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Space Elevator Gets FAA Clearance
lonesome phreak writes "Techzonez has a short piece about the recent FAA waiver received by the LiftPort Group allowing them to conduct preliminary tests or their high altitude robotic lifters. The lifters are early prototypes of the technology that the company is developing for use in its commercial space elevator to ferry cargo back and forth into space."
Just imagine the massive migranes you are going to get when you have to listen to musak for some tens of thousands of miles
There is no sig
..all the way to space.
What could possibly go wrong?
Take THAT Led Zeppelin!
Wouldn't it be best to launch from somewhere outside the United States - say from the equator? It just makes more sense to me if they used something like Sea Launch.
Welcome our heavly lifting space overlords by pressing all the buttons in the elevator before leaving.
Last time I checked we do have materials that can handle the stresses of hanging around from orbit.
At least thats what I remember from /.'s last article about super strength diamnond nano-tubes.
(or something like that)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's not like anyone is going to be building one any time soon. It would probably take years just to gather the raw materials.
great idea, all we need to do is invent the technology , im not holding my breath
perhaps the bookies should be taking bets
Fusion Power
Space Elevator
Perpetual Motion
Duke Nukem Forever
Microsoft Linux
I got a bridge in New York to sell you too!
...and there's no one there to smell it, does it stink?
IronChefMorimoto
I hate to be the person that gets stuck on the 900,304,564,282,012,373 floor. :(
When is Six Flags building one? And will the speedpass be valid for it?
God Fucking Damnit
We don't have any investors,
We don't have a product,
But we do have in-principle government approval!
Woooo!
Thoughts on Space Elevators by Blaise Gassend has a lot of good info & links on space elevators
I'd be betting the following anounts that it'll come to fruition within 100 years..
Fusion Power: $1000
Space Elevator: $10
Microsoft Linux: $3
Perpetual Motion: $2
Duke Nukem Forever: 1 cent
... I'd get in on the bottom floor and some kid would hit EVERY button.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountains_of_Paradise
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
The plane thing always struck me as silly. Its like accidently hitting a very tall building. Sure it happends when the pilot is an absolute idiot. Either way this will most likly be very far away from everything with protected airspace. You'll get shot down before you get near this thing.
Yo mamma so big, she's on the FBI potential target list.
... wouldn't it be better if they had a single target to focus on? Less randomness that way. :)
Seriously, though
FTA:
marking the first-ever test of this technology in the development of the space elevator concept.
It may be the first test of the technology that actually requires a federal permit because of the altitude, but here are pictures and a video of an earlier test in November 2004.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
You need to bone up on your Sci-Fi literature.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
From Gen 11:1-9
1. Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words.
2. And it came to pass when they traveled from the east, that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly"; so the bricks were to them for stones, and the clay was to them for mortar.
4. And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the entire earth."
5. And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built.
6. And the Lord said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do?
7. Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion."
8. And the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city.
9. Therefore, He named it Babel, for there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth, and from there the Lord scattered them upon the face of the entire earth.
So let's hope Liftport Group has their translators ready ;)
Yeah, cause we all know terrorist strikes are a non-event.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
According to the article, they just want to try out some climbers by letting them climb up and down a cable tethered to a mile-high balloon. They're not getting aproval to launch an actual space elevator. (You are correct though that a space elevator would optimally be tethered near the equator.)
"Beam me up!"
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
Great. Turn the allure of orbital travel into a 200km ride in a claustrophobic box with 17 people, sandwiched against some dude with balls-to-the-walls BO with a tinny rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" playing in the background. Where do I sign up?
My advice to you is to blast off into space NOW, before the glamour of it is all but a memory.
#roses { color: #ff0000; } #violets { color: #0000ff; }
The biggest problems are keeping it together, and keeping it protected from harm, like accidently hitting it in a plane, or lightning strikes. It could become a terrorist target.
Whoa, it'll take years to build it. By then, we will have won the war on terror.
It could become a terrorist target.
Sigh, could you please shut up about terrorist threats? What makes a space elevator more a threat than a space shuttle, or a Golden Gate bridge? BTW: space shuttles are full of highly explosive fuels!
