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First Pure Nanotube Fibers Made
TheSync writes "Researchers at Rice have announced the discovery of how to create continuous fibers from single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT). The breakthrough was based on the ability to dissolve a large amount of SWNTs in sulfuric acid, up to 10% SWNTs in solution. At high concentrations, the SWNTs form tightly packed liquid crystals that can be processed into pure fibers. The Space Elevator can't be far away now..."
The Space Elevator can't be far away now...
Unfortunately, it needs to be on average 35,000 Km away to work.
-Sean
Well since I've just recently been told that the moon actually is moving away from the earth (see this thread) we really ought to leash the moon to the Earth to prevent this. I like the moon where it is. I suppose it could double as an elevator....
The Space Elevator can't be far away now..."
I think that's more than a little bit premature. Sure, it seems like we can make them a little easier now in the lab... but as an earlier poster mentioned, we're going to need some pretty long lengths to streach into orbit. Nowhere have I heard how exactly the little fibres that are grown in the lab will be joined together *at the usual nanotube strength* over and over again to make these long lengths.
Won't the 'joints' between individual fibres be a weak point in the system, and since we're joining thousands (if not millions) of little tube lengths in the lab, won't that have a rather large impact on the actual strength of the tube (vs if it was actually one long continuous length)?
Just because something is made of nanotubes doesn't make it strong, it depends on how they are laid out. The press release sounds good, but until they publish the measured strength/weight ratio of a few feet of their manufactured cable. (The data might be in the paper, but I haven't bought it. Anyone?)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I apreciate your scepticism, but...
In Fact the dictating method here is NOT belief, but lies in the technology itself. If it can be built, it will be. If not... not.
So no reason to be jerky about it. To build one may be a important step forward to becoming perhaps an interplanetary society. So it should be relevant to build actually one. If its made of super-duper nanotube2000 or simply a uniform brick of diamond does not matter. As long as it is built.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Year: 2009
Place: Wal*Mart
Blotter: A bearded armed thug wearing a stylish black blouse was killed while trying to hi-jack the daily armored car. The purp was struck with a .357 caliber round which entered his chest and left his back.
Witnesses report that upon falling to the ground the woman's blouse was missing. Apparently, the robber thought the high tensile strength of Jaquline Smith's new line of clothes would protect him from any bullets. What he didn't consider was that the nylon stitches that held it together would tear and that the round would pull the entire blouse off his back, taking it in through the bullet hole and out a grapefruit sized hole in his back eventually ending up imbedded in the door of an Oldsmobile in the parking lot.
Police finding the round still wrapped in the pretty - if bloodsoaked, blouse, impounded it as evidence.
Eat at Joe's.
I don't know how many are interested and yet don't know about these pages but here is some good stuff for dreamers to read...
Institute for Advanced Concepts
and here is a design study for a space elevator:
Space Elevator Phase 1
Space Elevator Phase 2
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
The nanotubes are sticky and bond well with themselves. Read the article.
The process they describe here is a way of storing the nanotubes for transport, so that they can be assembled later.
Creating nanotubes is dead-on easy. I've actually seen a nanotube creation lab in the Physics department in the University of Washington. I think it is on the third or fourth floor. Go visit there if you get a chance.
After the nanotubes are created, they have to be seperated. They come in a hairball and need to be seperated individually. Next they are stored in a liquid type suspension. When they want to form their nanotube rope, they need a way to squeeze them back together again and extract all of the liquid. The liquid described in the article is beneficial because it helps organize the nanotubes so that they can be easily extracted. You will end up with 100% pure nanotube rope or cable at the end of the process.
Now you are probably speculating that it can't be that simple. It is. Sheep hair (wool), cotton fiber, polyester, and such all work in the same way.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I'm glad to see so many space elevator stories on Slashdot lately. I think the actual feasibility of this idea is important to impress upon people. SE research has a considerable amount of NASA funding, the fruits of which where the Phase I & II NIAC reports mentioned in the parent post.
LiftWatch.org is a news/portal site dedicated to following this and other developments in space elevators and related technologies. Besides the main front page news, here are some handy links for the SE afficianado:
I've been trying to get Slashdot to add LiftWatch headlines as an RSS feed. If you find the site interesting, please let the /. editors know so that there can be a LiftWatch.org slashbox.
Imagine (accidently) cutting someones throat with a fiber thinner than a hair, which is almost invible to the eye.
Wiliam Gibson, "Johhny Mnemonic"? IIRC, it features a japanese dude with a 'monomolecule' spooled in his thumb, used for exactly that purposes.
Your arguments don't hold water mate.
Conventional rocketry will never be subject to the economy of scale. Too expensive. SE will.
Besides, supersonic passenger jets and Space Elevators are a bad comparison. In fact, you have it all upside down. You should be comparing the shuttle to the concorde, and the SE to the jumbo.
First off,
The tenth concorde is as expensive as the first.
