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Space Elevators: Low Cost Ticket to GEO?
Crocuta writes "The current issue of Science
News features a cover story
that discusses the current developments in space elevator technology. NASA has been
working on such devices for many years, but private companies such as Highlift Systems are now jumping on the space
elevator bandwagon, no doubt seeing the huge potential profit in a low cost per pound
delivery system. PhysicsWeb has a somewhat
older, but much more technical article
on the formation and structure of the carbon nanotubes that form the basis of the proposed
tether cables. With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make
the world a better place."
With an object that goes through t the ionosphere you would get a constant stream of free electrons surging through the damn thing. Throw a power station at the base and BOOM. Free electricity. The only question I have is if we pull down electrons in the upper atmosphere would there be an impact?
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Arthur C. Clarke popularized the Space Elevator and once said "The space elevator will be built about fifty years after everyone stops laughing".
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http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast07se
My father is a blogger.
Some Books to look at:
The 1979 Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel, The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke.
AND...
The Web Between the Worlds, by Charles Sheffield, using the same idea, published about the same time Clarke published his book.
AND...
Of course, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
The minute I saw it on slashdot, just like the last time, I knew people would go into the "this is just impossible" mode without at least giving it a shot.
Ok, I'll bite. READ THIS (warning, it's a pdf file), and once you do, say it again. I'm not saying this paper is wrong, but it's enough information to realize that there's no one thing preventing it form happening. Not even money, as it would all cost about the same as the International Space Station. The one thing that doesn't exist as of yet is the nanotube wire, which feasbility is clearly only a matter of time. So if the existance of the Space Elevator depends on the existance of a 90,000 Km long nanotube wire (the fabric industry is used to threads this long, again, read the paper), then there's no doubt that it will become a reality.
The space elevator is doing for me what the apollo program did for my parent's genration: It's giving me an overdose of inspiration.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I watched someone talk about their plans for doing just this on TV about a month ago. I can't remember what show exactly.
Basically it was a ribbon that started somewhere in the Pacific on some island and went straight up into space attached to an anchor. The ribbon was paper thin but wide and incredibly strong. The reason for it being thin was because of wind resistence which is a major factor especially when its an area with tropical storms. It also had to be a no fly zone since if a plane clipped it, either the ribbon would go or the plane would be cut in half.
It sounded all well and good but the price was hefty and implimenting it sounds near impossible. It would save us a lot of money in the long run considering how much space shuttle launches cost. I just can't see it being reliable. You wouldn't catch me riding on it, thats for sure.
One thing I do know, if they get it to work then it'll be one of the greatest engineering feats ever. I hope they can do it, but I doubt they will.
One of the things that I find interesting about the whole process of the Space Elevator principle is the idea that after the first one, it is possible to relatively easily spawn of daughter cables, so that if the first one took 2.5 years, subsequent ones would take less than a year. Not only does this provide for additional capacity, it raises the possibility of selling cables! It also makes the first entrant into the Space Elevator arena almost automatically dominant.
Additionally, you can create a daughter cable, and then use the cable to sling the entire daughter cable to the red planet - suddenly, we have a means to get to Geo Earth orbit, a way to sling stuff to Mars (using the cable) and a way to get down to the surface of Mars, and back up! This is probably the most feasible way that I have heard of to explore Mars.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
Couple of points :
There are obviously enormous difficulties with building this cable, with having it survive lightning strikes, deliberate damage ( could a single guided rocket with an armor piercing molten jet warhead destroy this wire in one hit? If that happened, wouldn't the $10,000 missile have caused 50 billion worth of damage or more...everyone knows that a project like this is going to cost 10 times the current estimate), the mechanical wear as the spacecraft slowly claw there way up...
A far simpler and cheaper solution is a massive ground based laser array. (which incidentally is how they are proposing to power this thing...why not skip the cable and build a much bigger laser). The beam would vaporize propellant attached to the bottom of the spacecraft, eliminating perhaps 90% of the danger of rocket travel (the rocket blowing up has always been the biggest risk...if it uses a nonvolatile, inert propellant) and reducing the cost to a tiny fraction of current expenses.
Since the laser system would be a large array, it would not have to be built to nearly the quality standards that a manned spacecraft has to be constructed to since if one of the lasers burns out, blows up, ect the rest of the system picks up the slack.
The Monkees weren't a boy band so much as a postmodern satire of the Beatles. You must be capable of holding a grudge for a very long time, if you're still bitter about their "comeback".
Mark Walhberg, meanwhile, never really had anything worth coming back for. The moment he realized this, he changed jobs, finding work as a halfway-decent actor. If all the boy bands made Wahlberg's "comeback", music would be a much better place, and movies wouldn't be any worse than they currently are.
Also, the "let's shoot boy bands into space... without space suits!" comment is older now, but not any more tired, than when it was first made. Remember that you're posting on Slashdot, where we already know you don't like boy bands. Originality is much more important than mindlessly repeating the same inane remarks over and over again. Bandwagoning the editor's own tired "insights" puts me in the mood to space you, ahead of the pop-music chorus line of the week.
At least the boy bands are paid professionals: they can dance and sing better than you or I, they work hard, they maintain wholesome appearances, and they appear to be having a lot of fun. They're getting paid for something they do well, and it's something they enjoy doing well.
I'm not moved by the music that's written for them, and I abhor the whole music industry/marketing system that makes boy bands possible and lucrative, but the bands themselves are no more evil than they would be if they appeared under a system of independent copyright-owning artists.
Imagine a songwriter who believes his work would appeal to a certain demographic--highschool girls, for example. So he amasses some capital, hires a group of clean-cut young men and a choreographer, writes some catchy tunes, teaches them the lyrics, music, and dance steps, and hits the road. They work as a team, and work hard. They get lucky, create some buzz, burn an album, collect some royalties from downloads and webcasts (in addition to the take from their touring), and generally have a good time writing and fronting the music.
That's not so bad, is it? No different from the independent rappers, emo bands, country singers, folk artists, &c. that will spring up in our hypothetical RIAA-free utopia. I think boy bands will always be with us, and I don't think they will ever be the problem.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
"...Panama, a country that didn't even exist until the US decided..."
:-)
You're right. At the time Colombia owned that territory, and the government refused to allow the US to build the canal. So the US helped a group of rebels who opposed the Colombian government. We asked that they give us full rights to the canal (which Carter later overturned) and the revolution was a success. Voila, a new country called Panama, friendly to the US with a fancy new canal.
The movie "The Tailor of Panama" comes to mind.
The site was throwing around numbers like $10 billion - well within the reach of a large corporation. Heck, Microsoft could pay for this baby with cash.
Speaking of the magnetopause, it isn't exactly radially symmetric about the earth, right? Doesn't it get deformed by the solar wind and such. So the side towards the sun would have field lines that are more dense than the side that is away from the sun. Thus, I would think that as the space elevator passes from one side to the other it would effectively pass through plenty of field lines. I don't know if it would be as big a problem as with the tether, since I don't have a good grasp on the relative scales in question. But I just thought I would mention it.