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The Space Elevator - Public or Private?
AtomicGoat writes "The Space Review reports that a Space Elevator may not get built without help from the U.S. Government, but the notion that 'the DoD can also provide a sense of fiscal discipline when dealing with large, expensive programs' sounds like an Onion story. Right now a small private company (Liftport), not NASA or the Air Force, is in the lead on revolutionary space travel."
We, the people of Mars, reclaim this building for us!
We are tired of the metanacs controlling our lives!
We must control the entrance into our world!
Give us back what is rightfully ours!
(Red/Green/Blue Mars are cool)
Someday perhaps, but DOD, cost effective? Please... Giving something this to the government would probably ruin any efficiency in it, and a private company financing this...could happen, but most likely not for some time.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
While a project as risky and expensive as a space elevator would seem to be solely in the realm of government, private investors could play a role. Already one company, LiftPort, is trying to commercially develop a space elevator.
*TRYING*
For a commercial startup to get the mass amounts of funding needed for a venture like this seems VERY unlikely to me. With the current cynicism surrounding space exploration as well as the exorbitant costs associated here, I just don't see it happening. But maybe I'm just a pessimist.
Not necessarily. Build it on a privately-owned island or some such. No regulations, no permits required, etc. I'd imagine that something like this would best be built along the equator anyways, for technical reasons. I don't know for certain, but I'd imagine that the tilt of the earth could cause problems. Maybe a floating platform, or in an equatorial country that would provide uber-security in exchange for the obvious economic benefits.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
One of the companies that has been referred to in discussions of the X-Prize is going to use an inflatable balloon system. Ultimately, they plan on having a LEO space station supported by helium-filled balloons. (Insert usual joke about helium balloons. Insert usual technical rebuttal showing how It's Not As Silly As It Sounds).
If this system has potential, why not use this as the initial lift phase of a space elevator? Unspool out the first piece of carbon nanotube cable and leave the initial lift balloon tethered to its end. Hoist another spool, and splice it onto the end; inflate another balloon and send it up farther. Keep adding lengths until you reach the LEO altitude of your inflatable space station, then send it up along the tether. You'll end up with a string, supported at multiple points by small balloon and on it's end by a really big balloon.
That space station would help to support the weight of the tether, and could either serve as a launching point for the cable which would go out to GEO, or as a device to catch a cable lowered down from GEO.
The inflatable space station people claim tremendous efficiencies in lift because of the passive nature of the lifting force of balloons (negative buoyancy) vs. rockets (thrust). Why not use this approach to leverage the space elevator cable?
By the way, I'm thinking that all of this, once complete, would merely serve as the scaffold to support the climbers, splicers, etc., with which the final Space Elevator cables would be built, connecting ground to GEO.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Those are _VERY_ dangerous words historically.
I don't see that Nasa has "helped" space development much-especially the last 25 years. I can easily believe the world would be _further_ into space development without the various destructive government policies the last few decades that have turned the United States from an industrial powerhouse into a major debtor nation.
What the DoD ought to be more worried about is making the US into a technologically effective nation again(the US has a trade deficit even in high tech goods now).
Now, whoever creates a space elevator is going to instantly become a major, global power--and the DoD has reason to be concerned about such issues--but there are a lot of other pressing issues the DoD is also ignoring(i.e. the US borders just aren't very secure).
Unless the US government seriously gets its act together, I doubt very much it will have much of a constructive role in space development-this isnt' the government of Franklin and Jefferson any more-and is more like what they warned us against.
According to the http://www.liftport.com/faq.php#science2b FAQ the cable will break if it gets struck by lightening or hit by a Category 5 hurricane. Basically their argument seems to be that this won't be a problem because they'll build it where there isn't any lightening or hurricanes. That sounds kind of risky to me considering the massive amount of money involved. I mean huricanes I can see but isn't there lightening everwhere?
"... drowning in information,
The hammers you refer to weren't a case of padding expenses by the contractor, it was a case of stupid DoD regulations. At the time, they required that if a piece of equipment needed a special tool, the contrator had to make it themselves, not farm it out. As the company in question didn't make hammers, they had to set up a special line just for the few needed and that was the minimum they could charge under the circumstances to break even. And, I gather, they protested ruling because it was simpler and easier to get them from a hardware store but whoever was in charge at DoD insisted.
