Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Since when did we have the capability to
make fiber optic cables over a mile long?
We didn't at first, and yet we STILL built
plants to spin fiber optics cable.
It's the same situation here.
Hint: it's called a "lab" by some people.
It's a production plant, technically,
since the focus is also on the industrial
system engineering problems of mass
producing carbon tubes.
E.g., where do the raw inputs go? What
machines connect the hopper to the next stage?
Where the computers located? What sensors
are needed to monitor the reliable production
of lengths of tube wires? We can make one
or two in the lab, but what other equipment
do we need to make fuckloads (that's a
technical term) of tubes?
We can make short tubes, yes. We're learning
how to make long ones. If we suddenly learn
how to make arbitrary length cables over night,
we'll be DAMN sorry if we haven't worked out
the production logistics of a factory first.
What a silly point you've attempted to raise.
And +2 mod already... Oh my.
This is why you read slashdot, while real men
go off and build the technology of a new
century.
The recently opened NanoFactory has been reported lost. Scientists are combing the floor near their desk to find the misplaced factory.
WTF?
Dude.
The elevators will be equitorial, for reasons
that would be obvious to even a 18th
century physicist.
They will MAKE the tubes in Bremerton. And
then they will use this advanced technology
called a "boat" to move the tubes to another
location for deployment, if it comes to that
(which it may not for decades...)
You might be familiar with this phenomenon
already, called "transportation".
It turns out people can manufacture
in one city, and move the goods to another.
(And here, all this time, you thought everything
you touch--planes, cars, clothes, food--were
made in your own city!)
Got it?
Now finish your milk and cookies. Nap time is
almost here.
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.
IANAMA (I'm not a materials engineer) but to my best understanding carbon nanotubes come in single walled (SWNT) and multiwalled (MWNT) flavors.
The former are what you want for the elevator because they have extraordinary tensile strength and are very light (worthy of noting is that while their *theoretical* tensile strength is 5 times what you need for an elevator - 300GPa - and you need a safety factor of about 2 to actually make one - ~110GPa - the strongest single SWNT made to date is somewhere around 60GPa. I *think*.)
The latter - multiwalled - are much more dense and so will not be fit for an elevator - too heavy. These might actually be of use where strong rigid materials are required, such as construction. Just remember that we construct not out of what is strong but of what is cheap and readily available, hence some places use more wood and others use more concrete, and nobody uses steel except where local cheap materials don't cut it (lile.. skyscrapers).
Would be nice to have someone who has up-to-date info clear this up.
-
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!
Check this link out. It'll blow your mind how a space elevator not anchored at the equator is possible!!!
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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.
I can see this replacing steel rebar in reinforced concrete once it gets cheap enough. The stuff will never rust, no matter how much it is exposed to moisture.
That's a practical application that carbon nanotubes can be applied to now
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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.
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