't want to be on my way up when an airplane hits.
Well, one would hope that would never happen. But I'd rather ride on an elevator than a bomb made of rocket fuel. (R.I.P. 51-L)
FYI, Canadians: the committee on tall buildings ruled that Petronas is the tallest building, while CN Tower is the tallest freestanding structure. They're really not comparable.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Sorry for the late reply. Anyway, someone already tried to patent a Donald Duck idea (story by Barks, I think). The plan was to fill a sunken ship with ping pong balls, and I think it worked, both in the story, and in the real world. Luckily, they didn't get a patent, because it wasn't their idea.
The basic flaw in the idea is that you need the technology to move massive amounts of stuff into space to build a tether, and if you have that technology, you don't need a tether.
OK, I dont know about you guys, but I, for one, was kind of enjoying the recent increased unity and communication between the nations of the world.
But isn't this "tower to heaven" just the thing that caused God to come down and confuse the languages in the Bible?
I propose a 50 year moratorium on this technological advancement so that philosophers and theologians can thoroughly debate the ethical and moral implications of this undertaking.
:-P
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If they can develop the super fibers required to do this, the Space Elevator is the way to go. It's a great way to get people and materials into space without using great big rockets (tm). The amount of energy needed to leave earth from several KM up is a lot less, than from down here -- and once getting to space can be done at reasonable cost, it will open up for all.
Beware of Sleestak
But for every one of us that do like them there are probably just as many others that won't go near them.
There's also the point that few rollercoasters go over 250 ft. up. And the thrill of heading back towards the ground from that height at an 80 degree angle is very exciting.
Imagine then approaching the ground at a 90 degree angle from a height of 5 km. I know it's going to be decelerating (hopefully) but I'd bet any amount of money that there will still be people chanting the "I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die" mantra.
On one hand, Niven's Ringworld was built of "Scrith", which apparently someone calculated would need to have a tensile strength on the order of the force that hold an atomic nucleus together. But, remember, Ringworld was built around a star and (IIRC) had a radius on the order of 100 million miles.
On the other hand, Clark's doesn't rotate, but simply sits in GEO, so it wouldn't need to be nearly so strong. It's main purpose would be to connect the multiple towers together and provide additional stability to the towers. The towers connection to the planet, would in turn prevent the a Ringworld style instability.
On the gripping hand, you'd probably want something somewhere between the two. If you build the ring a little ways outside of GEO, you would have a small amount of artificial gravity produced. It would be small, depending on how far out you built, but it would help keep junk from just floating about in mid-air. Multiple rings could provide different levels of gravity to suit different needs.
Lastly, it's illegal. If the elevator or cable travel within 10 miles of any other national border, that nation is entitled to claim trespass on their national territory, up to and including shooting down the offending object.
Aside from the detail that the '10 miles from the border' rule applies only over bodies of water and cannot affect another country's border, the base unit, cable, elevator and asteroid 'anchor' will be in a line perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. It won't be swinging back and forth over the base country's borders and into its neighbors airspace. So it would not be illegal.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
An airplane has hit the empire state building. The building survived. If you hit a cable of carbon nanotubules with an aircraft, it would most likely cut through the aircraft.
Bruce Perens.
They'll be done when I'm 80, I can take a trip up and annoy people the whole way with stories of my gall bladder operation. Wanna see my scar again?
That's a pretty long time to be stuck in an elevator with tourists.
(Fountains of Paradise was a great book, BTW.)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Exactly my point. Do you have weight in a falling elevator?
My choice of the word "fall" was unfortunate. I intended it in the sense "fall to Earth".
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
The trick is that the system isn't at balance when not being used, but rather under consciderable stress. You actually put the end station a bit beyond geosynchronous orbit, so that the cable is always taut (sp?).
More advanced designs would have the end station be able to move back and forth along the cable so that you always balance the load being carried by the lifting force in the system.
A computer is just a calculating device, ultimately, so the day the abacus was invented, that problem had already been solved. Everything else was a mere matter of scalability.
How is going from an abacus to a computer just a question of 'scalability', while going from existing cable designs/materials to much-improved futuristic ones an impossibility? If 'workable theories' are all that is needed to get credit for a series of inventions (as you imply for the Ancient Greeks - 'on Robotics, Hydrodynamics, Steam & Rocket propulsion, etc.'), then I think we already should get the credit for a space elevator.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
It has to be very near the equator, which really limits the places. You want to have a stable, reasonably high tech place that you can get to easily. I mean, you don't want to spend trillions of dollars to build it, and have it be destroyed in an uprising.
Looking at the equatorial slice, you have Central and the northern part of South America. That's close to the US, but the only country in that area that sounds somewhat reasaonable is Venezuela. I think they're stable, and at least somewhat technically clueful. A shame there aren't more, as close to the US is a major plus, since American will probablly pay for most of it.
Going East, we get to Africa. Enough said there, I wouldn't invest a significant amount in Africa until it gets more stable.
Further East is India and Sri Lanka. India would certainly be a possibility, they have high tech, they speak English.
