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Space Elevator Group to Open Nanotube Factory
FleaPlus writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Universe Today report that the LiftPort Group, a consortium dedicated to commercially developing and constructing a space elevator, will be opening a carbon nanotube manufacturing plant in June of this year. The new facility has been dubbed LiftPort Nanotech. Many expect the LiftPort Group to be a front-runner in NASA's recently-announced Centennial Challenges competitions for space elevator technologies, which begin in September of this year."
Naturally, this elevator's music will be composed entirely of Star Trek themes.
If you think you're a hardcore roleplayer, come prove it to us at ArmageddonMUD.
Now, are they going to continue on with ok, but slightly annoying elevator music, or can you choose? Might be interesting to promote new bands etc...
Who am I kididng? It's going to be annoying, repetitive crap.
Foxed Design
Aliens had it installed on their UFO's since first contact.
... a space lift. Both slly names as it doesnt actually lift space does it? Think about it! No, you wont. Capt. Silly
Bremerton is in Washington state. One has to wonder why they're opening the factory in New Jersey... doesn't seem too effecient to me.
all major cities will have a space elevator just like airports and subways... or not.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Nice going, pointing to a 2.7MB PDF file. For those of you who want more information about the space elevator concept, visit the Wikipedia page on space elevators.
Naturally, this elevator's music will be composed entirely of Star Trek themes.
Are you sure its not space opera?
Starsucks
Did I miss a meating or something? Since when do we have the capabilities to make nanotubes the length of houndreds of miles?
Mods, this guy is for real. Mod -1 stupid, -1 naive, or -1 sad.
How many other applications will these nanotubes have in large-scale construction? Could they replace materials such as steel?
Won't it be kinda boring? I mean, I always enjoyed going to a large skyscraper, pressing every button in the elevator from bottom to top, and then getting off at the very next floor, leaving any other poor bastards to wait as the elevators stops on every one of 84 floors. Not too many floors in space though. At least, not yet. I'm betting there'll be a McDonald's half way up by the time you or I get a ride.
The recently opened NanoFactory has been reported lost. Scientists are combing the floor near their desk to find the misplaced factory.
The privately held company said a newly created division, called LiftPort Nanotech Inc., in June will begin operating a 3,000-square-foot plant in Millville, N.J., to produce carbon nanotubes.
3,000-square-foot? I have a front yard bigger than that..
A typo? Or is this whole thing just a sad joke?
The photocameras's flashes are the enemies of the carbon nanotubes.
From the faq http://www.liftport.com/faq.php
We don't need and are not counting on individual carbon nanotube molecules running the entire length of the space elevator or any significant fraction thereof. The individual fibers in a string or rope are only a few millimeters long, yet the rope has a large fraction of the theoretical strength of the fibers. This is even more the case with MOLECULES, several orders of magnitude smaller than a fiber. A diamond is said to be the "hardest substance in the world" because of the strength of the carbon bonds that make it up, but a diamond is not a single molecule. Likewise an SE could be made with CNTs just a few centimeters or millimeters long. (In fact, a CNT several centimeters long is a wonder; they're single molecules!)
Brought to you by the RTFA consortium.
After submitting the article a few days ago, it's come to my attention that this isn't going to be the first nanotube factory; I didn't explicitly say anything of the sort in the submission, but wanted to clear any possible assumptions. From an industry report:
Among the small wonders produced by nanotechnology are carbon nanotubes, an advanced material as strong as diamond. These amazing carbon cylinders possess 100 times the tensile strength of steel and are 10,000 times finer than human hair. They are believed to conduct heat better than any other material, and they can also conduct electricity or function as semiconductors.
"Nanotubes are astonishingly promising, and I'm a realist, not an optimist," says Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor at Northwestern University. "It's a question of making the technology cheap enough." In 2001, only 3 kilograms of the highest quality carbon nanotubes--the single-walled variety--were produced worldwide, each gram worth $300, or 30 times as expensive as gold.
