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Space Elevator Prizes Proposed
colonist writes "Space elevator proponents are planning competitions for space elevator technologies, similar to the Ansari X Prize. Elevator:2010 will organize annual competitions for climbers, ribbons and power-beaming systems. In other space elevator news, researcher Bradley C. Edwards recently left the Institute for Scientific Research to work at two companies on materials and technology. Also, the space elevator has caught the interest of Google's founders: 'At a space camp in Alabama last year, Brin talked about creating a space elevator to transport cargo up a special tether attached to earth. Also last year, Brin joined Page in proclaiming they should found a nanotech lab at Google.'"
I've always like this idea, but I bet some whack-job will try and bomb the thing. :-( ...on the other hand, some other whack-job will probably try and *climb* the thing.... wonder how far he'd be before he'd realize that it wasn't as good of an idea as he thought?
Here we go. Another Space Elevator post. Cue lots of post about
1) What musak should be playing in the elevator. This is the height of modern humour people, make as many jokes as possible.
2) Fear of terrorist attacks, despite the obvious difficulty of trying to snap a super-strong cable. And since when did Terrorists attack where they were expected?
3) Fear of accident, 'what if the thing fell to Earth?!!?!! it would slice through everything!!!". As if the brilliant scientists who are developing the elevator didn't think of this.
And don't forget, under no circumstances whatsoever should the story be discussed.
[sarcasm] Today, General Motors announced they were launching a chain of fast-food resturaunts called "MotorEaters" and Coca-Cola began construction on a new factory to produce cruise missiles for the US military. [ /sarcasm ]
Whatever happened to sticking to what you do best? Perhaps all that IPO money is going to fund an attempt to make Google into a frankenstein conglomerate of all the founders' whims.
All the things you could have done with the Iraq $150 billions...You could have easily built five such elevators, plus ITER and the two next generations of fusion reactors to get rid of oil need. Prizes are good and all, but these things can also be fully financed by doing intelligent political choices.
Right, and don't forget the mass of the cargo. It's an interesting situation, because it's dynamic. The mass of the cargo being raised or sent down will change from day to day, and the altitude of the satellite must be adjusted accordingly. However, to change the altitude isn't that simple. You must make it go faster, so it will start overtaking the Earth, moving east, before it starts rising. There will be ripples in the tether as a consequence, and the cargo pods will follow.
Also, the cargo will come from someplace and be sent somewhere. What about the launch system at the satellite, to send cargo pods to other orbits and receive them? An electromagnetic rail launcher seems right, but it will add and subtract momentum from the satellite.
How about creating a simulator for that? http://spaceelevator.sourceforge.net, anyone?
Right, and what were these alleged theories? Are you even remotely capable of pointing out one that has even the slightest shred of credibility?
>Apart from the cost (several hundred billion)
That is easily on par with the cost of several recent US-led conflicts in the world. Just the latest increase (not the total, just the increase) in the US defence budget is higher than 100 billion USD. The money is there. Also there are other countries in the world than the US too you know.
>and the technical impossibility of putting it into place
Care to tell me what these imossibilities are? Or did you mean impossible as in going to the moon?
>there exists no material with even one hundredth the strength required to withstand adjustments that are needed due to the earth's tilt
Feel free to attept explaining this too.
>It's all good in theory
OK; so it is good in theory but still, somehow, impossible? Neat.
> if somehow we could put one up and keep it static, but we can't
Syntax error dude.
>The physics just don't work that way
And what physics would that be?
BTW IAAP (phycicist), so feel free to be as technical in your arguments as you wish.
Perhaps these guys just want to invest some of that money in a)neat nifty things like nano-tech b) the Elevator as a type of "philanthrophy", which rich people have always done in the USA, but other than Andrew Mellon who founded a university, it has mostly gone to the arts c) e trying to outdo Paul Allen who has invested in the X-Prize entry from Burt Rutan...a Space Elevator would make the X-prize look like a cheap trophy. Oh, and what do these guys care if Google has a rough spell, they can't spend all the money that they have NOW. I don't see Google hiting any bad lows in the next few years, but there could be some technology hiding out there that trumps then.
The Ansari X-prize seeks to reproduce an effort that had already succeeded, and been substantially surpassed, by several governments.
A "space elevator", on the other hand, is totally unlike anything ever done before. As I read in a Slashdot post some years ago (referring to nanotubes, the favorite among space-elevator aficionados), "When somebody has built a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a creek on campus, then we can start to talk about a 40,000 kilometer bridge straight up".
The fact that we have not yet achieved one millionth of the task (and in fact fall several orders of magnitude for that) suggests to me that, much as I would love to see a space elevator in place, the job today belongs to materials scientists who are looking at shorter-term goals.
An eye to the future is great, but experimenting on climbers is like practicing the high jump: if you're jumping twice as high today as last year, I wouldn't start drawing any exponential curves. The ribbon is the really, really hard part, and we're currently so far away from it that research energy is better spent elsewhere for a while. 2010 is way, way too close.
Maybe with enough motivation we could get that 40,000 mm bridge by 2010, but somehow I doubt you're going to raise $10 million to build a bridge. The X-prize shot somebody into space for that kind of money.
I'm prepared to be wrong. I'm a software developer, and I've learned that as a consultant I can say, "Your project is doomed" with 95% accuracy before I've even heard your name. Being a nay-sayer is easy. But the real trick is being able to spot the 5% that will actually be profitable, and there are a lot of projects more immediately deserving of this kind of money.
I'm sorry if this is unusually harsh, but I'm sick to death of this reply. Whenever anybody brings up the plans to build a space elevator, some bozo says that it's a bad idea because of something that happened in that series. I like to think that most people can tell fiction from reality, but this is seriouslly making me reconsider.
Basically, you fly a satellite which is a conducting tether with some great big batteries in the hubs. Run the tether through a strong magnetic field like that around Jupiter and you get instant power.
Of course, you also get drag since the energy is coming from the motion of the satellite through the magnetic field, so you lower your orbit. Later, run a current through the wire at the correct time using the stored power and you can boost your orbit.
Effectively, you get orbital manuvering capability for free- no fuel needed.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
"Earth spins one way. Satellites can spin another way. Long wires will be able to put them really close to one another... Don't we have the makings for a really big generator?"
Earth spins, while a lump of rock infinitely bigger than any space-elevator orbits around it, conveniently dragging the entire mass of 7 earth-bound oceans behind it causing them to move in a regular, predictable manner, right next to large empty bits of land, and in the same country (not to mention the same planet) as the places where power will be used.
Yet if nobody has bothered to install any serious tidal-power generators yet "we'd rather burn coal", how much less likely is it that anybody will conjure up something complicated involving artificial satellites.
It's like all the "why don't we put nuclear power stations in space and beam the energy back" comments... we already have a nuclear reactor in space, it already is beaming energy back, and nobody except for the israelis and a few australians are bothering to collect it.
Examples of voodoo science masquerading as legitimate science are all around us: time travel, wormholes, black holes, dimensions curled up into little balls so tiny as to be undetectable, parallel universes, continuum physics, quantum computing, symbolic intelligence, machine consciousness, etc... It is all worthless crackpottery. Yet a few voodoo scientists have managed to amass small fortunes selling some of this stuff to an unsuspecting public, a public that continually thirsts for mysterious things to worship. Hopefully this site will wake a few people up.
You have to be kidding me. The above is from your site and is absolutely rediculous. Yet at the same time as arguing that black holes don't exist, you make the extraordinary claim that the bible contains the blueprints to an AI system?
You sir need to get a new tinfoil hat. I believe the old lead one you're using has leaked into your brain.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me