Lunar Space Elevator Instead?

koa writes "We have all seen articles on building a Space Elevator on the earth, how about this article about experimenting with the Moon first since the technology we have available to us is sufficient, as the Moon's gravity is 1/6th that of Earth's (the cable weight would require less exotic materials such as carbon nano-tubes). One could make a very good argument for commercialization of Space if getting materials to and from the Moon's surface was vastly cheaper and easier."

Comments

Interesting

[Sv-Manowar]

This theory has been investigated in depth in a recent book, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=014032870X/ 002-2420335-1812868

Lunar Space Elevator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah! The idea is pure lunacy.

Re:Except....

[Garion Maki]

unless...
you build the expencive elevator on the moon and start up a few mining/refining outposts with self suporting habitats.
once those are working good, you can start working on space stations/ships/habitats for a cheaper price, since most of the materials don't need to go past earth's gravity well, only the main part of human labor would need to come from earth.
the big and expencive part of the materials could be cheaply inported from the moon, and in a later stage, when space travel has inproved, you could get that stuff from the asteriod belts etc.

so even tho it might seem like a big and expencive thing to do, it might be verry usefull in the future.

Re:Except....

[TFGeditor]

"Earth is where all the people and materials are. Building a space elevator on the moon would be like building a superfreeway from one point on antarctica to another point on antarctica: pointless as there's noone around to use it, nor anything to transport over it."

"Iinsightful" my elbow. Doesn't anybody RTFA anymore?

FTFA: So, what would you do with a space elevator connected to the Moon? "Plenty," says Pearson, "there are all kinds of resources on the Moon which would be much easier to gather there and bring into orbit rather than launching them from the Earth. Lunar regolith (moon dirt) could be used as shielding for space stations; metals and other minerals could be mined from the surface and used for construction in space; and if ice is discovered at the Moon's south pole, you could supply water, oxygen and even fuel to spacecraft."

If water ice does turn up at the Moon's south pole, you could run a second cable there, and then connect it at the end to the first cable. This would allow a southern Moon base to deliver material into high-Earth orbit without having to travel along the ground to the base of the first elevator.

Doesn't anyone read the actual article?

[Fraser Cain]

I wrote the article, and now I'm reading through the Slashdot comments, and they're killing me. Didn't anyone actually RTFA?!?

Let me clear these up...

1. The cable would be 58,000 km long. This is the distance from the Moon to the L1 point, which is the balance point of gravity between the Earth and Moon. The Earth pulls the elevator straight using its gravity. If you looked at the Moon from the Earth, the space elevator would always be at exactly the same place on the Moon, always pointed directly at us, like we're tugging at it with the Earth's gravity. This has nothing to do with centrifigal force, like an Earth-based elevator where the counterweight keeps the cable taut.

2. Because of low gravity on the Moon, you could build the elevator with commercially available materials on the market today, like Kevlar or M5. The cable would be light enough that it could be launched on a single heavy lift rocket available from Arianespace, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

One launch = one lunar space elevator

3. You could connect a second cable to the Moon's south pole, so the two cables form a V, and then bring up water ice from the south pole. This would put water, air and rocket fuel into high Earth orbit at a fraction of the price of bringing it up from Earth.

4. As you make the cable longer, it allows you to kick objects into high-Earth orbit. You could transfer materials from the Moon into orbit for relatively little fuel.