Now, full-scale production of carbon nanotubes is underway at the world's first ever large-scale nanotube factory, built outside Tokyo by the Carbon Nanotech Research Institute, a subsidiary of Japan's Mitsui & Co. The new facility is expected to churn out 10 tons of carbon nanotubes--albeit the lesser quality multi-walled type--a month, and CNRI anticipates the price will be a much more reasonable $80 a kilogram.
These multi-walled carbon nanotubes may not possess all the impressive properties of their single-walled brethren, but mixed with plastics, they make ultrastrong composites or microscale precision parts. Such carbon nanotube-filled plastics are already being used by automakers in fuel lines because they are conductive and can thus be grounded to release static electricity, which can ignite flammable gasoline.
I can't wait, if they actually build one of these, Space is going to be completely different from SciFi!
Affirmation of the parent's point aside, the article is not that informative by now, is it?
the science of getting money.
This document has bad (or no) science written all over it.
Just one example from a document full of laughables. Hope they get the prize money & split so someone with some sense can build a reliable device.
Does this bring a new meaning to the phrase 'buy low, sell high?'
But not different to hard SF where they have been around for decades now.
Assume nanotubes get used a lot, what will happen to their waste? Will stuff made of nanotubes corrode or how will nature decompose it?
Regards, Tommy
Oh cool...
Carbon Nanotube space elevators.
And they conduct electricity.
I hope they insulate the ground base really well, or whomever is the first to step on for their first ride, will likely perish in a BIG FLASH as they vaporise from the built up static potential.
It has to do with tall conducting structures.
Did you ever notice at the bottom of AM transmitting antennas there is usually a big insulator?
Even if the transmitter has been shut off, tower climbers still need to use a long ground pole to discharge static electricity from the tower, and then connect a hefty safety ground strap before touching it, otherwise, Blammo!, another bad day at work.
I hate to break it to you guys, but don't expect poeple to be travelling on the space elevator once it comes into service. It will travel extremey slowly compred to traditional orbital insertion techniques. Expect it to take days to reach geo-stationary orbit.
Travelling through the upper atmosphere at such a slow speed will vastly increase your exposure to raidiation (van allen belt) and electrical storms. This technology is designed for lifting material into space, not passengers. We are still discovering much about the upper atmosphere, including huge electrical storms - as seen in national geographic a few years ago) so don't think that everything is completely accounted for and solved.
Later on, I would expect a faster model capable of lifting less weight but at much higher speeds to allow for human transport.
Once we can actually get a lot more material into orbit then we can build larger solar power collectors in space and power this passenger space lift. If I only has to lift 2 tonnes, rather than 20, then it should be able to move 10 times quicker. With materials science improving as we go better raidation shielding should also be possible.
The elevator won't mean the end of ballistic rocket launches. But hopefully the nano-tech that is in development will also help reduce the weight of horizontal take-off and landing space planes at the same time. Lighter materials for the hull and super-structure of the plane, as well as better fuel tanks, lighter wiring, more efficient engines, etc.
...all major space elevator lines will show live broadcasts of Conan O'Brian.
Somehow the thought of an elevator that plays "It's been a long road gettin' from there to here" doesn't sound great for customer satisfaction ;)
Not too in to the space elevator concept. Don't like the idea of lines made of any material stretching through airspace. Remember what happened when the tail of a US military jet cut through a tram cable in Italy, causing 40 people to plummet to their deaths? Plus, the US is already rumored to have a surveillance space plane with a combination of 4 different engine-types (jet, ramjet, scramjet and rocket) that can take off from a runway and achieve orbit by changing engine type as altitute increases. This uses existing infrastructure and is, in the long term, likely a much cheaper way to people and things in to space than some space elevator. And, let's see, ...if I was a terrorist, would I want to find a way to cut a cable and collapse an earth to HEO space lift? Nahhh...
So I say make the Nanotubes, but don't screw with an "elevator."
