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Space Elevator May Become Reality
mojotek writes: "The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts has a study(15Mb pdf) about the feasibility of a "Space Elevator" comprised of a 22,000 mile long cable built out of carbon nanotubes. In theory, it would be able to carry loads of 20 tons to space without using a single rocket engine. Sounded way too sci-fi for my taste at first, but this article at TechTV actually helped fill in the holes."
Most of the effort of getting around, is getting UP. Once you get up its cheap to move around.
Also, you can transfer fuel up by the tanker load.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
That's the book he wrote about this. Worth a read, it even describes some of the projects by the US and Russia concerning this decades ago, in the appendix.
To transport you (70 kg) up to an altitude of 200 km would take roughly 140,000 kilojoules of energy (you do the math ... first year physics stuff). However, they can't just lift you, they also have to lift a vehicle containing you. Say the vehicle weighs 500 kg for every person it can carry -- this would take rougly 1,000,000 kilojoules. If they do this electrically (which is one of the more expensive forms of energy), at 100% efficiency it would eat up roughly 300 kWh of energy. At 0.30/kWh (say), that's roughly $100.
Of course, a clever engineer would realize that every vehicle going up eventually goes down ... so the vehicle on the way down could be used as a generator, feeding power to the load of a vehicle going up. Equally obviously, we're not considering the amortization of the construction cost, which would be monumental.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It's really slow, but it ain't pdf format http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/fellows_mtg /jun00_mtg/html/472Edwards/472Edwards.html
Robert Heinlein (iirc) once commented that low earth orbit (LEO) is halfway to anywhere, and that's even more true of geosynchronous orbit (GEO). It takes a *lot* of fuel to get out of the earth's gravity well, and getting to GEO for the cost of electricity (provided by in-space solar cells!) would profoundly change everything.
If you want to leave earth orbit, you take a second elevator that runs from geostationary station out to the anchor and let go. Depending on the length of this section, you'll have a ballistic launch to anywhere else in the solar system. Well, you'll need a modest amount of fuel unless the plane of earth's orbit is exactly aligned with your destination, but you'll need orders of magnitude less fuel than you need today, and you can get that fuel up to the launch point for the cost of electricity alone.
If you want to leave the solar system, you let go of the upper elevator and hop to the center of a freespinning tether, then inch outward. When you reach the end of this tether, you could be traveling at a few percent of c. You'll be at Alpha Centari within 100 years... and a second tether there could capture you and slow you down. That's too long for passenger traffic, but brief enough that interstellar colonization is a realistic possibility by the end of the millennium.
So all things considered, I think research into carbon nanotube space elevators has better long term potential than anything rocket propulsion technology. Even antimatter propulsion, excluding some unknown mechanism to mass-produce anti-atoms.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This disaster was used (although on Mars) in the plot of in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (or maybe Green Mars... can't remember). In that case, though, the "beanstalk" was sabotaged as a weapon during a revolution. It wiped out a slice of a city, puncturing the atmosphere of a bunch of buildings, but had no casualties outside the settled areas. Can't have a tsunami in that thin an atmosphere.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Actually, its not quite like a skater...
A sakters arems and body have the same angular velocity, because her arms are attached to her body. it takes more energy to move her arms around when they are extended (further to go) and since they are attached to her body, the whole thing slows down.
In a space ship, the earth and the ship are not attached. As soon as the ship leaves the ground, the earth spins out from underneath it. Due to momentum, and air viscosity (pushing the ship in the direction of the earths rotation) this is not nocieable until the ship is quite high, but conservation of rotational inertia is not the principle you need to follow in this case.
A carbon nano-tube cable shouldn't develop any electrical potential moving through a magnetic field. This might be a problem with any metallic cabling run along the support cable for data transmission purposes, but I really doubt they'd want to do that. Added weight and all. On the other hand, it's free power.
Wind would probably be a very minor issue - compared to supporting it's own weight, wind would provide a fairly minor amount of stress. Static electricity - Maybe just run a ground up and down to deal with that a lightning.
Why?
A one-way trip would take about 5 days or so, and your weight would gradually decrease from normal to zero as you reached the geostationary station.
You would not stop at the 200km height, no more than you get off a ski lift at the first tower.