This is a good moment to ask yourself if you're not affected by propaganda too much..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Does anyone here feel like a young Frank Poole? 3001
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Does anyone else think that perhaps this article should be linked to the actual source instead of a link to a link that links to another site with a quote from the original source and no link to it? I mean at what point does this become a rumor when it's so far from the original source? Oh here's the link to the companies website: http://www.liftport.com/ And here's one to their staff blog which is much more interesting reading then this quote: http://www.liftport.com/progress/wp/ And heres a link to their september newsletter posted on their forums that talks about the FAA approval among other things: http://www.liftport.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25 3
...to base jump off of this.
The first civilization to build one gets a free orbiting city and pollution free launches to orbit. Why not build one on the site of Old New Orleans and name the free city we get New New Orleans?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Let it be known I also approve the space elevator. In fact, I was the first. Let me go down in history as the first man to rubber-stamp this project.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
That is not an elevator I want to be trapped inside when the power goes out.
I hope they are not placing the earth side in the path of Hurricaines.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
You know that on the first mission of this thing some nutcase is going to get in and face the back while everyone is facing the front.
And if that kid pushes all the floor buttons all the way up again, I'll strangle the little shit.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
elevators space you!
Unless, of course, Microsoft designs it. Then what you need is is color, touch-sensitive screen with an animated puppy on it. When you get in, he bounds up towards you and barks, and a little balloon appears saying, "Where do you want to go today? Based on past trips, I'd guess you want to go up. Is this correct?"
Halfway up the ribbon to space, the elevator would get confused and start going down. You'd have to stop it, turn it off, and manually open and shut the door to reset the system. Then the elevator would remind you that you should always reset the elevator using the Start menu.
There is a MUCH simpler and superior alterantive to a space elevator, and oddly enough the core concept comes from Jules Verne. The final piece of the puzzle was provided by Space-X, I beleive. Let me break it down into some simple steps, all of which use technology available TODAY:
1 > Find an east-west mountain range close to or on the equator.
2 > Build an Ionic Flow ring in a straight line going up the mountain range from ground level, pointing towards the west. Each of the gigantic rings strips electrons from the wind that pass through the ring, storing it in an internal capacitor (the power generation is caused by wind passing over the coils around the ring.
3 > Run magnetic iron tracks from each ring to each next ring. Their purpose is three-fold: to provide stability to the series of rings, to provide a repulsible glide-path, and to provide the "leekage" needed to meld the magnetic felds from each ring.
4 > Build your "ship" as a sharp-ended ovoid made with a ferrous iron frame, which encapsulates your ACTUAL vehicle (squib-releases or explosive bolts work perfectly as a means of shedding the outer fusilage). The fusilage must contain a closed wire loop that can be charged externally.
5 > Once the radio transmitters in each section of the 10-mile ring array read as being charged to full power, move the ship to the first ring at the base of the mountains, and set it on the magnetic tracks.
6 > Dump a huge amount of electrical power (possibly slowly drained from each ring by means of the rails, and stored) into the magnetic coild isnide the ship's outer fusilage.
7 > From a bunker nearby, hang back and watch the vehicle accelerate to, and then past, escape velocity as it is yanked from one ring to the next by thier now-active magnetic fields. The rings will be perfectly safe, since the ship will not be generating heat energy at a fast enough rate to harm them as it passes.
8 > Once the vessel is in orbit, it can sepperate from the external fusilage (which is ALSO in orbit). The external fusilage can then be used as building materials for a space station, or explosive charges can decelerate it back into the earth's atmospehre. If it is designed using the recently proven re-entry technology of Knight-1, it can land safely in the ocean for recovery.
9 > Once its mission is over, the internal spacecraft can use the same tech the fusilage uses to land as well, but being under control it can land on a smaller area such as a tarmac.
