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."
Just how long until some muslim wack-job flies a plane into the space elevator??
We have enough trouble getting stuck on elevators between floors in 5 story buildings. Could you imagine getting stuck half-way to the moon? They better be sure to put one of those bright red emergency phones on this bad boy.
Ok. I am really getting tired of Slashdot reposting the crap rag OSNEWS on here. Please, PLEASE stop "editors". I don't know which of you has a fetish for Eugenia Loli, but this is supposed to be a Nerds site, not a technically impaired idiot site. Please, I implore you, please, STOP RE-POSTING OSNews *Crap* here. Here stuff is devoid of technical cross examinations, rife with conjecture and poor spelling and grammar, and she does what has long been disallowed here, the censoring of Anonymous Cowards. It is bad enough Slashdot isn't critically edited or reviewed, but in the absence of recourse by a commenting public free from censorship and suppression, OSNews is a totalitarian one way street. Please consider that she is likely to be getting kickback to review and announce things, and with her one way system, she could very well be lying to suit the needs of her underwriters without having recourse.
Eugenia Loli needs to exposed. I will post 3 articles that show how fascist the Greeks can be, and that people like Eugenia perpetrate. Then I will cover My Big Fat GReek Wedding, with Fat being the operative word. Then some random Eugenia quotes. I hate you Eugenia, for being a fascist at OSNEWS. You are a pathetic waif who can not accept dissent, and you dictate to your small and withering community. I hope you get ovarian cancer.
Fat Eugenia Loli's Friends Ban all electronig games by mistake. Its people like Eugenia Loli that show that the formerly great state of Greece has erorded into a festering inbred, stupid hairy totalitarian fucks like herself. Now is the fatty greases sweltering out of her cellulite that makes it seem like Grease would be a more apropro name than Greece.
The Night Defender Fat Eugenia Loli Fat
Sweating and farting nervously on the verge of mental meltdown, ELQ reloads each of her precious OSNews pages, making sure all is well. Fifty Internet Explorer windows are open in Windows XP, it's gridning the hard drive to death. ELQ's cable modem and NIC activity LEDs are nearly solid from the raw frenzy of almost constant browser reloading. Eugenia's eyes twitch rapidly from window to window with Mercurial speed to make sure that any rogue comments do not escape her attention, always hitting her refresh buttons with pinpoint accuracy. No logical order for checking, purely random and impulse driven by raw Mediterranean temper, stopping for the occasional savage bite from a pork loin still affixed to the bone, Eugenia's eyes never leave the monitor.
"N-n-n-n NO! No TIME for Dance Dance Revolution, oh but it's been so long! I cannot allow the BASTARD flooders' comments to be seen. MY DOMAIN IS SACRED!"
Hair is frizzled and days unwashed, asscrack just barely half wiped in a frenzy to return to her monitor, having taken a large shit earlier. No time to flush! Her armpits are over-ridden with pubic hair, her fat flaps reek of B.O. and yeast from days of neglect and hour upon hour of sweating. Relentless sweating.
"Cannot to be keeps up this pace! I may be need to go to hospital for exhaustions" she pants in desperation, wiping the sweat from a matted hair lock with her week-old t-shirt offering.
The hour of judgement approaches! Comment number 45 in thread 374 is clearly of anti-Greek sentiment! It reads "Eugenia continues to post yet another story that's simply ripped off from other websites. How much longer can this continue? It's my opinion that she has poor editorial skills. I think they should be revoked."
"YOU BASTARD FUCK!", Eugenia erupts in raw hatred, simultaneously ripping a 120 decibel-at-1-meter fart into the back of her chair. "Nobody is to be attack my site!" Eugenia blasts away at 10 words per minute in a barely-coherant broken English. She's on a mission. After several hours, the words on the screen are completely shattered and in disarray, they make no sense. Eugenia is impressed with her English progress and submits her lousy retort. Relaxing only for several seconds to savor the rush, she continues her patrol, sleepless into the night.
Greeks ban electronic games by mistake
Beware Greeks writing laws
By Adamson Rust: Sunday 01 September 2002, 17:40
ONE OF THE SO-CALLED CRADLES of European civilisation appears to have got its Aristotles all in a twist over computer gaming. And mobile phones, for that matter.
The Greek government appears to have lost its marbles.
The government wanted to prevent its people from wasting their money by using electronic slot machines but the democratically appointed government has banned all computer games everywhere by mistake.
And now the cops are raiding Internet cafes to enforce the said SNAFU.
The law, according to our Greek correspondents, prohibits any kind of game that is played on any kind of electronic equipment.
And it appears to have been drafted so loosely that that includes mobile phones.
Theoretically, the cops could bust into people's homes but so far apparently they have arrested Internet cafe owners and customers who were fighting a few rounds of Q3 CTF.
Next thing, the cops will be creeping up on people using their mobile phones just to make sure they're not playing a quick game rather than using them for their real purpose.
Here are some details of the cock up in Greek.
And there's more details about this at the Greek Net Cafe organisation.
Give us a glass of hemlock, Socrates!
Greek govt bans all computer games
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 03/09/2002 at 16:45 GMT
The government of Greece is making heroic efforts to humiliate the nation in front of the entire world, by banning all electronic games. That's right; something as innocent as playing computer chess on your laptop in a hotel lobby is now a crime with penalties of up to three months in stir and a fine of 10,000 euros.
The purpose behind this charming legislation is to crack down on Internet gambling (which already was illegal) -- or, rather, to enable legislators to enact their little public dance of righteous aversion to Internet gambling.
Improved enforcement of existing law is all that was needed, but there's a problem. Unfortunately, the Greek government is "incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines," according to an older article from the English-language Kathimerini newspaper, written while the bill was under consideration.
Now it's official. The legislature has concluded that all electronic games have got to go because the bureaucrats they're maintaining on the public payroll aren't swift enough to figure out the difference between video poker and TuXkart. Perhaps enforcing literacy requirements and sobriety regulations for government workers would have been a more productive approach, but it's too late for that now.
Greek ban on gaming threatens Internet cafes
By John Lettice Posted: 04/07/2002 at 12:49 GMT
A Register reader in Greece emails us claiming that the Greek government has effectively outlawed Internet cafes by "all LAN and Internet games and any kind of game that is supported by electrical, electronic or software means." If anybody so much as has something looking like a game on the screen, he tells us, the cafe manager is liable for arrest.