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security
Private companies don't need governments to take care of their security for them. A space elevator will not be a very tempting target to attack externally. You can only hit the very, very, very bottom, and if you break it, you just lower a replacement for the bottom 0.01% that broke off. The main threat is crazy people somehow sneaking bombs aboard, and governments have proven that they can be just as gloriously incompetent at security screening as anybody else.
shared land use
And if the private company puts it in the middle of the ocean, or on an island that they own?
population relocation
And if there's no population to relocate, like in one of the scenarios above?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Right now a small private company (Liftport), not NASA or the Air Force, is in the lead on revolutionary space travel.
They aren't the only private company planning independent space travel. For example, Space Island Group is planning to build multiple space stations by the end of the decade. They have a lot of former NASA engineers working for them.
One advantage of this is that if some of the cable does fall, there's nothing but water for it to land on for several thousand miles. It gives them a large safety factor because there's time either to get it under control or to cut the end before anything will come loose and impact on land.
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I have probably been trolled, but...
It'll be placed at sea and run like an oil platform, so no worries about "safe" countries or room for support organization. The "cord" will be insufficiently dense to cause damage. Any material dense enough to do damage "wrapping around the earth" is too dense to use.
The only real dangers are the possibility of inhaling burnt nanotube dust and the cargo crawler landing on something/somebody.
The first is relatively unknown in severity, and the second is no worse than a jet dropping one of its engines.
-
When you lower a cable, it is relatively easy to anchor it to a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. Therefore, there is no worry about equatorial real estate, local population, eminent domain, or other government-dominated nonsense.
What about natural phenomenon, such as a hurricane or two blasting the platform each year?a 29B form is an AF request to take leave outside the local area.
Not that the goverment couldnt reuse it...they like things complicated like that.
I don't know if I am giving the grandparent's poster too much credit, but I think he knew it and was going for irony. Think about it, a request to "take leave" outside the "local area"...
The DoD, and much of the government is still very wasteful. This is often because of the idea of zero-balance budgeting. Having had the joy of being around the US Air-Force for much of my early life, I got to talk to a number of people who worked on squadron budgets. Basically, the goal of a squadron's budgeting is to spend as much of the budget as possible, or more (yes, this was possible, but the details are long and boring). The reason for this was that the budget you get next year depends on the amount of your budget you spend this year. If you spend 100% or 120%, you get a bigger budget next year. If you only spend 80%, your budget gets cut next year. So, what do you think most smart people did? They spent as much as possible, and often very friviously. Heck, one guy I talked to got yelled at by the squadron commander because he had worked up a budget that had them saving a bunch of money and about 25% under budget. He was forced to re-pad the budget, just to avoid being cut.
The DoD may be better than some in the government, but they still have a long way to go before they become a bastion of thriftyness. Let private companies do the space elevator, at least they will have an incentive to save money.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Basically, if you can think of a problem, they've solved it. It will cost about 10 billion dollars to build, and the materials will be available quite soon. Some examples of problems you might think of:
Weather: The anchor on the top is so heavy and is moving so fast that it won't be even shaken. Plus its strong enough to withstand the fastest winds.
Ionization in the atmosphere: Easy, coat it with gold at higher altitudes.
What if a plane hits it? It would survive--its strong enough that it would cut the plane in half instead of having the plane go through it.
I have to question the legitamacy of the company altogether. The write-ups are of an amateur nature. Verbage and use of the language is poor in many areas and I would question that any company looking to fund that large of a project would present it's foundation of material in this way to the public. Examples are in the FAQs answering questions such as if a ribbon breaks; "Honestly, it will make a little bit of a mess". and other things they say in describing the strenght of the ribbon; "3-5 times as strong as needed", what about correct english as in 3 to 5 times stronger than needed. Some of it seems written at a 5th or 6th grade english level. Certainly not collegiate level as you would expect. And the frank public statements regarding liability would shun and serious potential investor in the group. Of course you can always send in your paypal donation. I see they did take the time and effort to get the 'take your money' part of the website right. Careful here, you might have been scammed.
Good point -- you build it on the equator for starters: hurricanes don't cross the equator. Second, you pick the place with the most boring, unchanging, weather on Earth. Given platform technology can already hack conditions in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico, you should be okay for the rest of time. Part of the reason for using a sea platform is so that you can move one end of the elevator cable around (although ribbon would be a better description) so as to dodge orbiting satellites, etc, so there's some flexibility built in.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
Or, y'know, a small island. Assuming they can find a small island in the middle of the ocean.
If it's so goddamn far from everything else, it's not going to make for a very efficient means of getting stuff from "civilization" to space, now is it?