Still further East is Singapore, Indonesia and the Phillipines. Shades of the Cryptonimicon. While Singapore has a harsh dictatorship, it is stable and high tech. Indonesia and the Phillipines have too many trouble.
Counting the votes, it looks like Singapore is it, which is a shame since they're so far from the US. Oh well, maybe the Asian tiger will rise again.
...
If she floats, she's a witch.
Geosynch orbit height, if I remember from high school phys was about 6 earth radii which is about
....22,500 miles
sound right?
..........FULL STOP.
Is it just me or does this sentence make absolutely no sense?
The originator of the concept was a Russian named Artusanov (sp?). Clarke fleshed out the concept (for fictional purposed) in "The Fountains of Paradise", and expanded on it in "3001". Heinlein also mentions the possibility of using Kilamanjaro (sp?) as the base for a space elevator in "Friday".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You probably wouldn't need any special G force resistant furniture for an elevator like this. Ion motors take a while to build up speed. Just plop down in a lazy boy and wait for the sound of the DING.
Constructing something like this is certain to inflame some religion somewhere, and then jackass #1 will strap seventeen sticks of dynamite to his chest and throw himself at the base of the 50Km tower. Is it posible anymore to create some kind of scientific advance that NO ONE will object to? The space cable/lift thing is a fantastic idea and the potential is unlimited, but it will probly be shot down by politics.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
if that cable snapped while still within the earth's atmosphere, you'd have one hell of a mess. They'd be chiesling you out of the bottom of the elevator shaft for years.
Sig it.
They dont give much details, but friends of mine
.. though what I liked in his book was the idea of a "space elevator" on the planet of europa to send out spurts of water (turning it into a spinning sprinkler system) which would then freeze in space and be used to cool down & colonize other moons/planets..
have been discussing the ideas for years..
Is it really possible? I mean 33km of material is going to weight a lot unless it's made out of feathers or intestine.. and I'm sure those materials have weight as well, and aren't that structurally sound..
This was talked about a bit in Arthur C. Clarke's book, space oddyssey 3001
What I really want to know.. is has MUZAK International already started planning on how they're going to insert their horrible string versions of american pie into the space elevator?
"And how can this be? For he is the
Why exactly is it believed that such a system would reduce the cost of orbiting something? IIRC, we already recover and reuse the boosters and tanks from the Shuttle, meaning that it's mainly a matter of refueling the things and fixing the stress damage. Therefore, it seems like the main cost of getting to orbit is energy (well, that and building vehicles that don't fall apart on the way up), and my rudimentary knowledge of physics says to me that you're doing the same amount of work no matter how you get up there.
I can see an argument that the elevator might need less control/support architecture than the Shuttle, but presumably once you're up in orbit you'll need to move off the tether and remain alive for a few hours, so that equipment still needs to be hauled up. (I suppose we could also be assembling all our orbital vehicles up there, so that you just take the elevator up to a space station and hop into an orbiter which never had to be brought up from Earth, but that's a long way off...)
Admittedly, it would be swinging wildly several miles up, where there really isn't much to destroy.
As for balance, it should be doable to counterbalance all weight transfers -- all you need is to deploy / reel in a weight spaceward.
More fun is angular momentum. Recall that the top of the tower up in geostationary orbit is moving a lot faster sideways than the bottom. So while the steady state would have the bottom of the tower hanging straight down, regular use will have it curving East, probably quite sharply.
No, it was the "Tower of Babel". Hence, Babelfish .
Um..yeah. But, ever see "Speed?" Terrorists love elevator brakes. Boom...Snap...Splat.
Sig it.
Just think of the shadow cast by that monster. Seriously, just as planting a Redwood 3 feet from your neighbor's fence, this will surely be a concern very relevant to many citizens in the affected country(ies).
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
So that's why all those airplanes are always being shot down! Everytime a transatlantic flight gets within 10 miles of the UK the RAF shoots it down! Not to mention what the French do to them! :-)
Don't you think they'd come up with some agreement so that it could be built in whatever country it comes down in?
Far from going on, the list barely even begins. Almost anything "considered" impossible has NEVER been considered "impossible" by humanity as a whole, merely by the people with the most books.
Was it "impossible" to sail round the world, in Columbus' time? No! Columbus obtained maps showing a round world, and explorers' reports from those who had ventured futher than any "official" land. He also had the Greek's calculation showing the circumference of the Earth, and numerous other pieces of information, collected from around Europe and the Mediterranian.
The "fact" that popular myth =LATER= made him a dashing hero, who was the first to imagine a round world, is laughable. Furthermore, it's an insult to Columbus' intelligence, his detective skills and his competency as a sea navigator.
After the fact myths always reduce how much "the poor leetle primitives" knew. The fact is, they weren't stupid, and weren't that primitive. IMHO, the primitives are modern folk who feel that the only way to feel pride is to put their dead ancestors (who can't talk back, or kick up a fuss) as far down the ladder as possible.
