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Space Elevator Company Fission
Dag Maggot writes "Highlift Systems seems to be going through some turbulent times with cofounder Michael Laine leaving to form his own space elevator company LiftPort. Interestingly, Liftport pledges to be a "transparent" company, and as such have provided the full text of the original space elevator proposal which was made to NASA NIAC." We mentioned Liftport before, but the proposal is new and quite interesting.
It's about time they started using fission for space elevators. They were much too slow when they were coal fired.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
The space elevator seems to be the most promising alternative to the Shuttle program. The biggest problem are the carbon-nanotubes, it is not clear yet, how they are to be produced and a BIG quantity of them will be necessary for the project.
... or the poor connection of the server ... I hope for the first.
The site seems to be slashdotted already - 3 minutes, this should be a Slashdot record. On the other side it indicates the interest to the subject
I've spoken with Mr Laine concerning Lift Port systems. From what he told me, he is not leaving High Lift. Lift port was simply created for some sort of capital creation reason.
So, as far as I know, Michael Laine has not left the Highlift...
You lower the rope from the space station in geosynchronous orbit then tether the bottom to a ground station (in this case floating in the ocean). You also need a counter balance beyond geosynchronous orbit to keep the whole thing in tension.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Because, id like to see an alternative to storing nuclear waste underground (too much controversy and NIMN(not in my neighborhood)). We could safely lift the material up into space and then launch the waste somewhere else. This is still many years aways, but I hope they get some good funding to do their research, and build some test platforms.
later,
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
to the term "Elevator Music"
Imagine a few hours of that o_O
...please use the stairs!
Here are the google caches of the front page, and their FAQ:
Front Page
FAQ
I guess it is time to make a kind of "I survived slashdotting" signs for web-sites. Or T-shirts or something.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Google's cache of liftport.com: http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:TiE-9Ofu6fUC: www.liftport.com/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
=If life was easy, i would be out of a job=
There are some crazy design specs that people don't usually consider besides the nanotubes and the lack thereof.
1) due to the weight of the cable, it needs to be thicker at the middle and taper off at the ends - this makes the attachment of a vehicle to traverse the cable considerably more difficult
2) the growing - you can't "lower" a cable from a space station. the center of gravity must remain at the geosync point if you want to stay afloat
3) the keeping cable tensioned - this involves capturing a sizable asteroid into an orbit dangerously close to the earth (as in, genocidal proportions if shit goes wrong) - and after you anchor the cable, push it back out so it will keep tension (geosync don't work here). A fly-by capture is out of the question, and actually dragging a asteroid to our doorsteps is impossible by today's figures.
Space elevator, while cool, has a loooong road ahead of it - I am not betting my money on it (within my lifetime, anyhow). Granted I probably seem like a pesky naysayer that's keeping technology from going places - but just imagine stuff we developed WITHOUT first thinking it through; I think the nuclear stockpile on US and Russian sides definitly proves my point.
I'm all for it if they can bring the damn asteroid here SAFELY, though. (Shuttles so far has a roughly 2% failure rate - and that's two completely fatal ones - I don't want the fate of the world depending on that kind of odds)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
A nice article on space elevators without the fancy scientific buzzwords can be found here
You can also construct the cable in a satellite that's on geosynchronous orbit. Molecular construction both ways, so that one end lowers itself to earth, while another grows into space and towards the space station acting as the elevator end point.
As for space elevators in general, not only does the construction pose significant obstacles, but the reality of having a tensile cable stretched from earth to the sky (literally) introduces interesting variables. Back-up plans in case a plane flies smack into the cable? Effects of wind, lightning, hurricanes? What happens if the cable snaps below geosynchronous orbit? Anyway, sure, problems abound, but there's something very exciting about the idea of building something as massive as a space elevator will be.
Also, there won't be a great deal of taper if they get the material strength they expect - about a 2:1 ratio iirc.
Nuclear power has come a long way since the first commercial reactors, and especially Chernobyl. Unfortunately I don't think the general public has been told.
Either way, Liftport has been talking about holding a competition at a Robotics convention (or summert, I forget) for making ribbon-climbing robots. In the rules of said competition, the entries get extra points for a remote, wireless power source for the climber.
This struck me as slightly odd, and likely unfeasable on the grand scale, but an interesting developmental path...
WTFDTM?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I wish people who believe in these conspiracies would do a bit of research first instead of going straight to alt.conspiracy. Come use some of the brain cells in your head. Ive posted a link to the jessica lynch in question. The domain name is for the person who won the Miss New York pagent. No relation to the rescued POW.
Miss New York City 2003
later,
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
"It is also a sick reminder to see how they could fathom using radioactive materials for power. As the decade wears on I imagine we will see plenty more of these last gasp efforts to legitimize outdated, unsafe, 20th Century technologies and mindsets."
I sure hope we'll see more... nuclear technology has advanced significantly since Chernobyl, and through research and application will advance further still in the coming years.
As for mindsets: yours is the only outdated one. Nuclear technology is a relatively recent development, and we have only seen the start of it so far. And you are already going to give up on it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You may have noticed this term being spun about in the thread; the answer is nanotubes.
A nanotube is like a bucky-ball (buckminster fullerine) but elongated into a cylinder. To the uninitiated a bucky-ball is a small macromolecule composed of 60 carbons. It looks like a football (european) and hence its name. So nanotubes are cylinders of hexagonallybonded carbon.