The benefits of this system are many-fold. Unlike a space elevator, the power to carry cargo into orbit does not require large and potentially dangerous specialty-generation facilities. It is still a terrorist target, but sabotage will not result in dropping miles-long super strong cable chaotically over large tracks of land (a sabotaged ring only results in the vessel not having the power to get into orbit, and safely landing after it is lauched or even having the launch aborted IN MID SEQUENCE!). When not in active use, or self-charging, the rings can be plugged into the power grid to provide free and cheap power (one big reason this will NEVER be built: it can cut into some corporation's bottom line). It allows HUGE payloads to be sent into space at relatively low costs and rapid time-frames in comparison to a space elevator (which everybody alwasy seems to forget would take DAYS of constant activity to put ANYTHING into orbit). The ring-launch system could be built slowly over the period of decades, since the component rings would not need to be lifted AND HELD in posistion like a space elevator's cable. The entire system uses technology and engineering methods that have been widely used world-wide for years, and sometimes GENERATIONS (reverse-flow system, electromagnets, mag-lev tracks, autolifting bodies, capacitors, static electricity generation). It would cost a FRACTION of the price of the space elevator, since the vast majority of the component elements needed are not only
What just about everybody forgets about the spece elevator is that every orbit lower than geosynchronous will eventually intersect the elevator (assuming the elevator is anchored on the equator). A particle too small to track from earth can still have quite an impact.
One possible solution would be a much better tracking system combined with some method for deflecting/destroying objects that come too close.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
If you take that section in context instead of just reading it itself, you would find that the problem was not that they built a tower, but their motives for building it. They wanted to get closer to God. Theres nothing wrong with that except for when you do it outside of how he tells us to. He didn't tell us to build a tower to him to get to him, he told us to let him come to us. He was disgusted with the Babylonians because of their pride, not because of their tower building prowess.
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that."
Duke Nukem Forever gets my vote, only because it seems more probable that it, or something like it, would be released in the next 10 years.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
...all the slashdotters scrambling for the chance to scrawl "first passenger!" on the elevator wall....
I want to see the US build a "skyhook" space elevator on the Equator right off Jarvis Island. Jarvis could house the cargo/control center. Nearby Kiribati could become an (inter)global shipping hub. And Hawaii would be even spacier than it is now.
--
make install -not war
In "Rainbow Mars," Larry Niven (who also wrote Ringworld, seemingly the basis of Halo's ring-shaped planet) imagined "world trees" that grow downward from space and attach to a pre-grown stalk on a planet.
The world-trees were huge, but rather than supporting their weight traditionally, the roots were designed to hold them in the ground, as opposed to being flung out into space.
I guess if you had a space elevator and stuck enough mass out into space, it could take some of the supportive strain off the base of it with centrifugal pull. I'm not sure how the strain would work out on it.
At first I imagined an elevator box where you open it and push your cargo (a rocket, whatever) out, but I guess it makes more sense to let it accelerate and sling it off the end with centrifugal force, like... like a sling. No fuel required to get moving.
Pastafarians around the world applaud the proposed ribbon emulating His Noodly Appendage.
Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.
Current regulations (faa i think) prevent mile high cities.
Already there are conglomerates in tokyo with plans and long term roadmaps laid out toward the construction of self contained mile high towers.. (one shaped like nested bowls actually has 7 or so large open air parks contained within.
The US will never have one as long as these regulations continue to pose even a slight threat to what is already a daunting task in both engineering and financing.
Truth be told.. i want to live in one of these towers before i'm middle aged, so get moving with the restriction removal!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Goto: http://www.liftport.com/donate.php
...and they are asking for donations, saying:
"Developing the space elevator will require large amounts of financial capital over the next 10-15 years. At the present, LiftPort Inc. is in the early start-up stages, and like any start-up, has strong financial needs in order to achieve our goal of building the space elevator. If you would like to help support our efforts by making a donation, please click the link below. We thank you for your support."
It makes me feel so good to know i've helped a newborn business down the path of global domination!
Hooray for groveling private enterprise!
+5 Cynical
cwebster said it better.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
God has a tantrum because human beings are attempting to do something other than slaughter mindlessly in his name. Here, we see people attempting to accomplish a feat of engineering. In reprisal, God thwarts the effort by rewiring their brains to inhibit communication. This leads to the formation of diverse cultures and perspectives, which in turn leads to ignorance and intolerance in many cases. As a direct result, human kind engages in mindless slaughter in God's name.