Superiority by Imposed Inferiority is nausiating and needless. And WELL beyond where any Slashdot reader needs be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wouldn't this require one hell of a heatshield when going through the atmosphere?. Also, what are the "securities" of this? Imagine if anything went wrong in the atmosphere, or the cable broke - it would most likely trash a lot of houses on its way down. Will we be seeing in the future people sabotaging and trashing those cables, of terrorism causes?. Imagine if the USA president was onboard in one of those elevators and if some terrorist decided to attack the cable with a couple of bombs? Falling from the earth's atmosphere to the ground must not be funny honestly.
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
I think this would be worth pursuing aggressively if for no other reason that the secondary uses of the technology that would have to be developed. I for one would be happy to see my tax dollars spent on it.
But I still prefer electromagnetic catapults. There are problems, but far fewer than the space elevator.
I don't know about affecting the Earth's orbit, but ISTR reading something in Discover about the Earth's rotation slowing a very small amount because of dams (and the pools of water they are associated with) near the equator. Apparently, the dams have shifted the Earth's mass around a little, moving more near the equator, causing the rotation to slow, similar to how a spinning ice skater slows when they extend their arms.
Of course, I can't find a reference to this at Discover.com, but that just means that the conspiracy to make me think I'm going senile is back at work.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
No way. I can't even ride in a galss elevator without looking directly at the ground.
I hate elevators, and I hate heights. This is stressing me out just thinking about it.
Misfit
Now you will all discover the truth!
The world is flat, and everyone will be able to see it from their perch high atop the space elevator!
-- I lived through the IPO Rush of '99
that's the same amount of time in which the robocup people will play humans. it seems like anything can be done in 50 years....
India, I'm afraid, is currently rattling ICMB shaped sabres with Pakistan. Their government may be stable, but their situation isn't. They (like us) have high tech. They (like us) speak English (well, some do, anyway). If they're truly like us they'll come perilously close to exchanging a few with Pakistan.
I'll believe it in 50 years time when I see it in 50 years time. Just more fancifull PR drek in an attempt to keep the masses interested in space exploration/sciences, and nothing more than that. It also gives a new lease to 'scientists' who can't get a job anywhere else to do makework for more than their worth (scientific welfare). I doubt we'll see it in a few hundred years, much less 50 years, and if not by then, never. Eventually, increased social spending will suck the life out of any space program.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Man is Toronto going to be ticked.
They are very fond of their tower. See CN Tower
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
I'm not an EE, but I don't think there would be too much current in the line. Neverminding the fact that carbon is an insulator, the cable will be basically geo-stationary. You get current when you move a wire through a magnetic field, not when you leave the wire still.
Read the arcticle. The technology required to build a space elevator will be available in 50 years, and then humanity is able to build one. And this is going to take another 10 years at least, and maybe by then other ways of fast anc cheap travel to space will be available..
Links of interest on FAS
Some stuff on Russia's programs
Some general stuff on all sides
Why does "riding the space elevator" sound like something Kirk would say to Spock (or "Bones") after visiting The Planet Of Scantily Clad Green Women?
--
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No, that's exactly what I'm talking about. *g*
Actually, why would you need extra rings? Simply put your habitats on spokes a little further in or further out from the main ring, and extend them as far as your materials can handle. Just keep the center of gravity in a stable orbit.
Now where do I buy those tickets?
mv
5 hours of Muzak!?! Kill me now.
No, it doesn't. You think there is only going to be one of these cars? The cable would need to be thousands of kilometres long anyway, there's no reason for there not to be multiple cars in transit simultaneously. I believe the NASA plan calls for six.
Also, a rigid cable would snap rather easily the first time a stiff wind came along, since lateral stresses are magnified along the cable's length -- much like a completely-rigid building will collapse when hit by an earthquake. Better is to attach small station-keeping sections of the cable with thrusters attached, controlled by computer.
Third, if you attach the cable to the ground, you again have a disaster because the cable will snap or tear out of the ground if you have even a tiny mistake causing the cable to rise from the ground.
Fortunately, when the cab is decending the cable, it doesn't need a heat shield because it is dropping at a controlled rate and not dropping out of the sky like the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle is accellerating as it falls so by the time it hits the outer atmosphere, it's going pretty fast and generating a lot of friction. As far as terrorist bombings, the whole cable, all 25,000 miles of it plus counter weight, wouldn't fall out of the sky. If the base anchor was bombed then it would just kinda hang there and drift around a little. But if it was bombed towards the middle, then half would rain down on the earth and the GEO station would just stay there.
I wonder, will the old man will kick our ass for this space elevator?
Except, if you review the article, at this point they postulate that the tower would _collapse_ without the tether and the counterbalance. Do try to pay attention.
-Noodle
Can you imagine what kind of mess this thing would make if it collapsed?
In fifty years other technology would get better that the cost of have some one fly up there might cost the same as having a elevator to the space station. Hey you never know what will happen in a few years. I hope to see this coem about in my life time.
If anyone was reading the earlier story on nanotubes as heat sinks they will have seen one point that doesn't seem to be addressed here. Individual carbon nanotubes have an extremely high Young's Modulus, but as they are ony weakly bonded to each other the bulk material is relatively weak. Hence, one of the technologies necessary will be some way of cross-linking individual tubes without compromising their strength. As we are still only really working in lab (ie small) quantities of pure nanotubes, I wouldn't hold your breath too much!
