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Space Elevator Prototype Climbs MIT Building
Jackie O writes "According to an employee blog on the Liftport Group website, their prototype robot for the Space Elevator has just successfully climbed a 260-foot building (in a driving snowstorm, no less) at MIT. Now all they have to get it to do is climb over 60 thousand miles into space, carrying things. Good luck there." Update: 11/17 05:17 GMT by T : Liftport has posted some photos from the ascent, too. Thanks!
I bet Spiderman is just a tad bit jealous...
Are we going to start measuring stuff in MIT building heights now?
I heard the real purpose of the test was to place a police car on the roof.
Like the mess on my desk?
Finaly! I never really believed that man walked on the moon, all a big consipiracy! but now i can sleep safe at night knowin that with this news we have at last won the space race! unluck reds!
Exactly, for example, scaling fish is dangerous work and rather nasty as well.
Unknown host pong.
They'll need a tall building...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Never underestimate a stubborn genius. Besides, its the journey that holds the juice... imagine what they'd accomplish even getting half way there.
Getting people stuck in an elevator 30,000 miles up? Could be quite an accomplishment, depending on the politi-- er, person.
if those MIT kids can measure a bridge in Smoots (Smoot was a student), they can measure make the Green building a larger unit..... try and stop em....
How tall is that... in Smoots?
WikiPedia entry on the Smoot, if you have no clue what I am talking about.
Two Roommates and a Boyfriend, updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
As cool as this idea is, there are some problems (especially for the lower altitudes). Some of the problems are more serious than others:
Wind shear: winds at various altitudes can differ widely. Both the cable and anything climbing it will be affected.
Resonance: a cable will tend to vibrate; it will be necessary to dampen the vibration. Usually this is done with strategically placed weights. With an object climbing the cable, however, the resonance will be constantly changing.
No Adspace: There will be no place to put banner ads, so the thing will never be profitable.
Environmentally Harmful: birds could run into it and die. Doesn't anyone consider birds?
sigs, as if you care.
Steve jobs invented the MIT building, and the space elevator.
/me hands Slashdot a lesson on Permalinks
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Just like the thing described....
For Pete's sake... I'm going to get real mad if the guys on the 19th floor keep misusing our R&D technology just to fetch their morning "coffee and donuts"...
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
i am pretty sure that a towering space elevator is at least as phallic as a rocket.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
60000 miles = 316,800,000 feet.
316,800,000 feet / 29 feet per minute = 20.77 years
Or does it mean that it was fairly windy, snowing abit and it totalling a couple of centimeters on the ground and people who had watched to many catastroph-movies lately bandied about in Libraries burning books and being faintly surprised about how little warmth it produced?
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Or 1/1000th of the way there.
So make it a distributed project.
Have 1,000 little robots climbing 1,000 feet each.
That's a 1,000,000 foot climb.
Imagine how much they'd accomplish by doing that.
Um... oh, yeah:
They just need to put another 1218460.5384615384615384615384615 260 foot buildings on top.
they SEEM to have made a prototype, but have they considered how they're going to get the muzak to be audible once they get into space?
I don't think so.
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
Not _that_ phalllic - the thing will be paper thin and a meter wide. Unless you have odd notions of 'phallic', and if you do I pity your wife.
Which half of her?
Yeah, but just wait until some athlete climbs the space elevator... imagine: a contraption similar to those hand driven railway cars attached to the ribbon. The dude (or gal!) stops at 10,000 feet for Oxygen. Then again for a pressure suit and finally a space suit. Sure, it may take a while, but it's totally possible!
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Could one see the top? Or would it "fade" into the sky?
Yes, absolutely...you'll be able to see the other end of the 1-2m-wide, 100,000km long object. Trust me.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
"Look up there! What is that? It looks like a big"......."Johnson, What's that on the radar?, Sir, it appears to be a long"......"Dick!" "Yes Mr President?" "When are you gonna take me to ride that space elevator? I can't wait! Too bad that Star Wars thing was discontinuisimed. I was goin' to kick Darth Vader's ass!
100 years from now at the old robots home...
You robots today have it so easy!
Why, back in the day... I had to climb a 260 foot building! Straight Up! In a driving snowstorm!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Then you would have to deal with those pesky inner planets. May I suggest the Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
So you mean that we would really be saying, "That's no moon it's a space station"?
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar