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Going Up?
jmiyaku writes "The National Post is reporting that NASA has given a Seattle company a $570,000 grant to continue its investigation into constructing a space elevator. Coupled with some production-grade technology from a Japanese car company (carbon nanotube composites), this elevator could be a reality within 15 years..." The Highlift website has some more information.
I don't understand these people who think you can build an elevator into space. Can't anybody understand that you cannot just "tie" a cable from Earth to something in orbit in space? For building an elevator into space, there are two problems that need to be accomplished:
1) Find a substance to build a cable that can support it's own weight (plus the weight of whatever it will "carry") in space. For a long time, this was impossible, until Carbon nanotubes came along. But even with this problem fixed, no one has even considered the second problem.
2) Any object in an orbital pattern with a celestial body (Earth) is subject to two forces: inertia and gravity. We know this as freefall. Astronauts in space are constantly falling (gravity), but never actually fall to earth because inertia keeps pushing them forward. If one of these forces is knocked out of balance, aka the orbital body slows down its forward velocity, it will fall to the Earth. So, what happens when we tie a cable to, say, the space station from the ground below?
IT WILL FALL TO THE EARTH!
The space station orbits the Earth once every what...couple hours? I don't know, but I do know that it's orbit is much faster than the time it takes for the Earth to spin once on its axis. If we attach an elevator cable from the ground to the space station, it will literally whip the station down upon the Earth, because the station moves much faster than the Earth. Since the forward motion is hampered by the cable, down it will come.
The only possibility of maintaining an actual elevator cable is if it is hooked onto something in geosyncronous orbit with the Earth. The only problem there is that the object would have to be 40,000 miles away from the Earth to maintain constant orbit with a fixed position on Earth. Good luck.
What makes me even more skeptical about this report is a statement they make on their webpage:
In its initial report, the company has found that a space elevator capable of lifting 5-ton payloads every day to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars or Venus could be operational in 15 years.
Mars? Venus? How in the universe are we able to tether a cable onto another planet?!? There isn't even a fixed distance in that senario!
But, look at the positive side! It would only take out Australia.
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