Oh, and some posters are wondering what would happen if the elevator broke. The bit beneath the break will fall, with the rest lifing off and going into a different orbit (probably higher, but it's after lunch here and brain isn't fully in gear!!)
I'm quite sure I remember the american's successfully testing an anti-sat laser last year. They blasted a decommisioned comsat with this big ground based laser, which fried, then melted the satellite. They of course made it clear that they didn't have any intentions of using it on other people's birds...
Intolerant people should be shot.
As I recall, a similar concept were presented in a Donald Duck magazine a few years ago: The idea was produced by Gyro Gearloose. Scrooge McDuck's money bin was lifted into space by using a similar device, so his money could be safe from the Beagle Boys.
Isn't there a law prohibiting patents of ideas already invented?
-skurk
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
A space elevator would be good for doing things like colonizing Mars or lifting payloads -- because it cuts the cost of a space launch to something like a hundred dollars a pound.
There's a downside, though...if you build a space elevator, terrorism becomes a distinct possibility...once you've connected the elevator's collar, you're committed. If the space station on the other end (which balances out the elevator, which is itself not quite touching the ground) gets destroyed, you wind up with something like what happened in Kim Stanley Robinson's book Red Mars...a whip, longer than the planet is in circumference, wrapping around the equator. On Robinson's Mars, the damage wasn't severe in most areas...but on Earth, it would be catastrophic. Worldwide tidal waves, earthquakes everywhere the cable lands, and that cable's moving FAST. Once it gets hypersonic, it's like dropping a series of nuclear weapons every few meters all the way around the world.
Cool stuff, but dangerous.
Did we not all just read here that carbon nanotubes make a good heat sink?
I think we should pour all of our enviromental protection funds into NASA so they can build this global heat sink.
END
Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. They go into great detail on the building and maintaining of space elevators, as well as a spectacular description of what happens when one comes down...
How exactly did the Mesopotamians figure out that:
a. Matter is composed of atoms
and
b. Those atoms are composed of charged particles?
From what I remember of Meso. history, it seems a bit beyond the technology of the time. Please enlighten me, I'm very interested to hear this.
Visit the
And I thought space was clouded with tons of foreign objects? How do you avoid collision with those objects? How will a collison affect the structure and safety of the elevator? What will be the cost? Will it be a global effort? If Americans build it with their tax money, does that mean that none Americans will pay 5x the price a normal American will pay? Yada yada yada...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I was a participant in the Space Elevator workshop that led to this news item. I would like to make several comments on space elevator design:
1) A ground to synchronous orbit (35,000 km high) elevator is often discussed, but such a design is neither necessary nor economic.
A segmented elevator cable in earth orbit plus
orbit mechanics allows you to get around with only 1/7 of the height in actual cable segments. You coast between cable segments.
A tower from the ground several tens of km tall
saves you most of the losses that a rocket like
the shuttle sees from trajectory inefficiency and atmospheric drag. You simply launch from the top of the tower.
2) A real space elevator design will have multiple redundant cables because natural meteoroids and manmade orbital debris will occasionally run into the cable sections. The cables will be cross-connected so that the loads will be routed around any break (kind of like packet routing for the internet). You will have robot 'spiders' that will carry replacment spools of cables and be able to replace broken sections. This maintenance is like painting bridges continuously to keep them from rusting.
3) Existing high strength carbon fiber (1 million psi strength) is sufficient for economically rational space elevators. Carbon nanotubes are
strong enough for a 35,000 km space elevator,
but they would also make possible ultra-light rockets that would eliminate the cost justification for such a large elevator.
Daniel
It's give the .gov a WONDERFUL excuse to "annex" some poor 3rd world nation.
In the name of "intergalactic free trade" or some other stupid buzzphrase written by some suited spin doctor in D.C.
(* it still sounds like a far-fetched idea! *)
[Connection closed by foreign host]
The efficiencies of the space elevator are from two sources. First, conventional chemical rockets are not energetically efficient. But there are many near-future improvements on that score, ion drives and the like. More fundamentally, the problem with any rocket is that you have to carry around your reaction mass (the stuff that goes down equal-and-opposite to you going up). If you can somehow push off of the earth and/or harvest your reaction mass from whereever you happen to be, you can get almost as much efficiency without this obscene amount of infrastructure.
Push off the earth: that would be a rail gun. The only problem is, if you're accelerating sattelites up the side of a mountain to supersonic speeds, it gets pretty loud. Local people (not to mention birds and animals) complain. The noise is the primary reason that ideas for a Hawaiian orbital railgun don't fly very far. The problem isn't technical, it's social, and so it's much harder. Tyranny is the only easy answer, because there are plenty of people who wouldn't tolerate incessant sonic booms for any amount of money or government carrots, and that's their right.
The other half of the answer is space elevator(s) in space. Huge cables are much easier to build when they don't have to deal with the atmosphere or be geosynchronous overall. You grab the bottom, run up to the top, and let go. Wait a minute, you say; now the cable itself is your reaction mass, so why doesn't the cable's orbit decay? Because you're pushing against the earth's magnetic field with currents through your cable.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
It's not Babylon, it's Babel. Two completely different places.
Not long after construction begins, all the workers will begin speaking different languages and the project will be abandoned. It's happened before...
People keep thinking there has to be some international mega engineering project before we can disperse life. There doesn't, and relying on such a project will guarantee failure for the same reason that political leaders have increasingly drawn population from the countryside into the cities:
Central authorities want control because that's what it takes to become a central authority and dispersion means loss of control.
Read the above sentence over and over until you either get bored or you finally understand why central authorities are not your friends.
Positive sum games like the Internet happen despite central authorities, not because of them.
Seastead this.
There's no way a "space elevator" would be built, much less, tested on earth. The dangers are too great and population too large. If the "extra geostationary" drifted too close? If the fatty cable broke (or was cut loose) and came whipping down across 50km of the earth's surface? No way, no how.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
An idea I had, I'm not much of a mathematician so I'll leave that to others. Basically build a linear accelerator, strap it to about ten jumbos fill each jumbo, with a dielectric substance, charge each dielectric up on the ground. Arrange each row of jumbos, along either side of the linear accelerator, do it somewhere like the salt flats in Utah. I understand the payload of a jumbo is around a hundred tons or so, ten of them would give you a thousand ton pay load.
So ok the whole assemblage jumbos, linear accelerator containing a rocket, trundles along would it get in the air? hopefully. If you can get it to fly, jumbos get up to their full speed around 700 miles an hour. The linear accelerator could have ten electromagnetic rings. A timed discharge from each capacitor, would accelerate the rocket till it emerged from the end of the accelerator, much faster than 700 miles an hour. Whoosh the rocket fires, the question is, how much fuel would it have to carry to achieve escape velocity.
Is my idea any crazier than a space elevator?
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Please, bring up some more irrelevent arguments for this article. Here's a thought: I'm going to make this super strong material that'll let me build a space elevator that'll let people get there on $222 each way! Oh well I have no clue what the hell I'd make it out of, and I have no clue how much it'd truely cost, but if it cost X, and you split it up by Y, etc. etc.
Give me some facts. Research it. Show the material. Do some tests. Put up some data. None of this assumption crap. The Scientific Method is what defines science and helps us describe our environment. I see no evidence of that here. Just a bunch of assumptions and "cool shit". What I'd love to know the most is: How the hell do they go about constructing this? Obviously from the top down. How many rockets does it take to put this amount of crap in space? How the hell do they expect to get an asteroid... thats a big deal... How do they expect to build it? People, machines? etc. etc. etc.
Well, as mentioned in another post there is a carbon molecule with higher tensile strength than diamond that is in development that can serve this purpose without snapping or shattering. Once that is complete the rest is just details. To me the hard part will be joining the cable segments since your joint compound is going to certainly be weaker than the cable itself. And they definately aren't going to create a 144,000KM cable in once piece on earth and then stand it up.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Seems rather interesting that this appears soon after the paperback release of Larry Niven's book "Rainbow Mars" which featured a moisture sucking "tree" whose center of mass is at geosync. This tree was used by the natives as an elevator. Earth wanted it and got one to anchor on the coast of Brazil at the equator.
Overall a good read (for those who still do hardcopy)
-dean
-----------------------
-dean
-----------------------
hey, well, its just my $0.02us
Actually, why bother to use cables at all? I'd think that would just create lots of technical problems relating to friction, and would offer a very tempting point of failure. Wouldn't magnetic rails/rings of some sort be better? I seem to recall that a lot of near-future sci-fi does use those for accelerating things to space... How feasible would this be? Can someone else provide some URLs or hard data?
-RickHunter
Over 200 revolutions in 150 years. Yup. Sounds stable to me...
"When Arthur C Clarke came up with the concept of a comsat, he had 3 huge space stations in mind,
serving the entire surface of the planet, with crews up there for several months at a time."
Arthur C Clarke also came up with the
space elevator in his book 2061. If
memory serves me it was made out of
diamand.
AdFuel
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd say that any meteors and comets that come close enough to hit the elevator shaft were going to hit Earth anyway. Although that's a good point regarding the junk. At orbital speeds, even a marble could blow a chunk off the shaft.
("Heh heh, he said blow..."
"Yeah, huh huh, and shaft! Huh huh...")
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
This reminds me of Dr. F's Earth-tethered satellite from MST3K, `Imbilicus!'.
It seems like something you'd need the red,yellow, and blue card keys to get access to in Final Fantasy XXXII.
`Space Elevator', indeed!
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
Not too smart. If the cable isn't anchored, the differing forces as result of the transport of material would cause the line to change orbit. In addition atmospheric interference would cause the (very heavy) line to swing and destroy whatever be in its path.
Anyone read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson? How long you figure until it all comes crashing back down? It would no doubt be rather helpful, it would drastically reduce the pollution of space launches, but I don't want to be anywhere near the thing myself. The thought of a huge tower reaching up into the sky forever would give me the willies beyond belief. And I think the CN Tower is already tall enough.
this is gonna get one of those off topic ratings but did anyone read 3001 the final odyssey where arthur c clarke gave a detailed description of a space elevator? also i read that the weight of such an elevator could cause it to topple back onto earth think about it we could be having frequent tower cards i can see it now "for every dollar you spend you earn one free mile on the space elevator" talk about settin' your sites high.