All of this makes some kind of perverted sense. Computers in Internet cafes are gaming machines, sort of. Or at least they have that potential, and Greece has already shown signs of considering them as such. More recently, Greece banned all amusement and gambling machines, including the likes of Pac Man.
You pay for computers in Internet cafes, you can play games on them, so yes, there you go. And a little further research leads us to believe that Greece's position is maybe not so wildly eccentric as one might initially think. Here in the UK one does have to pay duty on gaming and amusement machines in public places. You can get a little more information about the position by tearing through this section of the 1995 Finance Act, but frankly we do not recommend it.
It would however seem logical to us for Internet cafe machines playing games to be classed somewhere within the amusement machines category, and therefore liable for duty. If they're not, then pubs installing computers instead of amusement machines could be on to a good wrinkle. So, some form of cafe tax? OK, but what, then, are we going to do about all of those people in pubs who'll sometime soon be whipping out their 3G phones in order to play online games?
In Greece, obviously, they'll just arrest the nearest bar manager, while in London's West End we foresee a variation on traffic wardens slapping Internetting Tickets on careless mobile gamers...
FAT EUGENIA FAT FAT LARD FAT PORCINE CORPULENT CELLULITE RIDDEN FAT
'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' Rolls on
Wed Aug 14, 3:23 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (AP) - In a summer of huge movies that last just a few weeks in theaters and are lucky to break even, one little film won't quit.
The celebration has lasted all summer for "My Big Fat Fucking.Pig.Greek.Eugenia Wedding," a micro-budgeted romantic comedy with great word-of-mouth that has steadily climbed from 20th place on the box-office chart to No. 8 last weekend. The film, about a woman who defies the traditions of her loud Fucking.Pig.Greek.Eugenia family by marrying a man who isn't Fucking.Pig.Greek.Eugenia, cost only about $5 million to produce. It has collected nearly $45 million since it's April debut, and the end of the honeymoon is nowhere in sight. "I feel like I connected with absolute strangers across America. That's what I love more than anything," said Nia Vardalos, the star and writer, who adapted the film from her one-woman stage show. "The money is like, 'Yeah, yeah.'
La la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la laLa la oh la la la yum la la.
Eugenia, is that you? I hate you because of the way you censor. I hate you, and if I had to live in your kingdom in real life I would suicide attack you. Your death would be worthy ends to my means.
This is just another example of spineless crap moderation by Eugenia. I hate her fucking fascist fat fronds of celluite dripping down her bones and puddling up near here wrists which hinge har fat sausage fingers.
Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, EUGENIA FAT PIG LOLI's editing/moderating [read: censoring] ALL AGREE on ONE THING:
So, you busy little plebian proletariat BITCH, get busy, you have some censoring to do! FUN!
Good job you little neo-commies BITCH, EUGENIA FAT. Don't want to hear the other side, shoot the fucker in the head as an ENEMY OF THE STATE [In this case anyone who seeks to improve the sad state of OSNEWS and its fucking lame conjecture.]
A few haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit LOLI QUERU
Try to suck less, please
Humorless
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless LOLI QUERU
Why do you hate me?
The Proletariat
OSnews Commie
LOLI QUERU fears new idea!
Censor him quickly!
Get busy moderating this down, you little minions of the FAT GREASE LORD obedient prefects of the corrupt CUNT, LOLI! You are the vanguards of chunky brown vaginal discharges, and dissent is not allowed!
frost spit
This is somewhat a repeat...at least we mentioned the space elevator before and the plans of NASA.
what about deep space? if we accelerate the payload up the space elevator wont we also get the slingshot effect of the earth's rotation adding to the energy we are putting into the payload to get it flung toward the outer planets at a much higher starting velocity and while using less fuel?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And I'll say it again. I *love* the idea of a space elevator. But I do not see how it will reduce the cost of going to space as much as some people claim. The maintenance costs for the tower will be tremendous.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
what happens when the cable snaps?
Ever since slashdot first posted news about highliftsystems (I'd provide a link to the news story, but I already have all the karma I need), I've devoured every bit of information I can regarding the space elevator. After reading about 1000 pages regarding the issue, I came to the conclusion that it IS possible. Go to the highliftsystems mentioned in the news post and read the PDFs that are there before you start screaming "cold fusion!". You'll probably reach the same conclusion.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
What we want, is a low cost solution to make your ass look like this
in foreign affairs.
Space elevators need to be located very near the equator, and if you look at all the countries near the eqautor, they're rife with anti-Americanism. If you think Bush will let haters of American gain the high ground, forget it.
My predictions is we'll see a coup in a convenient third world country on the equator, like Venezuala or India, with the installation of a pro-American government before we biuld a space elevator.
Those of us already in orbit can't wait for the space elevator to be complete. Finally, we can get some cable TV.
I see more space elevator articles here than anywhere else. Do otherwise worthless "nerds" get off on 23,000 mile-long cables?
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? ]=-
Imagine asking for the basement, (floor -1), and getting sent to floor 65535 instead :-).
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.
Repost. About a month ago.
Sig.i>
"With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make the world a better place."
Make sure you "forget" to give them space suits, air, food, etc. You would be amazed at how sneak those boy bands can be at making come backs (Mark Wahlberg comes to mind as do the Monkiees)
Here we come... walking down the street....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
.
.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
cant get much lower
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
As fascinating as it sounds, unfortunately, Congress will never fund such an endeavor -- as far as they concerned, space is a useless void that we now have no reason to explore after the death of the USSR.
The idea might be feasible -- I prefer the idea of a giant cannon/mass driver/gauss gun to shoot us into space myself -- but the idea of a 100,000km tube supporting an elevator is too farfetched to ever get funding, especially with increasingly conservative US administrations that would rather spend money launching rockets not into space, but into third-world cities, as well as European powers that have their own budget problems due to their social welfare systems that prefer to spend money on Earth and not in space.
The problem with something this tall is that it will inevitably be destroyed, and we will be scattered throughout the earth and forced to speak different languages.
Best Windows Freeware
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!
How many gazillion of billions do you think it will cost. If not by any accident, how many terrorists does it take to blow it up? There just is not and cannot be such big amount of capital tied into one physical place. It might be possible to build it - once, if you find someone who is ready to BURN that money. Someone who invested all his money into a dot.com in 1999 is worth economics nobel prize compared to this.