Pulling one weight up from the other (counter)weight is the same as pulling the counterweight down from one weight. You'll just lower the counterweight's orbit/speed. To compensate you need to accelerate the counterweight to gain back a higher orbit. Obviously, you need to burn fuel for this; fuel who needs to get from down Earth up to the counterweight.
What gigantic advantage does the space-elevator actually have over conventual methods to counterweight the gigantic economic cost to develop and practically engineer it?
If you actually read this guy's work, he admits a huge problem with this approach. An Equatorial elevator has zero theoretical force applied to the base, this one would have immense pressure trying to tear it from the mooring brackets and pull it to the equator.
As such the cable needs to be thicker, and the thicker the cable, the more the force, etc etc
We'd likely need another revolution in materials technology over and above nanotech for this to even be possible, and it's still vulnerable to breakdown/sabotage, as a snapping off at the moor would be disastrous (as opposed to an Eq Elevator in which case the moor is largely a moot point when loads aren't actively climbing)
And because he hasn't used real constants he has no numbers to give us. You can't base any serious theoretical ideas on this guys work, for all we know the force of the pull is ludicrously huge.
So don't pin your hopes on this.
in his words:
In my opinion, the main drawback with the off-center elevator is that there is a huge tension on the anchor point. This means that the cable will have to be heavier. Also, it means that a way has to be found to get the anchor setup. When building an equatorial elevator, there is no need for a force from the anchor point, so the elevator can simply be extended up and down until it reaches the ground. The off-equator elevator needs a force from the ground to stay off equator, so that strategy won't work. The only idea I can think of is to make an equatorial elevator, and then move the anchor point to the desired position. I am not sure how hard pulling the elevator into place would be, because I did not do the simulation with real numbers.
The flash of lightning (thunders of the ionosphere) can DESTROY the space elevator!!!.
open4free © : i'm the 1st engineer to discover it!
Having a nice big conductor like this might have interesting effects in storms...
e ntprojects.html).
:p
It might stop charge building up in the clouds (by leaking it to the ground), so stop lightning in the area altogether. If it doesn't, it would regularly be hit by lightning which may do something very wierd to the cable: There is research into using carbon nanotubes as actuators (http://www.uow.edu.au/science/research/ipri/curr
I believe they report strains of about 0.5%, so assuming 0.1% strain (because the elevator isn't designed to be an actuator)... and a strike at say 5km altitude... a lightning strike could cause the cable to suddenly try to become 5m shorter! Thats about 20 feet for those in Liberia and Burma. Oh and the US
I don't know what would happen, but its probably more likely that the cable would snap than pull the space station on the end down...
Funny things, nanotubes!
I word that regrettably comes to mind when I am urinating.
...will the workers belong to? Teamsters? And will there be nano scale union labels to look for?
I drank what? -- Socrates
So that's $10 worth of carbon nanotubes for free -- very generous! >:-< They repeat the price and amout of the next page, so they must be right.
Considering they want to open a nanofactory...
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Sure would be nice to have a space elevator. I'm having my doubts that this group of 5 full time and 4 part time people are going to have much to contribute. There is a lot of talk on their website about plans and research and 'groups', but very little substance. It seems their first priority was to develop a line of clothing and an online store. The "Finance" portion of their group consists of investment club opportunities which they generously offer to the public. I couldn't find any mention of other members of their "Group" apart from the sub-companies consisting of the same 9 employees. So far it looks like they have received some money from NASA and $100K from local development agencies in New Jersey where they have announced the building of their first factory. The money from NASA is a little misleading, however. It seems that another company, High Lift Systems, got its start when LiftPort's President, Michael J. Laine, ran into Brad Edwards on a space forum. Edwards is a physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories for 11 years and had raised $570K from NASA to study the feasibility of a space elevator. Laine originally wasn't interested - "I thought it was ridiculous,' says Laine" - but quickly changed his mind. Edwards is also the only scientist or researcher connected to LiftGroup on their website. Unfortunately for LiftGroup, but probably not for Edwards, after about a year he gave Laine the boot and went off to do research at Eureka Scientific under a NASA grant. Currently he has received $2.5M from the US government to fund his own lab. His take on Laine? He says that Laine "spins his wheels" and "if Michael Laine is standing there with something, Boeing and the Air Force won't even notice him."