Eventually, however, our species ends up creating much taller towers a thousand years later anyway... Which people then destroy, causing mindless slaugher in the name of God.
God is stupid.
Join Tor today!
http://www.elevator2010.org/site/ Has TONS of information on this. It is a contest site that has been mentioned here before a few times (I'm too lazy to look up previous articles). All of the materials are currently available to construct one. The movie on the site explains a space elevator in simple terms. I recommend watching it.
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
to join the 19741974827320328 mile high club! ;)
Blog via SMS text messaging
...and no one is there, do you make a sound?
Typical /.'er.
/. is to cry out in unison "Propaganda!"
/. idealists still got their proverbial elevator-head in the clouds thinking that nature and humanity are essentially good and will welcome their space elevator with open arms?
Soon as someone mentions terrorist the matched reaction of
The GP brings up a pertinent point and that is whether or not this thing can be destroyed and take a hammering. And not just by humans, armies or boogeymen terrorists. Remember New Orleans? Imagine the power of terrestrial weather or outer space nature against space elevators. Has this been studied in any form yet? Or are the
Comment removed based on user account deletion
your towel.
Oh well, what the hell...
I always lose at gambling, so I might as well try any one of these longshots and split the difference in case one of them hits.
Fusion Power: $200
Space Elevator: $200
Microsoft Linux: $200
Perpetual Motion: $200
Duke Nukem Forever: $200
I'll save the rest of the cash you spent for some pizza, smokes and beer.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I'm certain I'm missing something here, but if a large mass is going to be moving upwards towards a big counterweight, wouldn't there be a massive coriolis effect from accelerating the payload perpendicular to the rotation of the earth? It would seem we there would need to be a load of rocket fuel delivered to the counterweight every-so-often to counter the rotational deceleration from such an effect. Is that what they're planning to do or am I just crazy?
You don't have to walk. There is a thing called gravity.
Don't forget that in the Mars trilogy, both Phobos and the space elevator asteroid had been booby trapped in the intervening years by engineers fully aware of the fact that those space stations were excellent weapons platforms.
The destruction of the space elevator in the books involved demolishing the orbital attachment point, and the damage caused by the elevator collapsing was especially severe due to the lack of atmosphere on Mars (the cable didn't burn up on reentry due to the thin atmosphere).
IMHO a space elevator won't make a decent terrorist target until the world's industrial might (composed of factories and supply chain) is in orbit. Then the simple act of severing a tether (sending up a nuke or car full of C4 and detonating it some way up) would cause massive damage in economic and sociological terms, not just the purely physical ones. Though by then I expect that deploying a new tether would be a routine operation, despite the growing concern around the world of the rise in asthma and cancer rates which the lunatic fringe attributes to the carbon nanofibre rain that will be constantly falling from orbit.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-elevator.ht m
I was really hoping we could keep the Mac/Windows flame wars out of this discussion for once...
Current regulations (faa i think) prevent mile high cities.
Eh? What about this place?
http://www.denver.org/
could attaching a counterweight to the earth in fact disturb it's orbit around the sun?
It could become a terrorist target.
OMG, you're right!
Even Slashdot itself could be a terrorist target!
Jesus Christ, everyone run!
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
Totally self-contained atmospheric rockets are so... last century.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It is full of the perils of space elevators, particularly when encountering knids.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've heard the idea that we would want to bring a small-to-medium-sized asteroid in as a counterweight, to relieve the stress on the cables.
My question: Why not hit two birds with one stone and round up all the larger pieces of "space trash" (ie discarded rocket stages, irrepairably damaged satellites, etc.), tie it all in with a strong net, and use it as a preliminary counterweight until the asteroid (or whatnot) could be captured/moved in? I'm no physicist (far from it), but it seems to me that this might allow at least a materiels feasability test for one or two "strands" and a crawler.
Oh, and it'd help clear up LEO space, to boot!
~UP
Eat the Path.
The poles would seem a better choice, as although the elevator would need to climb further to leave the atmosphere, you would have a much easier time of it because it would be a rotating point, not a huge swinging arm.
