More on Space Elevators

finally writes "Space elevator news is being reported on Space.com and Yahoo. I, for one, am really excited about the project. I was wondering if any of the broad range of talents and skills that we have here have thought of doing a sort of open source assistance to this project by means of donating time and knowledge." We did a big story last week on this space elevator conference.

Comments

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[stak]

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You want to donate?

[Spudley]

Let me get this straight... this space elevator initiative is a purely commercial effort. They may be planning to spend billions, but the desired end result will be that they get a near-complete monopoly on space launches(*). ...And you're suggesting donating time to help them?
Hmmmmm....... I think anyone with a budget in eight figures can afford to pay their programmers.

(*) The word "launch" is probably wrong here, but I couldn't think of an alternative.

Re:You want to donate?

[ceejayoz]

Getting one up will lead to other industrial groups trying to get their own up. Competing space elevators would be a Good Thing (TM).

Anyways, I'd rather have a group of private companies doing it than NASA, given their recent success rate and Congress' cost-cutting measures.

Re:You want to donate?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually the budget is 11 figures... ;-)

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money."

From the mouth of the master...

[Will_Malverson]

Arthur C. Clarke said that we'd build a space elevator about 50 years after everyone stopped laughing. With stories like this, I think it's safe to say that we've stopped laughing.

Re:Jetsons Homes

[Will_Malverson]

The only thing that I can see as negative about this is that driving to work you will see all of these shiny vertical lines above the landscape heading out into the sky...

Nah... The only place you could put one of these would be at the equator, and the tower would be thin enough as to be invisible from more than a mile or two away. Once you get two or three up, and find that you still don't have enough capacity, it probably becomes cheaper to strengthen existing elevators rather than building new ones.

Re:Jetsons Homes

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Why can't we make small Jetson's style homes on the line... Everyone can live 5 miles up..

Nope. Don't forget these cables hang down from orbit.

So to make this work, you have to thicken the cable above you to take the extra weight. 38000 km of nanotubular cable is not cheap...

Why do they have to hang straight down?

[Mick D.]

I have a pretty decent knowledge of the physics involved in the construction and use of a Spave elevator. I know that they need to orbit in Geosync orbit so the cable doesn't change length. I know that the cable is actually hanging down to the Earth from the center and being pulled away from the Earth out at the tip of the cable beyond Geosync orbit.

But, the one thing that has always bugged me has been why the cable itself has to hang straight down from orbit. This places the "Ground" based end in much less practical areas. Couldn't there be multiple cables hanging down and strung like Christmas lights to northern and sorthern areas that would be more likely to use them. They would need to balance the weight to keep the orbiting cable in the correct spot, but with 4 or more anchor points it would provide multiple ways to orbit and redundency(sp) in case of catostrophic failure.

Any insight in this would be helpful. As far as I can tell the only problems would be the added weight and thus tension, but I haven't done the math and don't know how much stronger the cable material would need to be.

Re:Why do they have to hang straight down?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

But, the one thing that has always bugged me has been why the cable itself has to hang straight down from orbit.

The trouble is that the combination of rotation (which pulls at 90 degrees to the axis of the earth) and the earths gravity (which pulls directly towards the earths center)- the combination ends up pulling the end weight so that it is above the earths equator. The cable below that goes from the attachment point on the earths surface up to there.

You can move the endweight only a small amount from the earth end- the radius of the earth is only 6700 km, but GEO is 38000km, so the geometry for moving the end weight around doesn't add up.

So basically, the endweight is in the plane of the equator. So the cable comes off at an angle from the earths surface- and heads off to the weight beyond GEO. At the equator the angle is 90 degrees. But as you go north or south, the angle is lower, and the angle means that the tether is longer and weighs more, as it droops under gravity (there's little rotation force at low altitude to compensate, so it does it quite a lot.)

So if you go very far north you find that the cable leaves the earths surface horizontally... there's no point in going further north than that. Exactly how far north this happens depends on how heavy the cable is, and how much tension there is in the cable at ground level. So you can increase the tension and pull it up off the ground again. But by doing so, you are losing payload by doing this- the extra tension to make this work could be used to lift payload up the tether.

It's a bit oversimplified, but that's the main idea. You can do it, but it's probably not worth doing it.