LiftPort Group seems to be a lot of talk and a website. Search results for Laine are few and all related to LiftPort, yet supposedly he has been a leading proponent of the space elevator for years. Content about LiftGroup on other websites consists almost entirely of Liftgroup press releases, with no information other than that provided by LPG. LiftPort Group claims that LiftPort Carbon is a leading force in the industry and its product, Liftite(TM) carbon nanotubes, will "revolutionize the way the world thinks about materials". There is no third party reference to this not originating from LiftPort that I could find. As a matter of fact, I can not find ANY reference from ANY acknowledged authority in the field confirming any of LiftPorts claims. While other companies are mentioned in news stories about product releases, cooperative ventures, and funding awards, LiftGroup is mentioned in quotes from its own press releases. Maybe I'm missing a huge body of information somewhere, if not, the only question left seems to be...is Michael Laine a kook or a crook? I guess time will tell.
billy - who disavows all knowledge of THIS particular mission
why do people insist on pursuing this fucking retarded idea
Stop the Williamsburg space elevator!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stoptheelevator/
I've seen numerous people here on slashdot being totally obsessed with the idea of a space elevator, since it offers a cheap and efficient way to get into orbit, but less obsessed with some real dangers in the real world, should an elevator ever be constructed.
Consider that a space elevator is built, with carbon nanotubes, or whatever suitable material. Now, what can damage or destroy the elevator? There is so much space junk hurtling around the planet, about which slashdot has already had articles, that something is bound to hit some portion of the cable on it's 35'000 kilometer length up to geostationary orbit. I assume that even an extremely strong material would be liable to break under such extreme velocity impacts and stress. For instance, a piece of old rocket booster has considerable kinetic energy and I wouldn't like to bet on the elevator being over engineered enough to withstand such an impact.
Or what about that asteroid that is scheduled to pass close to the earth in 2029 or so, or any of the car sized asteroids that hit the earth regularly? What impact and damage could they do to the elevator?
And what happens if the elevator is cut? If part of it comes down on the earth it is going to be one massive impact, far more dangerous than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Duh - Nylon fishing line is a single molecule.
If you keep writing things like "meating" and "houndred," though, they're probably going to figure it out soon.
Actually, the page an non-equatorial elevators you are looking at is a bit out of date. There is much more recent material in the paper I presented at the 3rd annual space elevator conference. The slides are also available here. The paper should give you a quantitative idea of what the situation is.
To put into perspective what the previous post says. Moving a bit off the equator is possible and costs nearly nothing. On the other hand, if you want to place the Space Elevator in the continental USA, you are going to have to significantly increase the tension at the base of the space elevator, for a given payload.
The reason for this increase in tension is that as you move further away from the equatorial plane, the elevator ribbon starts being inclined at the anchor. The vertical component of the tension needs to be able to lift the desired payload, so the total tension in the ribbon is greater. This gets really bad as the inclination of the ribbon nears 90 degrees (at a latitude of about 48 degrees for the standard Edwards ribbon parameters).
And what about the space garbage?
I mean, it would really, really suck to have a toothbrush hit your umbilical cord to the earth at 200,000 Km/s.
The cable is *thin*. Planes aren't going to run into it for the same reason they don't run into mountains. They already know where the mountains are. The plane you're talking about didn't expect that cable to be there.
The airspace around the space elevator is likely to be restricted, for the very terrorism concerns you cite. A 100 mile radius is practical and sufficient. Nobody's going to run into this.