Wait a minute. You think shipping goods an extra few hundred kilometers via container ship is somehow economically prohibitive? It's obscenely inexpensive and easy to ship goods by sea. It's the getting it to space part that's tricky.
They're entirely serious when they say, "Oh, we won't have to worry about the part that doesn't fly off into orbit, because we'll put it in the middle of the ocean." Right. That doesn't create its own problems, no, not at all.
Of course it creates its own problems. Namely, that we'd need to restrict air and sea traffic in a certain area, we'd need to find a suitable island for the project, and we'd need to create a special shipping lane for spacebound cargo. You seem to view these problems as showstoppers; I don't really see anything prohibitively challenging about the examples you cite.
When will you people get it through your heads that space elevators won't work?
Probably never. Then again, odds are I'm too dense to see the nuanced wisdom in your above statements, and my responses are all hideously naive.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Not to mention that DoD has incredible audit trails for all parts. If a gasket on a plane fails, they want to trace all other gaskets of the same design, from the same lot, touched by the same person, etc. They are expensive to maintain, but can be invaluable when things really start to go wrong.
Those audit trails applied to hammers as well, apparently.
I spent half a day with a contractor for nuclear sub and carrier parts and he relayed the cost of the audit trail for a bearing that they built. It was astounding.
But... You could build a space elevator with a non-geosynchronous orbit. Say for an extreme example, you anchor it to the north pole, and swing it around once every 24 hours. The cable will appear to point in the same direction, parallel to the ground directly at the pole all the time. The forces on the cable will be different, and it will fling whatever is launched from it along a completely different orbital path, but who is to say that is a bad idea? There are many reasons why you want non-geosynchronous orbits that go from the northern hemisphere to the southern. This would allow for that without requiring additional thrusters as it would take launching from a geosynchronous space elevator.
Don't get caught thinking one particular way, and assume you _need_ a geosynchronous orbit.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
they have not even looked at what happens to a model of a few-meter wide ribbon in the atmosphere.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was known as "Galloping Girdie." I nominate "Whiplash Willy" for this thing until they can get the atmospheric effects nailed down.
I'm also curious what kind of electrostatic effects will traverse the length of the carbon nanotubes. Space shuttle experiments have demonstrated a lot of potential difference in a significantly smaller conductor tethered out from the orbiter in LEO. This one's much longer, and grounded(?) at one end.
No, many people have proposed that putting it on the ocean would be better. Especially because a space elevator must be on the Equator, and the Equator is mostly ocean.
You have to remember that space elevators are mostly supported from the top, not the bottom. Don't imagine a tower which goes up to the heavens, imagine a rope hanging from a sattelite.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I thought *Arthur* owned this idea. Hey, he invented it. I don't care who makes a space elevator , if it
can be made then
a: it will cost.
b: It will make the historical thing about the panama
canal look seriously easy. Go become a good historian (hint: don't invest).
c: It won't happen real soon.
But, we can do some of this technology slowly.
Perhaps not on the same scale , but Arthur himself
understands that atomic bond limits make it unlikely that we can do it as far as we'd like to see.
He likes to dream. That's why we love him. Heck. He did get it right a few blinks of a chickens
nose ago, and couldn't patent it.
Never underestimate how much we love Sir Arthur.
If there was any justice in the world he wouldn't
be an ill man in a wheelchair. He'd be a passenger
on spaceshipone. He deserves it. Please Mr. Rutan,
you know he wouldn't care if he got back to the
ground breathing...
I for one would *love* Arthur to be our first hacker in space. But I'd love to suggest that he
has to take the ashes of his New York nemesis
up with him. Even though Ike hated flying.
Hey, Arthur. Consider it your revenge.
Do slashdotters understand this old timers joke or
not?
In another thread it was mentioned that the center of gravity will be in geosynchronous orbit. Even if several miles are cut off at the bottom, the center of gravity will change so little that it wouldn't have a major impact on the position of the elevator. There might be slow driftage, but slow enough for it to be corrected by putting back however many miles were cut off.
According to who is Liftport in the lead on space elevator technology? As far as I can tell, this company is just a few of geeks who played with lego mindstorms and set up a fancy webpage. Their site hasn't changed in a year, and their team consists of mostly administrators who write blogs about unpacking and filing things. Their Liftport group umbrella has almost as many companies as employees. What have these people done that makes anyone think that they have more of a chance of building a space elevator than my kid brother Joey?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie