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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."
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.
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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?
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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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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.
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
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?