Potentially you could have "threads" of nanotubes that are bonded completely with strong chemical bonds, in comparison most materials we use in construction today consist of mostly much weaker interactions based on small charge dipoles and momentary charge variation (van-der-vaals force). IIRC correctly a van-der-vaals bond is about a thousand times weaker than a covalent (chemical) bond, and it is forces like these that hold the materials like kevlar together. The way the carbons bond in nanotubes should be compared to that of diamond, so in layman's terms a nanotube is a very long and very narrow cylindrical diamond.
A rope or sheet of woven nanotubes (of good length) would have a surely unbelievable tensile strength and hence people want to use them in applications like these (as well as in many other areas).
However AFAIK nobody has managed to develop nanotubes efficiently with significant length yet. However I keep seeing journals with articles on nanotubes and their practical applications so money's going into this field and it can only be a matter of time before a method of cheap production is found. The only method I know to date is vaporisation of gaphite with a laser - the resulting dust contains a variety of carbon species including bucky balls and nanotubes.
Nanotubes also conduct electricity and heat efficiently and seem to act as excellent lubricant.
The revised, second-phase report, much advanced over the first, should appear Any Day Now. Just waiting for NASA approval. There's also a book that expands on the idea.
The web server was having troubles late last night, so slashdotting only provided the final straw. We'll be back.
>Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station accident, 1986 = 810 curies released
>(above figures from www.space4peace.com)
> I believe the next series Martian probe launches are all slated to carry fissionable materials. So we are looking at potentially poisoning the entire population of central Florida as opposed to just a couple of places like Chernobyl and Kiev. That is an order of magnitude higher. A significant improvement.
And how many curies from atmospheric nuclear testing in the 50s?
Answer: several billion which has now decayed to around 400K.
And how much was Pu-239? About 225,000, from the first link.
We've already had your famed civilization-ending release of nasties into the environment. We did it deliberately (We didn't know any better. D'oh!). And yet, we're still here.
We've learned how to make RTGs safe for re-entry so the incident of 1964 doesn't happen again. But more to the point, nuclear power is the only technology with a high enough power density to allow us to extract fuel from the Martian environment for a "Mars Direct" plan.
If you wanna see men (or even long-term surface probes/rovers) on Mars for more than a couple of weeks, it's the only way to go. You can engineer your way around the risks of RTGs. You can't engineer your way out of using 'em.
That's why they're building this space elevator thingy, see. They send the first strand up in one or two shuttles. Part of the shuttle payload is enough extra fuel to get to GEO. They unroll the strand. They send lightweight climbers up with the next strand. Now they have two strands, the climbers can carry twice as much, and iterate until you have a satisfactory number of strands emplaced.
No habitats, and the ribbon weighs startlingly little per km (something like 7.5kg, OTToMH).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Maybe I'm missing the point, but why does anybody give this article any credibility whatsoever? If you look at the slashdot article, they act like this is a legitimate company with a realistic goal. But what kind of company puts animated GIFs of a "space elevator" on their home page and supports their idea with citations from science fiction novels? They tell us this has been considered by NASA. But so has the Podkletnov effect, which supposedly miraculously shields objects from earth's gravity. Either NASA isn't given enough funding to do background checks, or they're checking out every crackpot who comes along in hopes of finding gold. I'm betting this is a hoax, but if it isn't, this guy has about as much chance of constructing his space elevator as Imari Stevenson has of designing a Final Fantasy sequel. A word to the wise.
Bungeeeeeeeeeee...!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, less than a twentieth of a trillion. Read their FAQ before posting here.
Hey, that's less than half of what we spent on GulfWar II! And there'd probably be more lasting benefit to one of these.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Slashdot needs to make a space elevator thread... people keep talking more and more about it and it's becoming more and more possible to build...
- Danny
I haven't seen anything about the effect this would have on the Earths rotation. To continue with their analogy of a ball on a string, the weight moving OUT in the string slows the speed of rotation. Conversely, as a weight is brought closer to the Earth it would increase the speed of rotation. AND, if onle 1 elevator went up wouldn't it change the balance of the rotation?
They are frequently asked...
Cable width?
airplanes?
orbitology?
how they plan to lower the cable?
how they plan to connect the cable?
how payloads can actually be lifted and forces dealt with?
initial chemical-launches required?
first ribbon payloads?
space debris?
weather?
space weather?
electrical potentials?
what if the cable breaks?
environmental concerns?
safety?
how to power the lift?
etc. etc. etc.
none of these are unique questions.... they fall under "frequently asked".
Read the answers to your frequently asked questions, and they will be answered.
if you have a UNIQUE question - that should get rated a +5... but so far, no one has one of those that i've seen.
Geezuz tapdancing Krist.
(folds up soapbox, puts away megaphone)
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I've suggested using the very powerful lasers that will power the lifters to ionize columns of air around the ribbon and give the approaching stormclouds a discharge path to ground. It would also be possible to send conductive cables up into the clouds with sounding rockets, balloons, or special lifters on the ribbon to discharge the clouds. This will be necessary once a year or so because of the very low frequency of lightning storms in the area where the first elevator will be located.
Note, too, that a lightning strike would only sever the ribbon very near the bottom, no more than 30-50 km up. That's a very low impact accident; the rest of the ribbon will remain in place or drift higher and to the east over a period of days. We can just move part of the counterweight a bit further out and the severed end will come back down to the surface and can be re-attached.
It's also important to note that there will be several ribbons very quickly, and many ribbons over time; a single one being cut won't be a big deal.