You would need to contend with the aurora, though, as you'd have lots of charged particles flying around, which would potentially give you a huge potential difference between the ends of the elevator. (One reason the tether system experimented on by the Space Shuttle failed - even a "short" tether can generate massive potential differences and be fried.)
This is why I don't think the Space Elevator is a good approach to the problem. The requirements conflict, such that I'm not sure there IS a good place to have one.
(This would not be true on, say, Mars. I think there is a lot of potential for a space elevator on a planet like that, as the charge at the poles is much lower and the atmosphere is much less stormy.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What is an N-Registered aircraft and a C-Registered aircraft? Has it got something to do with the size/number/type of engines, or something?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
They weigh themselves, then clear all the buttons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Probably harder to test this out on someplace other than earth.. but with a smaller planet and stuff it maybe a good testing ground. IIRC you kinda have to start from space when building one of these things, so you're already in space just take a cruise over to the moon, mars, or uranus.
fitting captcha: cruise
This thing doesnt need to transmit large amounts of matter such a box with humans in it. It can transport raw materials into space in smaller chunks. Then getting the humans into space in a rocket to assemble them isnt a big deal.
Truth be told.. i want to live in one of these towers before i'm middle aged, so get moving with the restriction removal!
Mile-high towers would seem to be trouble in the brewing. It would seem to be such an easy target to aim for. For such a tall structure, I'd hope they'll make it withstand any concievable sort of natural disaster of a magnitude they don't expect to see for 10k years, typhoon and earthquakes and such, because if a mile high tower goes down, I think it would be a human catastrophe of a magnitude unseen previously.
In the US, it's probably much cheaper to just sprawl. One thing that shoots down tall towers in many places is the immense shadow they cast, esp. in the mornings and evenings, imagine a 12 mile long shadow. I wonder if asian cities will really even consider that when they approve the megatowers.
Great, lay a source of conduction across the natural insulation of our atmosphere and discharge the entire ionisphere into the earth. Wheeeee
Yes, because we all know the only time planes run into buildings is by accident.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Because they're flying a tethered balloon in US airspace above the maximum altitude allowed without having to alert air traffic in the area.
/. generated assumptions in the Phase II Study.
http://www.risingup.com/fars/info/101-index.shtml
They have to get a waiver to operate outside the limits set by FAR 101. It's a fairly automatic process. Most rocketry clubs do it regularly. By doing this they get clearance and (somewhat) priority for the airspace, and a NOTAM (Notice To Airmen) is posted at air traffic control centers so anyone heading that way will be informed.
According to the LiftPort blog, they've seen you coming:
September 18th, 2005
Welcome Slashdot readers.
You're welcome to rummage around and see what we're up to.
While you are here, sign up for our monthly announcement list. Toss barbed questions at space elevator enthusiasts at the Liftport Forums. Read our out-dated FAQ. Read Dr. Edwards NIAC study and free yourself from
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I have to admit that this is the first post on slashdot that's made me laugh outloud in quite a while.
"It was you"
Remember when it happened 3,500 years ago? Don't infringe on heaven.
And what's the problem with shadows? Last time I checked, clouds caused shadows too. It's not like this tower will permanently shade some spot, no, the shadow will be moving. It's just that every day you would have no sunshine for a few minutes. No big deal.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
t could become a terrorist target.
Even worse, it may be used for copyright infringement.
... will they be tentacled aliens? You know, it being Japan and all ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's managing the construction and infrastructure of large, mostly one off projects.
Guess what a space elevator is going to be.
Deleted
So if they get this thing going. Do I have to get a pass from the FAA before I press the second floor button?
You've almost hit on the reason a space elevator will never be built. It's essentially a 22,000 mile train journey.
Has anyone else at all thought about how a space elevator might be economically viable?
Deleted
think of it - we could have lots of different segments, and a spiraling train track that wound in to the centre! even better, we could occasionally drop segments onto the shanty towns below in "terrorist attacks" to quell discontent.
Current regulations (faa i think) prevent mile high cities.
The FAA outlawed Denver?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not to discredit the people playing around with that at MIT or anything... but claiming a little robot climbing up a ribbon is a test of the technology needed for a space elevator is sort of like standing in a parking lot with one of those pneumatic water-filled plastic rockets we all had when we were kids and claiming it was the first test of the technology you need to go to the moon.