Here are some more links to info on our very own Slashdot:
Here
Here..
Here..
and Here
I can just hear the laughter from outer-space:
"GLeebob, come here quick look what those silly humans are trying. Yup, they're trying the ladder-thingy. Remember when we tried the ladder-thingy..Ooooh, that was a dumb-idea. What will they do next, human-pyramid? Come on humans, bang those rocks together..."
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Seriously, isn't this like the 10000th time this has been posted on /. over the years?
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Here's a nice sized (15MB) report done by NASA. They talk about all sorts of problems that need to be worked out to make get this project off the ground http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_repor t/pdf/472Edwards.pdf
free ipod? yeah.
With the stupid racers "ricing" their civics out, I'm sure if you combined a few of them together with some tape we'd be able to launch everything cheaply out of the earth.
Shit, even if we don't succeed, we'll have a few less ricers to wory about!
If the system software were written in Erlang, that won't be a problem.
Of course, those kitten-fucking pigs'll use Java, dooming millions to an icy grave in the sky...
This is weird, the other night I had a dream that I was in Paris, near the Eiffel tower and I saw a cable going up to the sky, and I remember one slashdot story I had read about a space elevator.
This is real, I really had this dream about 2 days ago.
EHC
Why stop with one seemingly improbable concept?
Once the elevator is built, use it to haul pieces of an Orion craft to the top and assemble it there. When it's ready, let it go, flinging it out of Earth's magnetic field. Once clear, light it up and go see the solar system.
This way there's no radioactive contamination of the atmosphere, minimal risk while getting the "fuel" in orbit, and it's a handy way to get a crapload of plutonium out of our hair.
Saturn in fifteen years, anyone?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Discovered in 1991, carbon nanotubes are long molecular tubes of carbon atoms that resemble cylinders of minuscule chicken wire (SN: 12/16/00, p. 398). The bonds between carbon atoms in this configuration are so robust that, weight-for-weight, carbon nanotubes are at least 100 times as strong as steel. They are, in fact, the strongest material known. A carbon-nanotube string half the width of a pencil can support more than 40,000 kilograms, Edwards notes. That's equivalent to the weight of 20 full-size cars.
How much could spiders' silk hold if it were that thick? I've heard that its quite a bit stronger than steel, but is it more than 100?
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.
All this talk of a huge centralized project is just a response to the inevitability of NASA being shown to be what it is: A social control device to impede the dispersal of life long enough for bureaucratic structures to adapt to the freedom promised by cheap access to space. As pressure builds from the best news since the transistor that has recently come out of India combined with the real response to it from the West coming out of Texas, we'll see more and more of this kind of talk from the bureaucrats.
Seastead this.
Well - he blew it in Bolivia. I bet he'll try again, though.
Stop the brainwash
and it's called my penis. Grab onto it, show me a picture of Cindy Crawford, and you'll be in LEO in the the bat of an eye.
top floor: shoes, ladies ligerie, space. please mind the gap.
Does anybody remember a /. article a while back link to this story about how carbon nanotubes cannot handle bursts of common, ordinary light?
Yes, that's right! A standard camera flash will cause carbon nanotubes to explode!
Check out the link, there's a neat video showing this effect at work.
I can just see it now, on the front page of the newspaper... Tourist arrested for carrying terrorist device and it's just a FLASH CAMERA!
Yeah, I'm excited that the technology to do this is just now barely within our reach - but it'll be a while before it's squarely in our grasp.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
you and the secretary could get it on, and it wouldn't have to be a quicky.
Evil is the money of root.
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.
sig Zeon!
Cars will be drawn to the top of the elevator by a team of trained mules, hitched to a rope of a length roughly 1.8 times the circumference of the Earth. We anticipate only minor difficulties obtaining a right-of-way through most nations (with the possible exception of Sweden, because they're lame).
The mules will be fed and cared for by dedicated and highly trained staffpersons. At the end of their useful lifespan, most retired mules will be adopted by loving families everywhere. Unclaimed mules will be shot, as will be unclaimed members of loving families. Irresponsible and gratuitously hostile critics, who clearly do not have the best interests of humanity in mind, will be shot also.
On special occasions and international holidays, children of all races, creeds, colors, and nationalities, clothed in their quaint and colorful native garb, will be invited to throw superballs and apples from the top of the elevator. They will be charged only a nominal fee for this unique privilege. Highly sophisticated surveillance technology will enable all the world to enjoy the festivities!
We are now accepting investments in this historic, one-of-a-kind investment opportunity, not to be missed by the progressive and forward-thinking investors of our great nation. We anticipate incalculable earnings; we also anticipate neglecting to calculate them. Please give us all of your money right now and I promise you'll not regret having been so easily gulled.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
We could have a kewl ribbon around the earth with a nice little bow....
"With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make the world a better place."
With a development like this, we could shoot The Chump-In-Charge into space and make the world a better place."
Sounds like more of a Shelbyville idea...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Its apsolutely insulting that this 'news' has been on slashdot about 5 times. Why don't we build one GREAT BIG elastic band and, slingshot people into space?? We can start with the assh0le that thinks the space elevator is a good idea. Slashdot should wise up and post information that has a chance of occurring. Science Fiction never made shit up like this.
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.
Remember this article?
t ml ?tid=134
http://slashdot.org/science/02/04/26/1213220.sh
I'd be more frightened of the thing blowing up at the crack of dawn... er firecracker of dawn?
For example, the base tower would have to be 31 miles high, according to this article. Which is 90 times higher than the current tallest structure on earth, the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada is only 1/3 of a mile (about 170 stories) high.
There is also talk about using carbon nanotubes to make up the cable. The pricetag, 40 billion dollars (see 2nd link).
NASA spends $1,000,000 plus to built a space-pen, the Russians use a pencil. Now, they are building a space elevator to get down the street to buy a cheap car that couldn't hit 55 if it was droped out of a plane.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
A thought/question I had though: would the best places to build such elevators be at the poles or the equator? I am having a hard time picturing it in my head, but a globe tilted to one side spinning through an airless void - I can't see how the positioning of such a system in one location on the globe would be more favorable to any other. Weather systems, perhaps, which would rule out Antartica (the Winter storms there are so violent that they generate the great Summer waves of California and Alaska - but I guess a site full of geeks already knew that).