$10 billion is *nothing*!

[GPS Pilot]

This first space elevator could be built for between $7-$10 billion

People, put things in perspective. Since design work began in the early '70s, the U.S. has spent about $180 billion on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it? Certainly not reliable, low-cost access to space. The space elevator will change everything. Especially considering the fact that you can use it to lift materials for additional space elevators -- making the construction cost for subsequent space elevators lower than for the first one.

$10 billion for our first space elevator would be the bargain of the millenium.

Re:$10 billion is *nothing*!

[J'raxis]

$10 billion - just a few billion less than this monstrosity.

Re:$10 billion is *nothing*!

[FunkMonkey#9]

Since design work began in the early '70s, the U.S. has spent about $180 billion on the Space Shuttle program. What do we have to show for it?

Oh, how about major advances in many areas of science and technology, such as materials science, aerodynamics, propulsion... or were they developed independently of that $180B?

Should anyone working on a Space Elevator work to reinvent the wheel in areas where the amassed body of knowledge has already been covered by other projects? No?

A lot has been taken away from the Space Shuttle program to be applied in other fields, significantly increasing the bang-for-your-buck factor of a lot of things we can take for granted when we start new projects.

Redefining "Long commute"

[phamlen]

The Highlift website suggests "Travelling at average speeds of anywhere from 120 km/h to 160 km/h, the length of a voyage to low Earth orbit might be as brief as four hours." Considering that here in NYC, we have people who commute 3 hours each day, we should consider anchoring one near Grand Central Station. I can just hear the talk:

"Yeah, well, we were looking at a place in Poughkeepsie, but then we realized the commute would only be about 30 minutes longer. Plus you should see our views!

Re:What happens when the cable breaks?

[shrikel]

Actually the cable is more like 60,000 miles long. The idea is to use a substance that will NOT break easily. And if it did break, it wouldn't crash down like steel, it would float down like paper. They're taking this into consideration. Look at their faq on their website.

Re:What happens when the cable breaks?

[MindStalker]

The current thought is to design the cable so that incase it does break it should crumble into many pieces and mostly burn up in the atmosphere with just the last 10 miles or so actually falling, which would be an ultra thin cable hitting the ocean (plans are to have it be in the middle of the ocean for obvious reasons) So yes, probably small tidal wave from this cable, but nothing catostrophic and huge meteor shower, but nothing catostrophic if done properly.

Re:What happens when the cable breaks?

[the_skuncle]

More fiction and speculation has been written on this subject than you could throw a stick at.

K.S. Robinson blew the counterweight off of his space elevator in his awesome mars series, and it encircled the equator almost three times. By the time it was almost completely down, the heat from re-entry and pressure of impact caused the carbon whiskers to turn into pure diamond and bucky-balls (Buckminster Fullerenes).

Now, sure I know that it is only fiction, but so was 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' when it was written.

I also read a crappy book that placed the elevator on the polar axis instead of on the equator. It was written by some famous British guy who had written piles of stuff for Dr. Who and Red Dwarf among others. It answered the nagging question as to why I hate TV Science Fiction; There's virtually no science involved at all.

Just my $0.02

They don't, but it's easier that way

[Spamalamadingdong]

Since everything is going to the same destination anyway, and the dynamics of e.g. the lunar and solar tides would tend to stress paired skyhooks pretty badly unless you winched them in and out to compensate, it's probably simpler to just have one.

Once you're up to the level of traffic which justifies multiple skyhooks, you might be better served by a launch loop or orbital ring, aka Skyrail. You could have a whole bunch of those operating simultaneously.

Multiple cars?

[Myco]

I've read a lot of discussion on /. about these things, but I have yet to see anyone mention the question of how many cars can run on a space elevator at once. Obviously, if only one car can run at once, that seriously limits your traffic and efficiency. The main difficulty I see with multiple cars is what happens when they need to pass each other. Does anyone have any ideas for solutions to this, or other reasons why multiple cars wouldn't work?

If cars aren't allowed to pass, you could still send them along in batches, though. As long as you have ample storage for them at each end. Shouldn't be a problem -- space is big.

Re:Multiple cars?

[spike hay]

Actually, with this system, unlike other elevator concepts, it is only a one-way ticket. To get down, you have to have a vehicle capable of surviving reentry.