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Space Elevator Going Up
Adlopa writes "The
Guardian newspaper reports on scientists' efforts to realise the space elevator, as first described by Arthur C Clarke in his 1979 novel 'Fountains of Paradise'. Advances in materials science mean that 'a cable reaching up as far as 100,000km from the surface of the Earth' is no longer an impossibility and 70 scientists and engineers are discussing the idea at a conference in Santa Fe today."
Why would it have to be at the poles? I can't see any reason whatsoever for that restriction.
tower of babel?
One unlikely problem could be capturing the public's imagination. "When we actually start launching this it's going to be kind of boring," Dr Edwards said. "There's no smoke, there's no pillars of fire and there's no loud rumbling noises. There's just this thing that slowly ascends the ribbon into space."
This problem would be neatly solved once the initial expense of the elevator was recouped. At this point it would be much cheaper to send objects into orbit, including people... ride up the chain, get on a space suit, get out on your own nanotube cable and float around 36,000 km above the earth without ever needing to learn how to help fly a space shuttle.
I foresee an enormous tourist interest, to the point that someday several elevators will be sent up exclusively for tourists to use.
Nasa played around with dragging wires through the atmosphere to generate static electricity.
This thing will could possibly generate HUGE amounts of SE as the atmosphere whizzes past it 24/7. Are there plans to capture and use this electricity or what??
Everyone is bashing this, but can you see the good in it? Elevators don't cost millions of dollers to launch. They don't explode in midflight. Most of all, they are cheap. My only problem with this is where the hell the elevator goes to. Does it just...go up?
...estimates it would take about $7bn (4.4bn) to turn the concept into reality...
So how exactly do you come up with a budget for a project that calls for an unknown (but massive) amount of nonexistanium, delivered to orbit no less?
From the article.... "The biggest technical obstacle is finding a material strong but light enough to make the cable; this is where the carbon nanotubes come in. These are microscopically thin tubes of carbon that are as strong as diamonds but flexible enough to turn into fibre. In theory, a nanotube ribbon about one metre wide and as thin as paper could support a space elevator."
I know the fiber is as strong as diamonds, and I understand that along it's 100,000 km length it's flexible enough to dodge objects.
But how will they protect it from, well, planes at altitudes below 100,000 feet?
Space flight should be about space flight. Not about climbing some friggin bean-stalk.
The idea is just so - I don't know - demeaning. It's like cheating in an exam.
From what I've head, a space elevator is a bad idea in the sense that the atmosphere has a singificant EMF gradient between the surface of the earth and far up in the atmomsphere. Completion of such a device would case the world's largest lightning bolt ever. You'd be basically creating the largest "short" ever. :P
I thought the majority of mass was getting us up to orbital velocity? Going straight up and back down is a lot easier
:D Since they talked about putting this platform deep in the pacific ocean, this would be a perfect place to test and perfect this technology.
Well, ya, but the purpose of the velocity to begin with is to get beyond the majority of gravity. 25k footpounds I believe. If you want to get a satalite to orbital velocity, it is much cheaper to do so once it is in orbit, free of 98% of the earth's gravity than it is to do this along the way.
Haul it up to 36k feet, and then it takes a relatively trivial amount of energy to get it to a speed for orbit, since it isn't fighting a stronger force (gravity) at the same time. Also, if you are patient, and can take a week or a month to get the unit up to speed, it will take a very small engine (ie: efficient) to build up the necessary speed.
Also, for probes headed toward the moon/mars/space, orbital speed may not be a factor, except as needed to 'slingshot' the unit. IAMARS (i am not a rocket scientist) but it seems to me that you would have to save 70% of the energy needed by going to 36k km slowly, then positioning. The most important feature is that not only do you save the weight of the extra fuel, but you also the save the extra fuel needed to move that extra fuel. It may actually be more than 70% of the fuel.
Another interesting question: What fuel is used for getting the unit into space (36k km) to begin with: To power the elevator? Obviously it will not be rocket fuel. The cool thing is, if they used technology that harnesses ocean waves then they would not need oil generation units
The secondary benefits of this space elevator could eventually be greater than just cheaper satalite launches.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Why can't nanotubes be built through some kind of biological process like celluose fibers or wood fibers? Aren't long chains of molecules pieced together in cells by various enzymes? Shouldn't a process exist to genetically engineer a bacterium to extrude a nanotube out its but as long as sufficient raw materials and energy are supplied to it? It is not like nanotubes are chemically complicated, it is just carbon, carbon and more carbon?
Any one know of any projects using an organic approach instead of a chemical approach (which is what I think is being used now?)
What will keep the counterweight in orbit is basic physics. You set the whole thing up so that gravity and conservation of energy and so on work for you.
The question I want to know is what are the osilation modes going to look like. You have a massive string under tention, it is going to vibrate. I'm sure you could figure it out if you had some clue as to the properties of the material.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
And it goes up from there. At 25 feet per story (not uncommon for office buildings) you're talking just shy of five million stories. At a more house-like 10 feet per story, it's more like 10 million.
I know you were just joking, but I found that number kind of put it all in perspective for a second.
Slashdot - Texas Scientists Spin Carbon Nanotube Fiber
Other promising research:
Slashdot - Scientists Crack Silk's Secret
and
Slashdot - Nanotube Applications Grow And Grow
Maybe they did discuss all this and more at the conference - I would like to hope that these scientists and researchers are aware of what is going on in this far-flung field. I only wish they would have made mention of this stuff in the article for the common man, to show that it wasn't all so much "hooey" - that it is something which may be inevitable, and will happen sooner than we all expect.
We (all of mankind) are rapidly moving in a very funky direction, technology-wise. We have carbon-nanotube fibers. We are looking into other advanced fibers and fiber processes. We have found sea-creatures that make insanely great fiber optic fibers (and with the other stuff, we will probably be able to replicate the process very soon). The gains in communications alone will cause a lot of other gains to be made, because of distributed processing amongst far-apart supercomputing centers that need more bandwidth than they already have (and they have a crapload, but not as much as they want or need). Such fibers may help in the optical-computing dept as well. Remember also the stories of "growing diamonds" - that are so pure they are almost impossible to distinguish from real diamonds - and they have DeBeers quaking at the possibilities to their "markets", maybe destroying them. But these companies don't want the diamonds for prettiness or money (well, they want them for the money, true), but to be able to use them for the substrate of computer chips, instead of silicon, for higher speeds and better heat dissipation.
Couple that with all the other "funky" advances we have seen - we are all being dragged in a very wierd direction, speeding up the computing and learning capacity of all involved (and even if you are at the edge of the network, like most of us are here, and not where the action is, you will still be pulled in)...
I don't know where to go with this - except that our current distopia (and if you don't think we are living in a distopia, one every bit as scary, strange, and awe-inspiring as science fiction can come up with - you haven't been paying attention) is going in a new and strange direction, strangely reminiscent of what the "early-years" (which are only touched on) of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" might have been like.
This is all strange shit, yet very few of us are even seeing it or thinking about the real implications, for some reason...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
How do you gain traction on the cable without damaging it? Just throwing a rope up isn't enough, you need to be able to climb it as well. If you start with a 1m x 0.3m cable, then sloughing even a tiny amount of cable material as you climb or descend is going to chew though it quickly.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
OK, so these folks think they can move the base station to avoid space junk. That sounds extremely tricky already. But I wonder what they can do about meteorites and other smaller stuff that comes in much larger batches? The cable may be able to take one or two hits from these little buggers, but it's going to sustain *some* damage!