Slashdot Mirror
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".
p _1 .htm
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.
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.