Technically correct, but so far from the finish line, I'm not sure its really fair to claim it as progress.
Initial comment said by accident I was stating that was hard. Then admitted it would need to be far away and things need to be shot down. But thats not so hard to do if you have an automated system for such.
Yet another possible interpretation: God was a game designer.
I can see God sitting there reading the logs and going "gah, this game is turning out boring like crap. Everyone is just baking or laying bricks for that stupid tower. And WTF did I code all those classes and jobs for, if two people out of three are either brick makers or bricklayers? I know, let's give them a bit more combat, to keep things challenging and fun. Better make it PvP too. That's great fun. And, oh, I'm sure they'll love my new language code too."
Some millenia later, picture God watching tens of thousands of Roman legionaires storming Carthage, slaughtering and enslaving the population, and razing the city to the ground, thinking, "Oh, yeah, that's the shit. Great raid there, guys. Didn't think this PvP stuff would be _this_ popular. Damn, that was one great design decision."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Having seen the damage hi-rise flats can cause a city (Glasgow), I must assume that you are out of your mind. Buildings like these have zero sense of community & belonging and lead to indifference, social decay and crime. The only folk that would see them as good are those who believe in the "stay at home, keep yourself to yourself, oh look, American Gladiators is on". Drive to work, drive home, lock the door. It's a horrible self-contained existance and frankly it sucks.
Give me a traditional city with traditional shops, bars and housing anyday. One where neighbours know each other and parents are shamed into making their children behave. Hi-rises are too impersonal and one of the biggest mistakes of 1960's British planing. Sure, mile high cities may be sci-fi cool, but most of them were distopias remember!
The next globular cluster discovered gets named "Beowulf".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If a space elevator could be made that can lift heavy cargo up to space, then a similar construct can be used for transferring energy from a solar energy platform to earth.
Coriolis effect would happen precisely _because_ it's at the equator and perpendicular to the ground, and precisely _because_ it shares the Earth's rotation. The only places where you wouldn't get that, would be the poles. (But then good luck keeping anything in a geostationary orbit above one of the poles.)
The problem is that you're moving from a smaller radius R1 to a larger radius R2. If you tried keeping the same angular velocity (and precisely because it's perpendicular to the ground, it is getting constant angular velocity), the linear velocity is the radius multiplied by the angular velocity. It's that linear a progression: twice the radius means twice the speed. So in the first place you have a smaller speed v1, and in the second you have a larger speed v2.
To get that, which is the pre-requisite to having it move in a straight line upwards there, you have to apply some extra force (e.g., horizontal thrusters) to increase the speed. If you don't, it will fall behind. That's Coriolis effect in a nutshell: the object's tendency to lag behind as you move away from the centre, or to gain angular velocity as you move towards the centre.
Why it happens on Earth? Because Earth is a sphere. As you go from either pole towards the equator, the radius increases. To move in a straight line from N to S in the northern hemisphere, you move from a small radius to a large radius, at constant angular velocity. (If you stay along the same meridian, you do a full circle in exactly 24 hours at any point along it.)
That means you need to gain speed to stay on that same meridian. While both a city in Canada and one in Mexico have the same angular velocity (both do a full circle in 24 hours), the one in Mexico moves faster horizontally. It moves more feet per second towards the east than the one in Canada.
If you tried launching an ICBM from Canada against Mexico, you couldn't just point it straight to the south. If you did, it would fall behind and fall into the Pacific. You'd have to aim it a bit to the East, so it gains that speed difference by the time it reaches Mexico.
That's Coriolis effect in a nutshell.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A cable in the sky.... :)
What's next? An egomaniacal, murderous computer that calls itself "Hal"?
Resistance... is futile.
a riddle I heard from somewhere in some archaic form of English:
Howe manye donkeyes tales behoueth reche from the Erthe to the Moone?
Just one, an' it be longe enough.
I'm doing this from memory, and my Olde Timee Englishe isn't that good, but it translates to something like:
How many donkey's tales tied together does it take to reach the moon? One, if it's long enough.