Nobody's going to be able to actually launch a terrorist attack against it either. Only specialty personnel will be allowed anywhere near it. The world trade center and the pentagon were easy to hit because there were thousands of people in them in the middle of peaceful cities. A remote equatorial base where anything that flies in can be shot down with impunity protecting a cable only a foot across is essentially invulnerable.
It wouldn't be worth the terrorist effort. They could kill thousands in any city much more easily, and if the space elevator does break nothing particularly bad happens. The cable below the break falls at a low terminal velocity toward the earth, stretching across a fairly small length of wilderness. It's expensive to fix, but not an event filled with "terror."
As for rumored spyplanes... you just degenerated into wild speculation.
Their web page states the space elevator will need a tether of 62,000 miles. I wonder how much carbon will be required for that much cable?
So, I was laying around lazily on a vacation here in San Diego, and an idea idly struck me while shooting the breeze with my accompanying teacher friend.
There have been plenty of schemes to use Solar Power Satellites to provide cheap, ecological power to earth-based consumers, but one big problem has always been transmission.
Lasers and microwaves have been proposed, but lasers are notoriously inefficient, and both lasers and satellites have other problems. (cooking birds, airplanes and pedestrians in the case of an alignment problem, etc)
How do you get that power down to earth?
Well, few recent articles lead me to believe that a space elevator made of 5,5 quantum wires might be the best!
1) Transmission of power over superconductors wouldn't be very "lossy".
2) Problem of getting power to the elevators themselves largely solved.
3) 5,5 "quantum wires" are single-walled nanotubes, the best kind for tension strength, and are thus a natural fit.
4) No "cooked birds and airplanes" problems with alignment.
5) Getting sufficient material into space to build an economically feasible solar power station is cheap - just put the stuff on the elevator!
Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Can anybody shoot holes in this idea?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If only the French had attempted this and half-succeeded...If only there were a decent "A man a plan a canal: Panama" type palindrome that applied to space elevatores. A man, a plan, a tube: ebutyesrejwen!"? OK, I had to work hard to get a reference to Millville in...
Sigh. Yet another long term engineering mega-project that ignores the fact that the world economy will soon begin and endless contraction.
Is it really cheaper to build this thing than construct a Hercules-like spacecraft?
Nanotubes have many other proposed uses. You see a space elevator; I see a 62,000 mile long USB drive; or a large number or parallel processing super computers. Imagine a nano computer chip that reaches to space. Moore's Law will go out the window.
Is how long it will take them to make bicycles out of the stuff...
What about the meteor showers that happen, some annually? These could act like sand blasting?
Imagine for a moment something you do know to be true. A helicopter starts pulling up a VW bus via a wench and rope. Do you think a) The helicopter pilot does not increase his thrust b) The helicopter pilot does increase his thrust or c) The helicopter pilot does nothing different, just pushes a button on the wench? If you answered b or c large men with shot guns will be arriving at your house shortly.
This means that the orbiting station would have to be burning a huge amount of fuel to stay in orbit everytime something is lifted.
Look, take a tennis ball and tie a rope to it. Spin it above your head, then give it a jerk. That jerk is called gravity. Does the ball stay there or does it come towards you?
Now your saying, "Well this is different, there is going to be a giant rigid pole made out of carbon nanotubes that is going to support this thing". Even the very thought of how unfeasible this is, makes me angry even writing this...Do you know how much a building sways when it is only 300m tall? I'll tell you...it is on the order of meters. Multiply this number by 1000 when considering something this big. Factor in resonance effects of storms passing through it...I mean you thought Tacoma-Narrows was bad! This strain cycling leads to crack propagation = bad.
But the most telling part about this half-baked idea is that people are so concerned with the carbon nanotubes. *News Flash* materials fail at the weakest link, not the strongest. Any CNT would have to be glued together like a carbon fibre composite we all use today. The glue is usually the deliminating factor for composite failure. That being said, take your favorite carbon fibre golf shaft or tennis racket and then an arc welder. Go to town on it. The glue gets ablated...and your new shiny CNT tower falls to the ground killing everyone during the first thunder storm.