You don't need to tether the end, you can still get some very healthy benefits with a partial elevator. Deals with a lot of the security issues too. Cargo craft only need to fly to the low end and ride the rotation to the top where they can slingshot off. Using the Earth's magnetic field and solar power means it's self-stabilising too. More detail and better writing at; Free David Brin Short Story
it will be much easier for NASA to make fake photos of future "moon missions."
Evil is the money of root.
Ok, as much as we all laugh at Lance, or whatever his name is, from N'Sync trying to go into space, I think it was moronic of everyone involved not to make sure this happened, that he got up there and back safely, and had one hell of a good time.
The entire space program has been gradually fading from world view, and particularly from the Western world. Yes, there are programs still going on at NASA and ESA and even in China, but it's nowhere near what was hoped for in the 1960s and 70s. Putting a high profile celebrity into space would bring a lot of attention back to the space program. Would it be fleeting? Of course. That's what media attention is nowadays. But it would probably enspire a lot young kids to go to space, just as the early US and Soviet astro/cosmonauts did nearly half a century ago.
Oh my god, next thing we will have is space amusment rides. "Freefall 7 miles!"
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Please also enroll me under your special Car Insurance Scheme. I understand that I do not have to sign anything to make this completely binding to me.With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make the world a better place.
:)
To the author: are you channeling the Rice University Marching Owl Band today? We just performed a show in which we advocated the launching of boy bands into space. Is this a great-minds-think-alike thing, or did you spend some time at Reliant Stadium this weekend?
hopefully venus doesn't think we're trying to mate...
aoeu
Or it will just get blown up/flown into/cut down by terrorists.
//m
Think of the space elevator structure as a 100,000-km-long highway that will require ongoing maintenance and repair," says Smitherman.
How unrealistic can an analogy be? If a crack forms in some remote stretch of interstate, there's no danger of the rest of the interstate system suddenly ripping away and falling into space. Repairs would have to happen instantaneously without ever breaking an almost unimaginable ribbon tension. And this wouldn't be a very rare occurrence, either, as the ribbon would present a surface area of five to eleven million square meters on each side (5 to 11.5 cm wide, 10^8 meters long). And remember that it's on the equator, which every piece of orbiting debris crosses twice during each orbit.
And the only mentioned solution for lightning strikes (one of which could be fatal to the ribbon) seems almost totally unworkable, and doesn't take into account that a 100,000-kilometer-high conductive tower would generate its own lightning. Remember the ill-fated (but educational) Space Tether Experiment? And the tether was only a mile long. A space elevator's ribbon would intersect a huge chord of Earth's magnetic field, including both Van Allen Belts. Seems to me that, even if the ribbon didn't immediately blow like a giant flash-bulb filament, you still couldn't get within a hundred yards of the base due to the continuous electrical discharge.
Don't get me wrong--I've dreamed about space elevators since I was a kid reading about Clarke's hyperfilaments, but the more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems.
Will the wire generate power?
Yes, but only in the milliwatts.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
> when have we EVER installed a pro-american
> government in order to obtain resources?
I believe the fellow was referring to Panama, a country that didn't even exist until the US decided that they wanted to build a canal there.
Come to think of it, I believe the equator runs through Columbia. Time for a second helping?
Space Elevator
It goes way up
Space Elevator
Taking cargo to space
Space Elevator
Watch it go UP AND DOWNNNNNN
(thank you)
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
Cadbury, Nestle and Hershey have all offered their facilities as locations for the elevator base.
to Major Tom,
your circuit's dead
there's something wrong.
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Wow, great way to ditch nuclear waste.. Just lift it up and launch it slowly into the sun!
Instead of spending billions to perfect a safe, efficient delivery method why not just unravel the world's largest rubber band ball; tie them all together; and shoot the boy bands (one at a time for greater distance) into space?
Planets and moons would pass in between Mars and Earth at some point...how to keep the string from winding around Mars like a ball of string? Haha!
and what, pray tell, do you think the units are on the Kelvin scale?
I've heard some shorten "degrees Kelvin" to ?Kelvin, or even "Kelvins", in case that's what you're driving at, but it's still degrees, just as "60 Fahrenheit" is short for "60 degrees Fahrenheit".
...and on /., we'll debate which language is the best one...
One thing I never see mentioned by all these proponents of nanotubes as a structural material is that extrapolating the strength of nano-scale covalent bonds to macroscopic dimensions is overly optimistic. "Calculations suggest... based on flexibility... 100x as strong as steel" sure. There are all sorts of materials, if you remove all the defects on an atomic scale, that are super strong. But saying that it is inevitable that we can scale up something from 1 micrometer to 100,000 kilometers is a bit of a stretch. If you made the cable out of solid flawless diamond, it would be stronger than out of nanotubes, and we can already make bigger diamonds than we can make nanotubes. I think a space elevator would be great, but don't hold your breath. There are a lot of details to be worked out in the materials science area before it is really a possibility. But nanotubes do hold promise, just not as much as everyone here seems to think.
.. and get on board with my idea for space rubberband.
Inspired by RoadRunner cartoons and a 6 pack of beer, I was able to sketch out a design that would launch anything we wanted into space without fear of terrorist attack.
1) Dig hole 2 miles deep.
2) Build giant rubberband
3) Stretch giant rubberband over hole
4) Put cargo on top of rubber band.
5) Tie Star jones to rubber band
6) Drop Big Mac in hole
7) Jones drops. At the low point, right when the rubber band stops stretching, special release latch disengages Star Jones from rubber band thus saving Star Jones for next launch.
8) Cargo goes shooting up into space
9) Star Jones eats Big Mac making increasing thrust for next launch.
Yeah, I know I know.. after a few launches I would have to switch it up with KFC, Taco Bell and BK.
[Sadly, a coworker had to help me with the physics]
Anyone know the email to Nasa so I can get them working on this?
Live web cams
hmm sounds like a great new source of electricity!
There's a silver lining to giving up our civil liberties in the war on terrorism : they're inadvertantly making stupidity a crime. (Along with everything else).
Argh, please stop using this phrase. Bands play instruments!
pay just to ride an elevator. It will be lots cheaper.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If you accelerate beyond the tension strength of the ribbon, you will either pull the orbiting object down to earth.
No, you just slide down the carbon nanotube ribbon like it's a fire pole or the secret passageway to the Batcave.
e ee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeee
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
cut down by terrorists
I can see it now. A guy with a pair of scissors. *snip*
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
And what do you do if an airplane runs into this elevator?