The tenth SE costs a fraction of the first, because - you can use one elevator to raise another in almost no-time.
Then, and here's where you're off, A concorde has a slightly slower alternative that people find sufficient, and that costs significantly less. That's why there's 1200 747's and 12 concordes out there flying.
Next, you're assuming there will be the same amount of orbit-access demand when it costs 500$/kg or 100$/kg as there is now when it costs in the 5-digit/kg.
DEAD WRONG.
The cheaper the price, the more entities seeking space access as an option for their endeavor will open up their checkbooks. What you have is a completely untapped market of organizations - from poorer countries needing satellites, to research, low-grav-manufacturing of chips and medicine (offer a low-enough price and it'll be cheaper to make stuff up there than build centrifuges on earth), Communication satellite networks, power-beaming to remote and inaccessible areas that today require flying in fuel, satellites sent via SE will not need to be overengineered in a way that doubles their cost just to withstand liftoff shaking.
And it doesn't end there.
A SE is also a giant slingshot, making the entire solar system accessible without the need of large-scale LOX/Solid-fuel-rocket/ION/Nuke engines. All you have to do is go to the top and let go. A 91000km SE will slingshot you as far as Jupiter.
You'll get totally new markets - asteroid mining, settling the solar system (more real estate = more population = larger economies = more money to go around etc. etc. etc.).
The SE makes more financial sense than the computer or the automobile. It's a MASSIVE enabling technology that will make possible stuff you and I can't even imagine yet, the same as the people who harnessed electricity 100 years ago didn't exactly have The Internet or global cell phone networks in mind.
It's just a matter of who'll understand it first. NASA, Europe, China or India. Currently, I think China is in the lead.
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So, if I understand you correctly you are arguing that conventional rocketry will never be cheap because the space launch market it is too small. But the space elevator will be cheaper and so will create a larger space launch market... for conventional rocketry too.
The economies of scale apply just as much to conventional rocketry as to the space elevator- as I say, I've seen the figures for both space elevators and rocketry and it is much more arguable than you seem to think- the underlying, per launch, costs of both are very small indeed (maybe $50/kg); in both cases they are hidden behind the fact you need to borrow billions of dollars to build them in the first place.
Ultimately, the Space Elevator may end up cheaper, but it's not a slam-dunk; and frankly I wouldn't want to bet on it; but I am by no means anti-elevator.
And you're very definitely right about the interplanetary aspects of space elevators; even if it winds up more expensive (it doesn't look like it at the moment, but there's plenty of potentially fatal flaws with them) they are still very much worth building.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Well the thing is, the space elevator doesn't just go to geosync, it can be used to get to lower orbits too. Why would you take a shuttle when you could take an elevator and save a few million gallons of fuel. Just because it might be dangerous for humans to go through the van allen belts doesn't mean humans can't use it to get to LEO.
Also, regarding launch costs and making the elevator thicker... once you get the first elevator up it becomes much much cheaper to get a second (and third, etc) elevator up. You don't get reliability and high traffic by making the cable bigger, you get it by making more cables. The additional cables will also be much cheaper to build, as they can be lifted and deployed using the first one and the infrastructure to create the cable itself will already exist. This is when launch prices start dropping even more dramatically, to the point that rockets no longer stand a chance of being economical.
Some of this research has already been done. I know isolating metal ions and atoms inside C60 and fusing the resulting C60 into a tube (or bonding them close to each other) does not display superconductive properties.
I would suspect fullerines have similar conductance to graphite
Plus, a previous slashdot story indicated that fullerines undergo total disentegration under some conditions
Nanotubes as transistors
NAnotubes extend battery life
- Sig
This is actually what we've been looking for.
A way to self-assemble nanotubes into ropes which can be used macroscopically. Whether or not it's strong enough to use in a space elevator remains to be seen, but we can actually talk about trying that now!
The nanotubes which were used here are electronics grade tubes, that means that most likely they were single or double walled (single walled being the strongest possible), and had a very low defect density. This is obviously important to the mechanical strength.
I work in a nanotechnology lab, and part of my job is to grow nanotubes. They naturally come in ropes which are around 1 to 10 nanometers in diameter and a few microns to a centimeter in length. The tubes are held together in solution due to van der Waals forces (basically friction) which are absurdly high for nanotubes. We've been separating tubes from eachother in solution from years, but efforts to re-align them have focused on the air-water interface. All they have done is found a solution which will solvate more tubes, to the point that the tubes have no room to run "against the grain" and so become aligned. This is done all the time with polymers. In retrospect it seems obvious and easy (it wasn't).
I remember a week ago Smalley was being bashed here about his conflicting views with Drexler on the future of nanotechnology and molecular assemblers (versus self-assembly). If you'll notice, Smalley is on this paper. This is why he has a Nobel prize, and why he disagrees with Drexler, self-assembled nanotechnology is already here, and it's only going to get better.