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!

Comments

When?

[mpost4]

This sounds nice. Also why just a space lift. could it also be used to scale other objects that we may not want to risk human life on?

Re:When?

[double-oh three]

It's a good idea in theory, but there's the small problem of someone has to go to the top of the building/object to anchor the ribbon in the first place. So once they work around that, it should be fine.

And the fact that a rope and pully would do the same job faster just occured to me.

What's the point exactly?

[nrlightfoot]

I fail to see how climbing a 290 foot ribbon, on battery power, is even relevant to building a space elevator. It's realy just someone's fun little robotics engineering project. The amount of energy needed to climb all the way to space is so huge that either a highly energy dense storage medium not yet available, wireless power transmission, or transmitting power on the ribbons themselves if that turns out to be possible, are the only viable options to power a space elevator. Other than that, the lifter is a simple engineering project that could be built today.

I don't see this as very eventful or important.

[i41Overlord]

They're making this sound like it's a step towards achieving their goal, but really what they did today wasn't a stretch of the imagination like the final goal is.

If I claimed that I can jump to the Moon, you'd look at me like I was crazy, because the laws of physics would be completely in opposition to my claim (for example bones would shatter long before you could exert the force to jump even 50 feet). Now if I showed you that I could jump 3 feet, would that really convince you that I'm making progress towards my claim of jumping to the Moon?

To get back to this space elevator idea, climbing 260 feet is no big deal at all using cables that we have today. It's simple work. However, making a cable that is 30,000+ miles and able to support its own weight plus the weight of the payload is impossible with these cables. They'd need a material that doesn't yet exist.

The real hurdle in this project is not making the robot climb the short conventional cables that are readily available, the real hurdle is getting a hold of cables of unbelievable strength made of a substance that doesn't yet exist.

The first automobile wasn't supersonic, either.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

60000 miles = 316,800,000 feet.
316,800,000 feet / 29 feet per minute = 20.77 years

And the first automobile didn't break the sound barrier either - though we now have an experimental model that has, and consumer-grade vehicles routinely cruise FAR faster than those early manufacturers considered.

Ditto trains. Ditto planes. Ditto ships.

Also: As you get farther up you can go faster for a given horsepower. Once you cross synchronous orbit (or when you go back down) you GAIN energy from going farther, and the limit (if you don't want to keep it as velocity) is how fast you can store or dump it.

Re:Umm..

[BlueJay465]

Progress is progress, I agree. My concern, however offtopic, is the following question: What kind of conductivity is a 60,000mi carbon nanotube antenna going to have? No one seems to know for certain what kind of geomagnetic effect such a large antenna would have during solar storms. Worst case, catastrophic climate change...Best case, dazzling aurora.

Re:That wouldn't work.

[LiftPort]

300 Gpa is the upper end of the theoretical spectrum. The best steels (and I mean ~the best~) are as much as 85+% of the max theoretical strength of steel. When carbon nanotubes reach 33% of their theoretical strength, we WILL build a Space Elevator. Let's collectively cheer on the researchers. If even 1/50th of the max strength is achieved, the world will change. Why aim to make bridges and elevators a little longer, or your tennis racket a little lighter? Let's aim for the big prize, the breakthrough, and grab the enhancements and improvements along the way.

Re:Materials

[LiftPort]

You're right. The material we need has not been made yet. This is a barrier that can be broken. 105 years ago, heavier than air flight was impossible. Today, space flight is possible. 50 years ago, 1 kilobyte was huge (and on punch cards. Today 1 gigabyte is small. We sometimes sound over zealous (I'll be the second to admit), but this is just a technical problem to solve. Better minds than mine are working on it right now.

Re:Sixty THOUSAND miles into space?

[benhocking]

It's 60 miles to the beginning of space, and approximately 20,000 miles to geosynchronous orbit. The anchor for the space elevator needs to be at 3x geosynchronous orbit or approximately 60,000 miles out. They had that number right, but your comment emphasizes the Herculean nature of the task.