... and don't tell me they could prep a shuttle fast enough to go save the people ... Besides that, do you really think the government is going to pay to save these people when their are "charities" that the politicians "have no association with" to donate to?
... the government won't allow us to have hover boards and floating cars like in Back to the Future Part II because of safety reasons ... what makes you think that they'd really allow one of these things to be built?
With a hover board, you are 2 inches from the ground ... with a space teather, you are over 2 levels of atmosphere from the ground ... er some really big number!
... and there is no Superman ... they'd NEVER get insurance for this thing!
....
I don't know of anything that could go and get the people except a space shuttle
C'mon
And remember Superman the movie? What if you were Lois Lane on the Eifel tower, but this time, you are in a space elevator
And what if we ever wanted to tear it down? Oh, that's right, we'll just pull it into space so that earth can have 4 moons
Although it is a cool idea, it just isn't safe and it isn't practicle. They'd be better off spending the money trying to develop "beaming" technology or some other alternative method for getting people into space.
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
This would not be a string from the Earth to Mars, it would be a Space Elevator on Earth, and a separate one on Mars. Both of these would provide for low cost movement from planet surface to space and back. The Elevator on Earth would not have a problem with the moon, however the Mars one may - not sure. In Red Mars, this was dealt with by initiating a side-to-side oscillation in the elevator to miss the moon. While this would create additional strains on the cable, they might be within the capabilities. Addtionally, there is talk of putting an Earth based elevator on a ship at sea (think Sea Launch) to enable movement of the cable to avoid thunderstorms or large scale space debris.
The subject of small space debris hitting the carbon tube structure is a problem, but the designs deiscussed include for a couple of solutions: (1) the cable is thicker where there is a higher proportion of the orbital debris (2) The cable is actually slightly curved so that it will tend to deflect incident debris (3) the maintenance of the cable would include for cable crawlers that would routinely make runs up/down the cable to repair damages from debris.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
So yes, there are many challenges to overcome, but they all, fortunately, seem surmountable.
Still waiting to read about propellantless
propulsion that would make sense !!
I think Kelvins are different because they start at zero, so the number of Kelvins is directly proportional to the temperature.
What's 2 farenheits? That's not an absolute temperature, just a relative one.
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
I suspect people who are acting stupidly, exhibit and are drawn to, certain patterns within communication, that would allow one to design a filter that could identiy them for filtering.
For example, in political discussions you often see insult loops where people exchange generic insults. To avoid being exposed to that sort of noise, one can filter out threads that contain words like "republican" and "democrat". I sometimes read political newsgroups and have found that filtering those two words from subject headers wipes out a lot of the stupidity.
I'm guessing there are similar loops in the discussion contexts of slashdot. The subthreads that develop about grammar and spelling, and personal insult threads. Such things could be filtered without too much trouble.
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.
I'm a huge space enthusiast. Huge. I love just about anything that promises to bring the cost of space access to a reasonable (read: below $200 per kilogram) levels. I've been following the X-Prize competition with great interest.
That said, I can't get behind this space elevator push. First, the economics of it won't scale to meet a wide range of demand fluctuations. What if you build it and then find out that demand for it is only a tenth of what you had predicted? There's no way to scale down the sunk costs involved--it's an all or nothing sort of proposition.
Second, it would represent a prime terrorist target. No set of defensive systems could hope to cover against every possible means of attack. Missiles, bombs, lasers, and who knows what else. And we haven't even covered the subject of action by a hostile nation-state, which could presumably marshall far more impressive resources to the task of bringing down a cable.
Third, it represents completely unproven technology. Better to go with a multistage rocketplane or some variation on that theme. Design one that can be built with the equivalent of off-the-shelf parts and build it with a multi-purpose role. A launch vehicle that could also effectively double as a system for high-speed transoceanic delivery would have great commercial and military applications, and would be developed that much more quickly and economically.
In short, the space elevator is a nifty idea in many respects, but it won't happen until the construction of such a system is relatively trivial. When one business guy turns to another and says: "You know, we're paying a lot of money for pilots for our launch vehicles. Maybe we should just build an elevator and get some high school kids to run it."
In a world without walls, there is no need for Windows.
One of the papers on their talks about the high about of energy a climber will require and how the energy should be transmitted by laser (as nanotubes are very good conductors the resistance over that huge distance is just too much). Anyways there is absolutly no talk about conserving energy. As technically if you had a climber at the top, and assuming it used some sort of rollers to climb up and down. The energy generated by the rollers on the way down should be the same energy required to get back up. (Minues electrical resistance and stuff) Is there any way to save this huge about of energy? It seems such a waist to not atleast try.
Also true of ALL Great Circles around the Earth!
What you mean is that more things in orbit pass over the lower latitudes than higher latitudes, because all orbits pass over the Equator irrespective of inclination, but only highly inclined orbits pass over the higher latitudes.
RB
So, I will keep trying to post some thoughtful questions and ideas on these space matters and hope for some intelligent replies.
Well, there are some thoughts. Any comments?
Okay, rehashing somewhat of an idea posted earlier but with a different spin: The idea has always been that we could generate trillions and trillions of watts of power by harvesting solar power directly from space through satellites the problem being that we lack an efficient method of sending said power from the satellite down to the Earth where it could be used. So, what's stopping us from, if this technology succeeds, from sending the energy straight down cables like the one theoretically to be used to haul up more space junk? Wouldn't that be an even BIGGER boon to the world?
While some science fiction authors who have been paid by NASA in the past to image propoganda may believe what they read in Astounding! or Analog (remeber when that was a "high tech" word), even if they could fix something in geosyncronus orbit so that the lift line didn't wrap around the globe, they still have to overcome gravity to pull you up. You don't think you're going to use a pulley and dumb waiter to get to space. In other words, you have to expend just as much energy to go up. Until we invent anti-gravity (which would make elevators pointless), that means rockets. So now you have a rocket on a tether that can't use the advantage of an inclined plane. PS. something in orbit has no (very little)weight. Remember Archimedes boast that if he had a big enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the earth? It's true. The thing is, when you're on the ground and the rope is tied to a space station, you outweigh it.
Bad analogy.
I was one of those people inspired by Apollo. Stayed up late on Sunday night that Summer when I was thirteen watching the fuzzy time on the surface replayed, with Walter Cronkite commentaries.
Fast forward a few years, and watch it all rot.
Maybe an elevator would do better, maybe it will finally get us access for good. I hope so. I fear not.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
My favorite part in the novel "Red Mars" was when a faction of the Mars colony severed the counterweight at the top of the Mars elevator... the cable fell down, wrapping itself several times around the entire planet, completely annihilating everything in a 10 km swath about the equator.
If we ever build this thing on Earth, I sure hope we include explosive charges every 100 m or so in order to break it up if it should fall; otherwise I predict a drastic drop in real estate prices near the 0th parallel...
One word: Bungee!
Sorry, fella, but we did it. I'm really fond of the ol' USA's principles, but our actions have at times been *far* short of our ideals.
...from which I take this quote: "In 1903, after Colombia rejected a treaty for U.S. control of the canal zone, the United States sponsored Panama's revolution for independence from Colombia. The United States and Panama quickly agreed upon a treaty in which the United States guaranteed Panama's sovereignty and, in exchange, Panama ceded perpetual use, occupation, and control of the Canal Zone to the United States. Work on the canal began the following year."
:)
A quick Google for "panama canal overthrow" gives this page at the top of the list: http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ail/panama.html
If you don't believe me, check it out yourself at any library. It should be easy enough; talk to a reference librarian if you have trouble. I doubt you'll find any reputable historian that will deny this event. (And while you're at it, see if you can figure out what happened September 11, 1973. Hint: It's relevant to your comment, it happened in Santiago, Chile, and it likely involved the CIA.)
At any rate, even the looniest government shouldn't be tempted to do such a thing for a space elevator, because they can just build a floating platform. Heck, they can even contract it out to Halliburton!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Why, 'cause you have to expend a fair amount of energry just lifting fuel up as your craft ascends. not to mention heating loss thru the atmosphere/clouds. Just ask yourself what's more efficient riding a bike under your own leg power or having someone shoot a hot laser at your waterpack to propel you by steam....I don't think so..
As far as I've read the "cable" or ribbon will only be at its max diameterseveral inches - our guidance systems aren't that good -the current (USA) tech can hit stuff on te order of magnitude of a jet. The ribbon version of the cable is 1 meter wide by a FEW MICRONS!.
..........FULL STOP.
they should practice building 'em on mars where they won't destroy quite so much stuff when they fail...imagine the energy of one falling. I think Larry Niven gets credit for the mars idea
The units on the Kelvin scale are officially known as "kelvins".
Google sez:
kelvin (K): A unit of thermodynamic temperature, taken as one of the base units of the International System of Units (SI). The kelvin is defined by setting the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water at 273.16 K. Note 1: The kelvin was formerly called "degree Kelvin." The term "degree Kelvin" is now obsolete. No degree symbol is written with K, the symbol for kelvin(s). Note 2: In measuring temperature intervals, the degree Celsius is equal to the kelvin. The Celsius temperature scale is defined by setting 0 C equal to 273.16 K.
Note how there is no degree symbol when writing a tempetature in Kelvins.
From:
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/temps.htm
we can see
The kelvin (K) temperature scale is an extension of the degree Celsius scale down to absolute zero, a hypothetical temperature characterized by a complete absence of heat energy. Temperatures on this scale are called kelvins, NOT degrees kelvin, kelvin is not capitalized, and the symbol (capital K) stands alone with no degree symbol.
There would be electromagnetic induction due to the space environment outside the magnetopause (the boundary of Earth's magnetic domain; outside that, the Sun's field dominates), but that's a much smaller effect (because the field is so much weaker out there than just over the surface of the planet).
With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make the world a better place.
Yeah, but what if the aliens consider that an act of war and start shooting back
I mean, if we dont want them here, why should the rest of the universe?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
The planets do not all run at exactly the same point in their orbits at all times. There is no way to "run one to Mars" since the distance between Earth and Mars is not consistent and there are times when Mars is on the far side of the sun. Our space elevator would have to stretch, pass through the sun occasionally and avoid the moon, Mercury and Venus as well.
That said, it is only necessary to stretch the elevator from the surface of a planet or moon to a point outside the gravitational field from which "space launch" is possible. This would remove the need for huge fuel tanks to lift craft away from the planet -- that work being done by the elevator.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Shouldn't all the drawings have two elevators, one going up, one going down, with the cars being transferred one to the other at the endpoints? Two-way traffic on a single string would be a pain. The redundancy wouldn't hurt either. Heck, why not have a dozen elevators all within a stone's throw of one another.
Might be a good way to get rid of nuclear waste...
I mean, we don't shoot it into space now because if we had a "Challenger" like incident with nuclear waste aboard we'd be pretty fucked.
With a space elevator that all changes. We can get it into orbit then blast it into the sun!
-Craig
Just a thought.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
So Elevator Action will finally have a worthy sequel --- I can't wait to shoot those light bulbs and watch them fizzle out in total silence. And finally when I reach the other side of the solar system, I'll fly into the horizon in a red spaceship ;-P
That'll make Pacman 2130, "Pac in 4D", look pretty lame.
A typical elevator uses counter-weights of some sort. If the elevator is used to deliver fuel in exchange for ore or even ice, the power could be balanced fairly well after the initial costs.
Nonsense! There's no way that a 100,000-mile-tall tower would have any effect on language.
Er, that is to say, there's no way that a 100,000-kilometer-tall tower would have any effect on language.
No. The problems with cable-break for space-elevators are significant, but they vary, depending upon where the break occurs....
Recall that the CENTERPOINT of the cable is what is in orbit.. the cable itself descents and ascends from that point.
A break below the centerpoint would result in the cable mass above the break being "flung" spaceward, where it does little damage. However, anything below the break will be falling, at trans-sonic speeds, and will do SIGNIFICANT damage upon impact with the surface of the planet. That being said, if security is such that terrorist attacks can only be made at the attachpoint of the cable, on teh ground, then the damage to earth is virtually non-existent, you just lose your umpty-billion dollar elevator (and any passengers, frieght, etc)
the worst possible break condition would be for a break AT or just below Geosynchronous, as you would wind up with 36000 miles worth of cable accelerating, and playing "crack the whip" thru the atmosphere, and creating a VERY spectacular light show as it winds around the earth...
If the friction is sufficient, the cable might burn up, as it passes thru the atmosphere, but if it doesn't, you can expect it to wrap 1.5 times around the earth (approx).
-Jazz
I don't get it. If the climber pulls on the rope won't it pull the far end into a lower orbit?
And what's this bit about centrifugal force allowing us to send stuff to Mars? Won't gravity just cause the thing you relaesed to just drift around the Earth with the thing it was attached to?
fling slashdot into space to stop reporting lameness and thus feeding lamers. I'll stick to QA3 since none of you can run it.
yeah -- if you don't know what you are talking about,
then sure these are "surmountable"
your "solution" is to make it stronger -- somehow.
duh -- right.
That's what the Nazi prison guards said.
I vote Cowboynealese
"Ask me about Loom"
i wonder how much i can get paid to say which floor sir
lotsomail@machus.net
just when I was getting used to using WSDL and SOAP XML over HTTPS with CMP EJBs to... OH NO! It's already begun.
...to pretend the other people aren't there.
(Like we do in elevators now)
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Thou shalt not spread B.S. on /. (without getting found out).
Rubbish. 10 billion is a small fraction of the cost of the ISS, and a space elevator would be *much* more useful. If this indeed turned out to be feasible, it'd get funded in a heartbeat.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Sure, it all sounds like it will work, but have they thought about how they plan to deal with the Vermicious Knids?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"What the hell I don't live on the Equator" doesn't work, most of the cable would fall on the ocean, which has waves. (Insert gratuitous comparison to Hiroshima, Saudi oil reserves here.)
On the other hand, let's do the energy calculation. Where's all the energy for this disaster going to come from? Rocket fuel? Or has someone come up with an infinite extraterrestrial source of buckytubes?
heh
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
I wonder if the carbon tubing will have more bandwidth than the MUD drills?
Maybe we could construct a ladder? Ooh! I can see the tops of the trees already! Cake or Death... Long live Eddie Izzard... his stand-up is a must-see.
They're a little melty, but damn are they exquisite!
Everything in the post is complete and utter nonsense. So of course it gets a +5 insightful. Only on /. do the lowest common denominators get upheld the highest.
You just want it to work so much that you are willing to totally ignore such obvious flaws. Well that explains the existance of Linux I guess.
If the cable was broken by terrorists, lightening or some other force near the earth surface, only the part of the cable BELOW the point of impact will fall. Everything else will be pulled outwards from earth. That's why the cable is there to anchor the whole system.
(Note this is all implied by the previous poster's comment about only worrying about 1 km of cable falling, but I thought I'd make the point explicit for those of you wondering why only 1 km would fall.)
There's and interesting, informal dicussion group for this kind of thing at space-elevator@yahoogroups.com
An alternative solution, would be to monitor the cable for cracks, when one is found, send a reinforcment elevator which would attach itself above and below the the identified area, and i suppose those fandangled nano bots would fix up the tear. The fix-it elevator could then be sent either up or down again. Assuming the wire is built to sustain a substantial amount beyond its own weight, this shouldnt be a problem. In the book series "Red/Blue/Green Mars" a space elevator is constructed on mars and eventually falls, causing enormous destruction and wrapping itself several times around the planets circumfrence. Bet that if your on the tail end of that fella when it falls you'll at least be in for one heck of a ride before you go!
This would let us put cows in orbit! Imagine, fresh milk in space.
"By his neezings the light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning"
It's a quote from the book of Job, but it comes to mind from a book I read some decades ago called "Eyelids of the Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men" which is by and about a biologist who went to Lake Turkana (then Lake Rudolf) in East Africa and shot 500 crocodiles...
Anyway he hired locals (Turkana) to help him and though they were Flat-Earthists (and presumably Creationists) he explained to them in the course of some argument about whether the other side of Lake Turkana was the End of the World that the Russians had fired off a rocket with a dog in it that had gone around the world which they assumed meant off the End of the World, and their reaction was that it was certainly a great form of punishment, but wasn't it a waste just for a dog?
OK maybe it IS off topic, just free associating from the idea of boy groups in space...
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Something I haven't seen being discussed is the fact that the objects as they move from the surface into the orbit will have to gain additional kinetic energy on order to keep the same rotational speed. That energy will be drawn from the satellite on the far end of the cable decreasing it's rotational speed. Will they have to put some kind of engine on that satellite to keep it on the geosynchronous orbit? Or am I missing something?
Yeah, but my degree kelvins goes to 11..
The irony of a flamewar about "degrees" vs. "degrees kelvin" is truly humorus.
It has also been a long day of staring at poorly designed C++ code <sigh>, so maybe it's not that humorus.
This is a pretty funny post, but it bugs the crap out of me that everyone thinks this is a strike. It's not. The port owners closed the ports after a work slowdown of 50%.
In other annoying news, President Bush mispronounced the word "nuclear" 473 times during his speech the other night.
Donald Moffitt has an execlent novel called Second Genesis in which interstellar starships are created from genetically engineered trees grown in orbit.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Yes, this is a repeat, and they pretty much have determined that this stuff will break up into small pieces with the biggest problem being breathing it in when it lands.
They should create a massave array of these things around our planet to use as high speed transport systems, that or we could use it for higher speed internet :)
I don't know if a parachute for the whole elevator would make sense (probably, but might be weight issues.) But parachutes for the passengers would probably work. The case that matters most is when the elevator's below the break, which means that at least for Earth-based causes of failure, it's at a relatively low altitude / speed. If you're going individually, bail out with breather equipment once you start to get some atmosphere.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In using this elevator, could we eventually raise the planet's polar mass-moment of intertia incrementally so that by the conservation of momentum, the planet begins to spin slower?
It's not as easy as it seems, because if you just chuck a satellite out the door, that puts it in an orbit designed to bash into your cables, but you can lift a rocket with maneuvering-orbits quantities of fuel rather than escaping-the-gravity-well quantities of fuel, which is a big win, and use it for a "bus" to deploy small satellites. (It's too bad you can't just chuck stuff out the door - there are lots of things you can do with a bunch of cheap nanosats.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lance Bass might be able to bestow "cool" upon NASA as far as young teenagers are concerned, but Congressmen and their constituents are a slightly harder to impress.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
The cool thing is that, should somebody detach the thing, it'll fall up
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
What would happen is the ribbon snapped 100km up? Wouldn't the earth (equator) get hit bay a 100km long hyper-sonic whip?
Isn't this an important problem?