It so happens that Slashdot has two articles on carbon nanotubules today...one on their heat conducting properties, the other on its potential use as a rigging cable for a space elevator.
:-)
The space elevator article said that the carbon nanotubules may have a strength as high as 200 giga pascals. However, this article says
"Ironically, the same weak linkages that make carbon nanotubes superior for heat conductance could deflate scientists' earlier expectation that bun-dles of them would provide unrivaled mechanical strength."
Umm...I think that the scientists from the second article better call the scientists in the first article.
Did anyone else notice this?
"At the moment, Sri Lanka lies between 6 and 10 degrees north" Do they intend to move it or just wait till precession moves the equator closer?
Yeah, so we're going to have people in Space suits screaming, "Going up!". Funny.
NASA always dreams big, and falls nostly on its face.
This time, here, are a few things they missed out, which might just happen....
Case one:
An asteroid coming really close to the Earth might just try to go past the ribbon like connector, and in the true Olympic Spirit, Break the ribbon, and finish things off. It'll be fun to see the Elevator Duct Snap because of a "furball".
Case two:
If they miscalculated.
(they do it so often...)
The counterbalance asteroid might just take its own turn, and snap the cord.
Or better still, if the elevator line is strong enough, it might just yank the Earth out of it's orbit.
That'll be REALLY cool!!!
That's all the things I could imagine.
Do me a favour. visit this site
No idea about the patents... but, had you read the article, you'd have seen that the idea goes back much farther than that Donald Duck story...
For better insight into the matter of space elevators, you might want to read the mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, on how such a thing would be built, an on what the consequences of its downfall would be. Of course there's ACC's books, the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton etc. which use the theme.
Not a single ice tower but an Ice System. Put new layers of ice over collapsing and melting center take up waste water and use it again. It might need some Fancy guide materials to help keep a shape and it also might a bit bigger than a Light-wieght solution. Ice is easy to make/replace/repair on the fly than any thing else I can think of.
They'd better offer some good music... And what about that strange silence when you get into an elevator with a stranger...woah...5 hours worth of silence... - [jeff]
I wouldn't reccomend a space elevator. If it falls, no one within wide radius of the fall zone would survive! Having it fall around Earth more than once would not be fun!
Read Red Mars to see what can happen when one falls. It's an obvious military target.
but then, maybe the mods aren't heir to our shared Christian heritage.
George
"Hey, what does this button do?"
"Nooo! Turn left! Left! Ahhhhh!"
Space Elevator Under Repair.
Please Use the Stairs.
Thank You.
The Management.
On NASA's side, they did come up with alot. Microchips, Velcro, Tang, turkey launchers...
There are a lot of other cool ways to send stuff into space. For example, Freeman Dyson's alternatly trite and innovative book 'the sun the genome and the internet' talks about either using a mass driver for shooting up people and precious cargo or using a ballistic like device filled with various explosive gasses which could accelerate an object to thousands of miles per hour, sending it into space fairly cheaply.
The second option, at least, would probably be portable.
Incidentaly, why do people assume that this thing has to be built on land? If location is an issue and many nations need to use it, it may very well float. There's already at least one floating launch pad for a shuttle.
p.s. yes, i know 'alternatly trite and innovative' seems contradictory however Dyson's view of the internet and solar power are both at least 5 years behind the times and I'm surprised he gave so much copy to them.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Doesn't pass through India or the Phillipines.
Are the close enough? I don't know enough physics, but the article makes it sound like if you get too far away problems arise - both with the orbit and with atmospheric events like cyclones, etc. Both India and the Phillipines are known to have cyclones and typhoons.
You also miss some important countries. Most importantly, Brazil (equatorial rain forest, anyone?)
Brazil is known as "the perpetual country of the future". Today, the future looks closer than ever for Brazil. Brazil's democracy is solidifying to the point where today one of Brazil's foreign policy goals is furthering the cause of democracy in other S. American countries (Peru is a current target). While the financial system is still modernizing (witness the 1999 currency devaluation), Brazil is on it's way to becoming a low-inflation, high-growth economy.
While Brazil is still decidedly "low-tech", it is modernizing quickly, in part to due it's large population, in part due to it's realative wealth compared to other third world nations.
Also: as others point out, by the time it becomes feasible to build the elevator, Indonesia and parts of Africa may become much more stable, which may make them more attractive choices (especially Indonesia - after a few years of solid democracy, all the things I said about Brazil may be valid for Indonesia). Moreover Singapore has a downside... is there enough space to build an elevator there?
Highly recommended...
(Point of interest, I'm not trying to steer people to B&N or anywhere else, just borrowing their engine to list book details; tried Amazon first, and they were "temporarily closed" -- weird, huh?)
I will be saying weeeeeeeee.... all the way to the top.
Maybe it will be one of the really fast one like the ones in the Hilton in Atlanta. If it is, I can see 1000's of geeks riding just to get the g's. Maybe they will have a couch for all the drunk, stoned, or tired freaks whole can't stand just Dargon Con '00.
