Space Elevator Conference Wraps Up

slavitos writes "The Space Elevator: 2nd International Conference, organized by the Los Alamos National Lab and the Institute for Scientific Research has just finished its work in New Mexico. To be sure, most people still think it's absolutely ridiculous to even consider building such a thing. However, that's exactly what organizers wanted - an open discussion on the issue, plus some free PR."

Comments

Re:Benefits?

[david.given]

Seriously, to many people, a "space elevator" is going to sound like the "escalator to nowhere" from the Simpsons - a fairly frivolous-sounding projet, and not as inspiring as rockets. Okay, so it'll make space exploration cheaper - what benefits does it have for ordinary people?

Well, once you have cheap access to space, a whole bunch of things suddenly become much more profitable.

Example: most near-Earth asteroids contain very high quantities of heavy metals. There are all sorts of things you can do with iridium, platinum or gold alloys. How would you like a car that ran off ordinary petrol but used a fuel cell instead of an IC engine? Quieter, lighter, cheaper, more reliable --- provided you can get the palladium catalysts required to make it work.

Example: it would be possible to start mass producing things in microgravity. Defect-free crystal growth would lead to much cheaper electronics among other things. If you can get the cost of access cheap enough, even mundane things like steel refining will change: vacuum foam steel girders would be cheaper, lighter and stronger than conventional rolled girders.

Example: Outside geostationary orbit is a great place to be if you want to do something hazardous. Want to build a really messy experimental nuclear power reactor? Now you can do it and it won't be in anyone's back yard.

Example: there's more you can do with a space elevator than get to orbit. They provide an ideal anchoring point for telecommunications systems, among other things: put a communications complex 500km up and you've got LEO-quality satellite communications while still able to use fixed position dishes. Plus it's repairable. Cheaper satellite TV, anyone?

Example: low gee hospitals .

Example: Tourism!

These are just a few examples I can think of off the top of my head --- I'm sure that given a few minutes thought I could come up with some more. The great thing about a space elevator is not that it's directly profitable, but that it's an enabler. It makes a whole bunch of other things become profitable, and opens up the possibility for a whole variety of other industries, currently unthought of, that would be even more profitable. It provides new wealth to the economy, which produces long-term gains in the same way that feeding starving children (although an admirable goal in itself) or building aircraft carriers just don't do. It's the old teach-a-starving-man-to-fish argument: invest, don't spend.

Re:Benefits?

[squiggleslash]

Generally speaking, most starving in the world has to do with the affects of wars or deliberate mismanagement in some shape or other, rather than the global economy. The two biggest famines I can remember were Ethiopia, caused by a dramatic civil war, and Cambodia, caused by a combination of Pol Pot's deliberate destruction of the Cambodian economy and infrastructure and the following civil war with Vietnam.

With modern farming methods, food is extraordinarily cheap to create. The space program can be pretty expensive and not make a difference to how many people we have starving in the world. Additionally, two of the absolute benefits of the space program has been improvements to communications infrastructure and the ability to monitor the world's weather systems and planetary features, both of which have actively helped in food production, the former by allowing better planned and coordinated food creation, the latter by providing warnings allowing potentially disasterous damage to be minimised.

Long term, hey, may be we can move people off this planet - that should improve things too!

Re:Benefits?

[bodan]

"There are starving children that need food, and we're spending how much on a frickin' elevator to space?!?!"

You're already spending ten times as much on the shuttles, and those things are orders of magnitude less useful than a space elevator.

"With that much money, we could buy 10 aircraft carriers!".

Well, actually I think there are quite enough aircraft carriers on Earth. Anyways, a space elevator's military potential is orders of magnitude greater than an aircraft carrier, especially if the lasers used for climbing can be used to defend it - that shouldn't be too difficult.

[...] a "space elevator" is going to sound like [...] a fairly frivolous-sounding projet, and not as inspiring as rockets. Okay, so it'll make space exploration cheaper - what benefits does it have for ordinary people?

OK, so it's a thousand times more efficient than a rocket, big deal! Look hot PRETTY and INSPIRING the rockets are!!!! Come on, it's going to be infinitely more inspiring after it sends it's first thousand people in space, or when any highschool can send science projects in space, or launch sattelites - this thing should make Iridium-like systems a hundred times cheaper than today. Oh, and "ordinary people" will be able to actually use it. Personally. What benefits does NASA have for _you_, right now? And as for how great a target it is: it is ribbon around a meter wide, 100000km long. But, the atmosphere - the part accesible by plane, I mean - less than 30km. So it's area is 300000 square meters, much lower than any building's. If terrorists can hit it - what with all the security around it, big giant lasers that can hit a 1m square dish on the climber 100000 _km_ in space - they can hit anything, anywhere, and the elevator is the least of your problems. And anyway, breaking it inside the atmosphere (actually, anywhere lower than geostationary orbit) will sent most of it in space, not on earth. And the piece below geostationary orbit, if it fell, will create less debris than an exploding shuttle. It's less than a milimeter thick, for God's sake.

Want more war like Iraq?

[bluGill]

I'll bet you didn't like the war in Iraq (going on a limb here, you might have). Would you approve of the US/UN going to war and knocking out several other "innocent" goverments? (for some definition of innocent?) Most starvation is caused by goverments not allowing the food, of which there is more than enough, to get to the people who need it. Generally they have a political gain of some sort to doing so. (you might not see it as a gain, but they do)

As for a space elevator. Well I think private eneterprize should do it, which means get NASA out of the way and loosten up the laws preventing private companies from going to space. (Okay, it isn't exactly illegal, but it is nearly impossible to get the permits) At least in the US this is a problem.