How does it affect the stability of the elevator?
If you are talking about the distance to geosynchronous orbit, it's 36,000 kilometers, not miles.
Also, "1000 mph of lateral accelleration"?
Wrong units for accelleration and I am not sure where this figure comes from, but I certainly now agree (after doing the calculations that I thought would prove you wrong) with the point of your post: there would be "whipping" of the ribbon as it fell.
Some back of the envelope calculations:
At the moment of breakage, each segment of the cable will be motionless compared to the atmosphere around it. In order to conserve angular momentum, the higher pieces will undergo angular acceleration to counter the decrease in angular momentum associated with a decreased moment of angular inertia about the center of the Earth. Angular momentum is the product of the rotational inertia and the angular velocity. Rotational inertia is SUM(MiRi^2). (Sorry about the poor notation.) Let's assume the designers are smart enough to have a fail-safe that disconnects the ribbon near the geosynchronous orbit level in the event of breakage (lower would make sense, though, as some portion of the cord could be held up by the platform at the far end of the cable). This puts the cable length at ~36,000 kilometers (~22,000 miles). Thus, the end of the cable is currently moving at one rotation per day at ~42,000 kilometers above the center of Earth. (36,000 km + ~6,000 km for the radius of Earth.)
To calculate the starting rotational inertia, the integral of mr^2 needs to be taken from the surface of Earth the breakage point (let's use the worst-case scenario given good planning of right at geo-synchronous orbit). Assuming the linear density is constant with distance from the Earth (not true, but it makes the calculation possible without more detail than is available), the rotational inertia is the linear mass density of the ribbon times ((42,000km)^3)/3 - ((6,000km)^3)/3 or (the linear mass density times 2.462*10^13 km^3).
The final rotational inertia (when the whole thing is at rest) is much easier to calculate. It is the total mass times (6,000 km)^2 or total mass times 3.6 * 10^7 km^2 times the mass.
To compare the two figures, the first should be changed to units of total mass of the ribbon. This can be done by dividing the result by the length of the ribbon, giving an initial inertia of 6.8 * 10^8 km^2 times the mass of the ribbon. The ratio of these two inertias is approximately 19. Thus, neglecting air friction, and assuming the whole ribbon hits the ground at once (without being held back by the connection Earthside), the ribbon would be going at a linear velocity 19 times that of the surface of the Earth. This is approximately 19 * 1,600 km / hour or 31,000 km / hour.
Obviously, neglecting air friction and neglecting the slowing of the ribbon due to the Earthside connection is inappropriate, but the calculations show that there would be considerable "whipping." (I started this post to disagree with zenofjazz about the whipping, but now see how wrong I was.) However, Due to the surface area, I would think that the majority of the ribbon would burn up in the atmosphere, regardless of how many pieces it broke into. I would imagine that all of the ribbon more than a few miles up would disintegrate due to the horizontal acceleration relative to the atmosphere. I don't have any figures to back this up, though.
An interesting side-note: What would be the behavior of the carbon nanotube ribbons be upon exceeding the tensile strength? Would they shatter? If so, this improves the chance of them burning up and increases the friction, thus further reducing the final air speed.
Sorry about the some-what incoherent post. It's late.
I was not concerned about only 1km of cable falling. It seems obvious to me that there is the potential for a lot more than that to fall (although no nearly enough to wrap around the earth). The point of noting the weight of a 1km section of cable was to emphasize the immense surface-area to weight ratio this material has. It's lighter than tissue paper. It doesn't really matter how long a section falls, because it's going to have the falling properties of a crepe-paper streamer.
Additionally, those concerned about the cable wrapping around the planet, remember that the entire structure is revolving at the same tangental velocity as the Earth's rotation, with it's center of gravity on a stable GEO. If it falls, it will fall more or less straight down (give or take a bit for winds). Most likely the part that does fall will land in the surrounding oceans.
What is not known is if or how the cable will disintigrate into individual nanotubes. If this happened, there may be some danger related to inhalation of the particles. Research is being conducted into this issue, and the designers are working on a way to insure that in the event of a catastrophic failure, the material tends to break into rather larger pieces, which couldn't be inhaled.
If someone crashed a 747 into the cable, the part of the cable below the crash point would fall to the ground. The rest would... just hang there the same way it always has. In order to create a real catastrophic failure you'd need to snap the cable thousands of miles up into space, which would be much harder to do.
Space elevator... good idea... at least until some islamic terrorists decide to fly a rocket into it :(
I wonder why nobody talks about this: If they pull up an elevator cabin on the 100,000km rope, where does the cabin get the rotational momentum from? If it just pulls the rope, the rope will be pulled to the west. Even assume that the cabin makes it's way up and arrives at the top station 100,000km away from earth, it will have reduced the tops rotational momentum.
The top will rotate slower than the base station at earth, which makes it more "light" (in the inverse sense of gravitation). The elevator would be biggest pendulum in the solar system -- unfortunately not in a homogenous field. I don't have enough time now, to make a Legendre-Equation for it.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
Hmmm ... I hope my cord doesn't rip ....
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
First off... looks like you used PI=3.4 Ouch! .049 ... let's say 5e-2 cm^2 or 0.05 cm^2
(0.25/2)^2 * 3.14159 =
Next, you have made a mistake converting your cable length ...
The line is 100,000 km long which is 1e10 cm ... so the volume is 5e8 cm^3 (you're only low by a factor of a hundred).
Using your 1.4 g/cm^3, we find that each strand would then be 7e5 kg.
700,000 kg is NOT significantly less than 40,000 kg.
Thanks for playing! :)
Don't forget to take into account conservation of momentum and conservation of angular momentum. Those space elevators aren't going to be all that rigid, so you typically will find that the energy won't transfer -- your space elevator will either bend or (most likely) simply break. The worst possibility would be if your space elevator *doesn't* break, because in that case all that energy also gets applied to the ground end. Next thing you know, you'll have the ground end tear free, and then you've got a problem with it progressing out of orbit, ripping its cables through the air, trees, ground, and whatnot. A major problem.
Indeed, I seem to remember that Carl Sagan's book (involving a space elevator) had an event like that.
Not a good thought.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
... to build a thousand 100-km rail guns
to launch cargoes into any orbit you want,
IN PARALLEL, rather than a single, 100,000km
serial cable?
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
You need a Space Mountain :)
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
they are watching broadcast TV...