The topic of this thread started out as "Space Elevator." Who ever moderated this post (#13593147) as anything other than -1 off topic is eggregiously irresponsible. What is worse, this moderator thinks the post is "Interesting."
Is there some way we can rate the moderators? This moderator should be moved on to responsibilities other than moderating.
theDunedan
In all fairness, ancient polytheism wasn't as much a clever design from scratch, but a mix-and-match that reflected more who conquered whom, and which faction gained influence at whose expense.
For starters, each time a new city would join the empire, its own protector deity would be added to the pantheon. Or occasionally a close enough existing deity would be used as a good enough substitute.
(With the occasional mis-step, such as Egypt ending up basically ruled by satanists because their invaders assimilated their own deity of war with Egypt's Set.)
And that was just the beginning. From there Gods moved up and down the hierarchy like yoyos, and occasionally got killed off, to reflect the shifts in the balance of power. Each time a city or caste gained enough power and influence (e.g., went to be alliance leader or was the birthplace of the new Pharaoh or whatever), it's deity went up the hierarchy. Then they got pushed downwards and so did their god.
And whole new myths and legends got thought up to give the masses some explanation as to why that balance changed. "Yeah, well, Ra may have been all that cool and great, but our Isis tricked him, so now she and Osiris rule even over him. So get worshipping your new masters." Some time and an invasion later, "Yeah, but our Set killed your Osiris. Pwn3d, suckers." Then two centuries and a revolt later it's "Yeah, but our Isis did a bit o' necrophilia, gave birth to Horus, and between them they pwn3d Set and resurrected Osiris." And so on, and so forth.
So basically IMHO all that separation of responsibilities was more like the side-effect of all this, than cleverly designed that way to avoid uncomfortable questions.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I suppose you think the elevators should have "Real People Personaities" too huh?
Imagine the lawsuits when one of the elevators suddenly starts spouting how depressed it is, and decides to end it all with a nice long free fall.
Hey if we build this thing in just the right spot at just the right height then while the Earth rotates the elevator can act as a giant baseball bat and our satellites can be the balls...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
So I take it that the peanuts in the little bags at those accelerations would become peanut butter, mmmm peanut butter.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
You mean Arthur C. Clarke? :)
</fanboi>
Actually the U.S. owns Baker Island (0 deg 12' N, 176 deg 29' W), 12 nautical miles N. of the equator, and Jarvis Island (0 deg 23' S, 160 deg 01' W), 23 nm S. of it.
So if we built an offshore platform on the equator near either one, we could claim it as U.S. territory (since it'd fall within the existing 200 km exclusion zone).
>;k
So what we do is buy a ton of these Professional Series Ionic Breeze Quadra Silent Air Purifiers, now with OzoneGuard! You get a 50% discount for buying two, I wonder what the discount would be on 1000? I have no idea how many it would take to build this ring you are talking about, but its certainly something to think about.
Don't forget, with each purchase, you get a free Ionic Breeze® Air Freshener 2.0!
Could it have one of those phones in case the elevator gets stuck?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
From what I've heard, it sounds like the FAA has moved to deny their request until LiftPort can demonstrate that the elevator is knidproof.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but this bit I think is creeping featurism. We don't have magic ground cars that prevent maniacs from blowing them up in vulnerable places, after all.
Mind the Gap
press all the buttons from 1 to 10,000, and you have to stop on each floor
..........FULL STOP.
According to the Japanese vision for Sky City (iirc) there would be seven bowls whereby each would be open to a central atrium. It would not be inconcievable to know most of the people on your bowl, and with plenty of room for shops, bars, etc. Each bowl would also have the same population as most small towns.
sorry to be in such a rush, saw this right as i was headed out the door.
2^3 * 31 * 647
the major problem is still that the bulk of the energy being used, regardless of the source, is going to be spent keeping the vehicle in the air instead of moving it towards its desitnation.
Not really. Airplanes are built to fly. Staying in the air doesn't take much energy. Small airplanes can get the equivalent of 30mpg. (you are running a small engine in the range where it is most efficient most of the time, unlike a car where the engine is typically oversized) This while flying at 90 mph.