MarNuke
MarNuke
2000-09-08 01:49:27 Space Elevators in 50 Years (articles,science) (rejected)
I posted the following article text last night, and the apes decided that this story description was better? That's it - I give up on story submissions.
I'm saving any future useful information for everything, where the site design doesn't include hasty filtering to "keep up" with the submissions, and where XP (everything's version of karma) actually is designed well and has meaning.
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Wouldn't friction from the earth's atmosphere create a huge amount of heat, akin to what hapens the the space shuttle upon re-entry, on the cable? It's going to cost an awfull lot for maintenace on the cable. And just imaging having to run a new cable each time the old one wears out, that can't be cheap, or easy, no matter how good the technology is.
Check out "The Fountains Of Paradise" by Arthur C. Clarke. It's all about building one of these on a fictional island which is basically Sri Lanka shifted a few degrees south so it sits on the equator.
Also lots of funky theological stuff involving our first contact with an alien spaceship (it zips through the solar system, talking to us for about 100 days, then it's gone).
Man, it's time I read it again...
http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
What's your argument against India then?
I said India was a possibility, but India doesn't show the hubris that Singapore does. Plus, it would have to be in the very tip of India to make the Equator.
And what does Cryptonomicon have to do with anything, have you actually read it, or did you just glance at it? We've heard about you Americans and your reluctance to read big books.
Have you read Cryptonimicon? Stephenson nearly ejaculates an imperial pint of semen when he describes the Phillipines, alluding to the Phillipines as being the closest country to America in the far east. Whatever, I still wouldnb't build a space elevator there.
I like big books, Gravity's Rainbow is my favorite book, and it's quite big.
Where are they going to get a base tower 50 Km tall? The tallest buildings are the Petronas Towers, both under .5 Km, so they're talking about something 100 times taller.
In the 60-odd years between the Empire State Building (1931) and the Petronas(1996), the height of the tallest building increased less than 20%. So...last 70 years, 20% growth, next 50 years, 10000% growth.
And what happens when something flies into this thing? Heck, birds have trouble avoiding wind mills, so I expect this will generate a fair amount of road kill. I certainly wouldn't want to be on my way up when an airplane hits.
No, thank you. I'll reach orbit the old fashioned way. Now pass me that bong.
yeah.. the US needs a new panama-canal...
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Personally I doubt that they will be able to do this in 50 years. The main reason being the fact that I've allready read stories about this +/- 15 years ago stating that in 20 years from now....
Can anyone explain why you'd need such a tall base station? The only reason I can think of is that gravitational effects are so much smaller at 50km up... Is that the only reason?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I think you're getting these books mixed up a bit (Either that or I missed it in 2061). You're quite right that ACC came up with a diamond space elevator. I think the book was "The fountains of Paradise". The space elevator is also mentioned in 3001, with a comment about nanotubes in the appendix.
. ._ _ .__. ___ ___ ._ _. _.. _. .. .
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Ohh yeah, i also forgot to mention the possibility of this screwing with earth's orbit :) I doubt the fources at work here would likely effect it. But I can just picture this thing causing us to go spiining off into the sunset, quite litterally I minght add :)
This is great! A space elevator by the mid-21st century. Come on guys, do you really think that we can squeeze any more juice out of plain ol' rocket motors? It just isn't going to happen. And what about fusion or fission? A fusion motor would melt a hole on the launch pad and a fission motor would blast you with radioactive particles. The space elevator is the way to go. For just the price of electricity plus a small fee, you can go to GEO in a few hours. If you want a round trip ticket, then you just pay the square root of the one way. But fifty years? I think that is just a bit too close, more like 75 or a 100 years. When the Bay Bridge in San Fran was built, it was after nearly a century of ideas, politicing, false starts, and failures. At the moment, we are still in the conceptual stage. We have a pretty good idea about building it, but still have a lot of hurdles to overcome. A project this big will require some mega financing and a definite revenue stream. This idea won't take off just to serve tourists, there will have to be an industrial infrastructure in space that has goods to ship back to earth.
Right, so, a bunch of geeks that lack anything near an astrophysics degree can tell NASA all about what can and cannot be done in space?
/. must have plenty.
Sure.
What, have you been watching Top Gun again? WTF does an astrophydics degree have to do with a space elevator?
Perhaps you meant to say Aerospace Engineer, Mechanical Engineer and Materials Scientist, of which
George
- "You ever ride that thing?"
Which is probably how half of the population would feel about riding something like this."No."
"I did. I swear, I think my ass sucked up 6 inches of seat foam."
I mean can you imagine FIVE hours of light elevator music?
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
Now the PC Slashdot mods are gonna nail your ass.
I hope your khamra can handle it.
And other coutries haven't done this? USA on Japan, USA in Australia, USA in USA, French in the Pacific...
Clarke is very fond of creating amazing structures in his stories. My favourite one was from 3001. This consisted of four huge towers in four equally spaced positions around the equator. Each of these towers was then connected at the top by a huge ring circling the earth. All of this was of course a habitat for the ever expanding population of earth. It also eliminated the need for satelites. Now that would be quite an engineering feat, not to mention a spectacular view. Imagine a base jump off of one of those ;)
Perhaps they will even let People of Gender participate in the design and construction, and have People of Secuality decorate it?
FJ!!
I think my thoughts can be listed as only one item.
Phobos - Greek word for fear or flight
1) They say the "base tower" would be 50 km high, which they say is "much taller than the Eiffel Tower." Rather like saying the Eiffel Tower is much taller than an ant.
;-)
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2) They conveniently avoid mentioning that the entire system would tend to *lift* the base tower, even if the counterpoise mass balances the cable. If the tower isn't very well anchored, it could detach from the ground and eventually be whipped off into space. Since most of our engineering experience deals with holding buildings up off the ground, I'm betting they haven't put much thought into how to anchor it. Personally, I want to be there with a camcorder when it pulls loose.
Oh, and yes, there's seriously nonlinear mechanics involved, and we're not even close to materials that are strong enough to tether an asteroid against centrifugal force (it's going to be at 2x GEO altitude and going much faster than orbital velocity -- think about it), and we're not even sure an asteroid would be solid enough to withstand that kind of strain. I suspect it's going to be a lot more than 50 years before we solve those problems. Never mind that it will have to stand up to being hit by old booster upper stages and other junk that's still in orbit with too much kinetic energy to think about -- remember it's moving at one revolution per day, and objects in LEO are moving several thousand mph faster than that. Just imagine something like a Delta or Proton, or maybe a Shuttle ET, impacting at LEO velocity. shudder
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
I bet Starscream will destroy it before the Deceptacons can even think about using it to bring reinforcements from Cybertron. ;-)
Space elevator, space bridge... c'mon, people!
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
I suppose the elevator will not only be pushed away from earth, but it will also pull towards the object on the other end. With a flexible `cable', won't the object be pulled towards earth?
0x or or snor perron?!
This idea has always really appealed to me, because its so simple in concept, and so elegant.
However, the reason for even considering building one, is that it will greatly reduce the cost of getting things to orbit. However, to build this thing will require an unbelievable number of spaceflights, using old, expensive technologies...
So, can you justify bankrupting yourself to build something that might recoup your investment far in the future, or do you put it off until spaceflight becomes cheap enough to justify building it? And, once spaceflight becomes that cheap, is there a need to build it anymore?
I think it should be done, and that it probably will, eventually, I just dont think it really will be a bootstrapping sort of technology that will catapult us into space - we cant build the thing until we are already able to get their easily.
IF they could really build a 50KM high tower, you could put a mag lev launching rail up the side, and use that toaccelerate spacecraft. Forget about the space elevator.
At 50Km you are basicaly free of the atmosphere and the enrgy need to rasie the spacecraft out of the atmposphere and accelerate it to whatever speed it gets too after 50km comes from the ground, drasticaly reducing the weight of the ship. (The Shuttle weighs less than 1/2 what it did at launch a mere 2min after lift off and is no where close to 50km up)
Such as system would drasticaly reduce the cost per pound to orbit.
So, how are they going to keep things from hitting the elevator shaft and/or cars and killing people? There's so much junk, so many meteors, and a bunch of comets "flying" around up there.
-- If a god of love and life ever did exist, he's long since dead. Someone, something, rules in his place
There was a tiny scene in an anime film (Gunbuster?) where a character was riding up a cablecar up to a tethered space station.
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Anybody who built such a system probably wouldn't be stupid enough to omit emergency clamps which would attach to the cable preventing a fall. We have systems that are similar in concept on all current elevators. This would take care of the problem of the break happening below the car and I suspect that parachutes/retro rockets could help out for breaks happening above the car (no clamp engagement wanted there).
DB
It gives the facts and figures on an 860 mile long elevator as opposed to the accepted idea of a much longer elevator.
Interesting.
The one engineering problem I forsee is the ground platform which would have to be a minimum of 50Km tall to adequately serve the elevator. This is a huge obstacle to overcome. The current tallest buildings are a little over .5 KM IIRC. This presents a major construction problem that no one has found a solution to yet.
Any idea's? ;-)
Just you're average nitpicker.
Are there any materials made now that can be strung 50 km into the atmosphere and not break? I am not talking anything useful, like a cable, but even just a very thin thread.
I keep thinking of bring a really huge bobbin of thread on the space shuttle, putting a weight on one end and lowering it to the earth's surface. But that is just the fisherman in me - I am sure there are physics reasons why this wouldn't work... so maybe we use a rocket to get the velocity going toward the earth.
Anyway, then we could do like ships do - you use the small line to haul up a slightly bigger line, and then the next bigger line etc. until your hawser is across the gap.
Stuart
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I guess I understand the concept of building a pretty big space station as the orbiting counterbalance. (Or capturing a giant "asteroid", whatever). Maybe I understand building a 50 KM high building on the ground straddling the equator. But how do you get the cable up? Does it have to been in one piece? Connecting pieces of cable in the upper atmosphere I imagine would be pretty tough. I would think that you would want one solid cable anyway. So do they stick a giant spool on the back of the space shuttle and launch?