Bottom line is a ridig object that long, enduring dramatic heating and cooling cycles, winds stesses, costs, lead me to believe this idea is probably this worst being floated around today. And the costs...just building a tower with a base large enough out of todays composites, in order to with stand these forces and all the other myraid of engineering obsticles, would equal the combined GDP of the US/EU for a decade! And for what??? A reusable space shuttle would be infinitely cheaper, quicker to come to being, and not have huge consequences if it failed. Okay I've said my peace, now no more talk of this rubbish!
and that wouldn't affect ANYTHING down here on the surface right?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Can the passage of this current-bearing cable through such a rich source of charge as the ionosphere, tap enough current to power the elevator? Isn't an electric generator just this sort of field cutter? I can imagine some interesting interactions could occur between the cable's current flow characteristics and a (presumably) eddy-current motor propelling the elevator tram itself. We'll need a whole new set of visualisation tools to map it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Let the text box and browser do the text-wrapping for you. Doing it yourself is fucking annoying.
He misspelled "see".
Please do at least a minimum amount of research before dismissing an entire field of technology. The fucking elevator is going to be fucking built in the fucking middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean, far far far from any normal air routes.
First: LiftPort Nanotech will not be making nanotubes for the space elevator in the near future. The SE is not going to be built this year, or even this decade. Any CNTs we sell in the next few years will go towards commercial use in other products (e.g., stronger plastics).
Second: LiftPort is on the board of Elevator:2010, and hence is not entering the competition.
Maybe by request they can play this album.
http://www.voltaire.net/music/BannedOnVulcan.html
OYDUIAPOTVN-WCTGITNOGRAUEPSCBRTASW. ...
AIYDUWTASF, LIUY (And if you don't understand what the acronym stands for, look it up yourself.)
Karma: NaN
um... i was under the impression that the parent was being a little sarcastic.
but whateva.
between earth and the moon? If we built a space elivator between the moon and what ever counts for as space (I guess on the moon with no atmosphere that might only be 1cm off the ground) would there be a danger of the mother of all van-der-graph (phonetic) static discharges? also wouldn't the top sway an awful lot, even moden sky scrapers that only go a few hundered meters wobble quite a bit.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
You need to quit basing your ideas of science on Simcity games and check the facts. Microwave power transmission from orbit and beyond doesn't "cook birds, airplanes and pedestrians" in the case of an alignment problem. Geez. Do your maps say "Here be dragons!" on them too?
I don't have time to write a real post, so I'll just quote the relevant section of the Wikipedia article on solar power satellites and hope that spurs you to think before you post next time:
Meanwhile, while people are squawking about the imaginary menace of microwave power, real people on Earth are dying by the thousands from cancers produced by coal particulates released into the air from fossil fuel burning plants.
No, it's not. The tensile strength determines how often the width must double before reaching GEO - it's an exponential scaling.
While it's an exponential scaling, 60 GPa is enough to do it. The characteristic length for a material needed for a non-tapered space elevator is 4000-and-change km. The density of nanotubes is 2-and-change. For a length of 5000 km and a density of 3, you have a tension of 150 GPa. This is 2.5 times the tensile strength measured. The tapering factor is e^2.5, or a factor of about 12. Not a problem.
The real problem is that 1) we haven't yet been able to make pure enough single-walled carbon nanotubes to get close to the 110 GPa figure (60 GPa is the most I've heard of measured), and it'll be very hard to do so on a mass-manufacture scale, and 2) composites will have lower tensile strength than the fibers they're made of (though it may be close enough).
If a tapering factor of 100 is acceptable, the minimum tensile strength of the elevator material is about 33 GPa (150 GPa / ln(100)).
Your "proof that gasoline fumes ignite" test is slated for this month, BTW.