Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why I'm even bothering, I'm not sure. Although the Space Elevator is an old and wonderful idea that will inevitably come to pass, any mention of it on Slashdot is so annoying because people come up with the most ridiculous assumptions.
First of all you're responding to a guy who is either a troll or a total idiot.
Second, when you buy property you don't own the sky above it beyond a hundred feet and that's being very generous. I own a lot of vacant land and I can't put anything over thirty feet on it. It's owned, paid for. It's all mine. But there are still limits.
Generally speaking, you don't own the minerals beneath the land you buy either. What happens when you buy land is that you are given a list of rights and it is generally quite limited. Owning an acre of land doesn't mean much of shit at least in the US. You can own land and still not even be allowed to camp on it. No kidding. You find owning land is not really all that different from renting once you actually try it. In fact, you have to pay taxes on the land even after you pay it off. That's just the way things go.
So, no, you are completely off the mark. You can't build a tower into the sky just because you bought some land.
do they really need to have the wire anchored on a sea platform?
Why not reel it in when it's not in use, and reel it out when it's needed?