At the 200km height another poster mentioned - you would have a hard time finding any change in your weight. Instead of being something like 6400 km from the center of the earth you're 6600 km away. That's enough for about a 6% change - less than the annual weight change by many people on yo-yo diets.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Not neccesarily. If you detach the cable from the base (Earth-Side) all that happens is you have to reattach it (Assuming the Space-Side can hold the cable in orbit.) Any prognosis of doom would have to come from detaching it from the space-side in which cause Earth's gravity would pull it down. Now, crashing an airplane into the WTC is one thing, taking down a orbiting space asteroid is quite another. (Of course in Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars series that is exactly what happened but..) And the cable itself can withstand the force of multiple nuclear explosions (has to b/c of forces acting upon it)meaning it ain't coming down easy.
If it *does* fall down it won't case all that much damage. The cable will wrap around the earth in a straight line from where it was cut. At the beginning of the impact the kinetic energy wouldn't be that much it wouldn't be until later on that you would have to worry about any serious affect. By the second time around the earth the cable will began deterioting and exploding in the upper atmosphere.
Also since this has top be placed in a geo-synch orbit it needs to be located close to the equator. I.E. if it falls it hits a whole lotta ocean and not much else. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out a spot where it nearly completely avoids populated areas. Futhermore having breakaway points on the cable itself would allow for only say 1/10 of the cable to impact the earth the rest would break and fly off into space. place it on the coast, the thing breaks off and the 1/10 impacts the pacific/atlantic ocean. Done deal.
If we can build a damm space elevator we can protect it!
I was just out of college (iirc) when the first popular discussion of beanstalks came out (Charles Sheffield, in some long-dead Baen book-zine).
The numbers were so ludicrious that he repeatedly apologized for wasting our time. Of course this was a flight of fancy, the numbers were orders of magnitude larger than the strongest known materials. Yet, if "ultronium" could be developed from some exotic material....
Then buckyballs were discovered. Then buckytubes.
The fact that this is even "just" possible with known materials less than 20 years later is mindblowing. I can only compare it to the confident RSA predictions in Scientific American (which I also remember when it first appeared) that RSA-128 would take millions of years to crack. We all know how well that prediction held up.
Given this perspective, I don't think it's unreasonable for NASA to spend some serious money considering its options if/when stronger materials become available. It's easier to believe that even stronger materials will be discovered (e.g., perhaps by putting foreign elements within the tubes to manipulate quantum properties) than that we've suddenly hit the ultimate barrier.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I've read this paper in full, a couple of months back. According to the paper the actual, demonstrated strength of the carbon tethers is only as strong as Kevlar- it's about 1/10 of the needed strength. The overall weight of the fiber is exponentially related to the strength, so the tether works out maybe 20,000 times heavier than his design- which makes it completely uneconomic.
OTOH, single fibers are almost strong enough, but only if you allow absolutely no 'safety factor'. Most normal engineering uses atleast 2 safety factor, and usually many times that. But as nobody knows how to splice them together into a rope, and doing so would lose atleast 25% strength, it's not enough.
He's got the best architecture I've seen for this by a long way, nice paper study. Not practical right now. Hope somebody sorts out the fibers very soon.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Nasa already tried a long cable experiment. This one was probably made of metal though. They deployed a long cable from the space shuttle (i forget how long, but it was pretty darn long) and let it 'drag' behind. The idea was that as it dragged across the Earth's magnetic field, it would produce an electric current that the shuttle may be able to use.
Well, they goofed up the math somehow. They underestimated the stresses on the cable and the thing snapped shortly after deployment, flinging it away from the shuttle. They did not retrieve the cable; one more piece of space junk.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
No, this is covered in the paper. The tether would melt and reenter harmlessly above a 100km or so. Below that it would survive, but its a pretty predictable landing zone; and one of the cleverer ideas he had is building it in the sea where it won't hurt anyone.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I studied this concept as part of a commercial space development group back when I was in college. It's quite compelling.
;)
There're two significant challenges in implementation, though.
The fundamental flaw in the concept lies in conservation of rotational inertia. Think about a spinning ice skater - as she draws her arms in, she spins much faster. The opposite is also true - as a rotating mass extends from its center, its rate of rotation decreases.
The space elevator rotates at a constant geosynchronous rate, but as its payload is raised along that axis, the difference between its linear inertia at the surface of the earth and its linear inertia around the circumference at geosynch altitude (or any significant altitude along that axis) is absorbed by the elevator's structure.
Unless the payload applies some sort of thrust perpendicular to the axis of the elevator, that difference in inertia only works to pull the whole system back down to earth. Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
NASA has done some experiments with tethered satellites which address the vibration issues (as well as accumulated electric charge from atmospheric drag), but they were intended more for spinning-wheel satellite applications than for space elevators.
It's a really cool idea that unfortunately is a something-for-nothing scheme. If there were some kind of cool electric thruster system which didn't rely on reaction mass, it'd be feasable, but then we're straying into Area-51 technology.
I didn't do any math for the damage caused by pieces below that mark, but my guess is that anything below a few km wouldn't be any worse than dropping a WWII bomb and the resulting damage would be very localized. between that and several thousand km, the chunks would fall into the water (assuming the builders were smart enough to build close to a coastline on the correct side:). There would be a region above those thousands of km where the chunks would be a bit more of a worry, but above that, they're likely to burn up when they hit the atmosphere.
Beyond all that, buggered if I know :)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Another Robert Heinlein observation, this time from _Friday_. The issue is never energy, it's how the energy is stored.
The energy required to lift a ton of cargo to GEO is the same regardless of the mechanism used (and disregarding any power you can extract from descending cargo). But there's a tremendous practical difference in that energy coming down superconducting power lines from a solar array out by the ballast or if it comes from liquified oxygen and hydrogen stored in disposable tanks. It makes a tremendous difference whether you the energy is coming via an existing infrastructure (e.g., power cables) or if if you have to waste some fuel to lift the fuel you need now.
I don't know what the current factors are, but I wouldn't be surprised if putting something into GEO requires 99 kgs of fuel for every kg of payload. A beanstalk would get you there with no "waste" other than the reusable elevator car.
As for harmonics caused by weather... I think this has been dismissed. This cable is under millions of tons of tension, and has a cross section of well under a meter when it's in the atmosphere. The load bearing core will be surrounded by a much larger infrastructure for the elevator, power cables, etc., but since it's not load bearing it can be dampened -- and is still on the order of a few meters. With such a small profile and high tension you aren't going to see much energy transferred from weather systems into the cable. (Earthquakes are another matter.)
And the conservation of momentum issues are real, but I (and others) are skipping many of the fine details for overall clarity.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
To some extent those two are each others' solutions.
The low-frequency vibration solves the pull-back problem. Thinking discretely: The weight of the payload on the thether and the taut teather form a loaded "stringed-instrument" string:
Go up a bit, you pull the string back.
Stop and wait a bit, the string accellerates you forward.
Now go up some more while the string is still going forward, providing a "pull" backward that damps the vibration, stopping the string at the vertical position.
Repeat.
In fact you do this continuously, modulating your ascent slightly so the net result is the string stays nearly vertical. When a vibration starts to build up you adjust your speed in sync to damp it.
Similarly the tether and the weight at the end (large compared to the payload) form a pendulum. It's a much more complicated pendulum than one near the surface, due to the varying gravity and the rotating coordinate system, but that's the basic idea. Again thinking discretely:
Go up a bit. The couterweight pulls back.
Stop and hang around. The counterweight starts going forward.
Go up some more. You decelerate the counterweight and bring it to a stop near the top again.
Repeat.
Again you do it continuously, this time keeping the weight at a constant displacement behind the point over the tether's base. The slant of the tether corresponds to a forward accellerating force from the rotation of the earth, providing your angular-momentum transfer by accellerating your payload and decellerating the earth. (Coming down you push the counterweight forward to accellerate the earth and decellerate the payload.)
Now there may be one or more locations along the tether where what you have to do to damp the two modes is exactly opposite. But if you've kept it damped on your way to those spots you should be through before an oscilation builds up. Or run two or more payloads simultaneously and coordinate them so you can always damp both modes. (Multiple coordinated payloads can also provide better damping and trade off each others' effects on the tether to achieve faster travel.)
Of course you have to put your counterweight a bit further above geosync, so lift losses when it is displaced downward slightly don't turn into a positive-feedback collapse.
If you don't have enough payloads in transit you can damp higher-frequency modes against the atmosphere with a few active airfoils spotted along the tether. (REALLY high frequency stuff - like seconds-to-audio - you can damp with a couple small structures attached near the geosync level.)
Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
No.
The amount you have to put in is only a small delta above the amount that you would have had to put in to run an electric elevator up an idealized stiff structure of the same height - and the delta approaches zero as your damping approaches perfection.
But once it's up you don't need to power it AT ALL, which I'll get to in another posting.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"If you detach the cable from the base (Earth-Side) all that happens is you have to reattach it (Assuming the Space-Side can hold the cable in orbit.)"
Essentially, orbit means "centripetal force juuuust matches gravity." If the top is in geostationary orbit, then only the top is in microgravity. Every single inch below the top has a net force pulling downward. The lower your altitude, the faster you have to go to be in orbit (one revolution per day at geostationary, one revolution per hour at LEO). A break at any point in the beanstalk would bring it down.
You could make it tall enough so that the sum of the centripetal force of the end counterbalances the weight of the structure, and this would put the structure under tension instead of compression.
However, if you cut the structure anywhere between the surface of the earth and geostationary, everything below the cut will come crashing down. Fly a plane into it at seven miles, and you have a seven mile structure (about 35 times the height of the WTC) falling towards you. If the US can hit ballistic targets at a few hundred miles up with a kinetic-kill vehicle, Joe Shmoe with his suitcase nuke on a V-2 can hit a stationary target at that altitude. If there's a time-bomb on the elevator that goes off when the elevator floor is at or near geostationary, then we have 22,000 miles of material coming down.
"And the cable itself can withstand the force of multiple nuclear explosions (has to b/c of forces acting upon it)meaning it ain't coming down easy."
Tension, compression, and shear are three different things. Just because a material can withstand one or two of the three doesn't mean it can withstand all three.
And then there's a fourth factor: Heat. This was the WTC's weakness. While the steel structure withstood the airplane impacts, it couldn't survive the heat of the fire. Sure, the beanstalk might be able to survive the blast from a nuke, maybe even a shockwave if it was within the atmosphere, but nothing can survive the heat.
"The cable will wrap around the earth in a straight line from where it was cut."
No. Your main problem here is that you're assuming that all the mass will be at the top of the structure, forcing the structure below it to follow the top along as it comes down. Gravity being what it is, the center of gravity (assuming a structure of uniform density) will be somewhere between the bottom and the half-way point. And because gravity increases exponentially as you go down, taller structures will have their centers of gravity further from the midpoint than shorter ones.
So while you're correct in thinking that each unit length of cable will have to deal with tension in the cable (due to the motion of the rest of the cable) as well as gravity, you're incorrect in guessing what direction that tension will pull. For points in the structure higher than the center of gravity, the tension in the structure will be the stronger of the two forces, pulling the structure down along it's length instead of letting it spiral down in free-fall.
If anything, the top of the structure may fall along a straight line because it got snapped like the end of a whip, giving it more kinetic energy than it would have had if it were just in free-fall (and causing more damage than a free-fall would have done).
"By the second time around the earth the cable will began deterioting and exploding in the upper atmosphere."
First off, you have no idea how large these pieces may be when they break off. Second, all the kinetic energy of hundreds or thousands of miles worth of stuff has to go somewhere. If the actual mass doesn't make it past the upper atmosphere, then the momentum and kinetic energy just gets transferred to the atmosphere, which means a shockwave.
"Also since this has top be placed in a geo-synch orbit it needs to be located close to the equator. I.E. if it falls it hits a whole lotta ocean and not much else."
Tsunamis. Big tsunamis. And most of the world's population lives within 200 miles of the ocean.
Remember, something with the mass of a small island killed off the dinosaurs. What we're talking about is a structure with at least that much mass. While it may not be one big chunk, mass is mass and it's still coming down in a very short period of time.
"Futhermore having breakaway points on the cable itself would allow for only say 1/10 of the cable to impact the earth the rest would break and fly off into space."
Just for the sake of repeating myself, if the cut is anywhere between 0 and 22,000 miles up, anything below it is coming down. Period.