And watch out if your "engine" dies for whatever reason.
No more than if the engine dies on the freeway. Less because in 3d space there is a lot more room between planes (even if everyone was flying to work during rush hour, one person per plane), so you have more room to deal wit the problem. Radio contact means that you declare an emergency and everyone knows to get out of your way. Airplanes to not instantly drop from the sky at 9.8m/s/s, they glide down slowly. Sure you can't go far, but there is plenty of time and room to choose where you come down. Pilots are tested in this exact situation. I'll bet your drivers examiner never shut off the engine while you were on the freeway (I never got over 25 mph on my drivers test).
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I guess the astronaut gets killed in the process, seeing as he isn't there to smell it.
nice article about space elevator research for those who are members.
A Hoist to the Heavens
This was in the August issue of the IEEE Spectrum:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug05/1690
23,000 mile journey into space. How fast are you going? Remember you're attached to a carbon fibre rope, not flying free, what's your top/average speed going to be? 100mph? 1000mph?
How long is it going to take? 1 day, 5 days, 10 days? How many lifts can be made per week? Per month? Per year?
The high cost of getting into space is more to do with the management and infrastructure than the cost of the fuel.
Deleted
The sole question, and I'm pretty sure you agree with me on this, is what to replace the rocket system with. My personal preference is to push R&D in every possible direction. Ideas that don't work will fall off the edge on their own, leaving the best ones standing. That way, the pick is based on what works, not what someone thinks should work.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
hehehehehehehe, it has been a while since I have been flamed so pointlessly. I will respond for anyone who might have been confused by your response.
As for referring to "Europe" i was using the same term a VP(CEO?) of GM(?) used recently when saying the advanced cruise control as coming out there and not here. I guess he didn't know what he was talking about.
AS for the complexity being "unimaginable", fortunately there are many of us who can think a bit bigger then you. If it required a large infrastructure, we could handle it. I am sure 30 years ago having nearly every computer in the world connected to each other would have seemed "unimaginable". I mean, why would we ever need more then 4 billion IP address?
And lastly,as for autoland comment, I guess when the linked article says "without help from the pilot" doesn't mean what it says. Yet again you should tell them how wrong they are.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Actually at this point in time he was the Hebrew God, not the Christian God. This was roughly 5000 years (or so) prior to Christ.
Also when reading the Old Testament one has to remember that it was writen very similar to the Illiad and the Oddessy. Therefore 1) don't take everything literally and 2) Remember these people didn't understand basic concepts such as weather and gravity. They tended to blame everything, negative and positive, on "God/gods etc".
You are applying a very 20th century mindset on a book that was written with anything but.
Before making such an inflamatory (and ignorant) statement you might consider pondering your thoughts first.
Libertas in infinitum
This Idea stunk when it was a bad startrek voyager episode. John Dvorak was right, "there are no new bad ideas, just old ones getting recycled!"
Say, just a thought here. Why not make a space elevator with lightweight elevators that shoot the elevator straight out into Space? No good huh? Well, it worked for Christopher Reeve... Levity, brevity & jovial{moon}ality time: Okay, boys. Play us a little Bruce http://tinyurl.com/dkgar screaming Brain Campbell music whiles I go warm up the space car.
Google search for "Ionic Flow Ring" (with the quotes) reveals ZERO results.
Google search for Ionic Flow Ring (sans quotes) comes up with 390,000 results, the first few of which are debunking the "Q-Ray" bracelet.
So, please, cite some credible sources, with links, and we'll determine if you're being honest, or merely blowing smoke out your ass.
=)
When was the last time a ship at sea was attacked by a car bomb?
I encourage everyone to check out Liftport's web site, as these concerns have already been addressed, as well as most of the others that have been brought up in this thread.
The base of the elevator will be a couple hundred miles offshore. The ribbon will be nowhere near any normal air traffic routes. Further, the area around it will be protected by a heavy military presence (they've already worked this out with the US government).
Weather is potentially an issue, but not a deal-breaker, and they're working out the fine details there. As far as space debris goes, the entire thing is mobile to a limited extent. They expect to make regular small changes to its location to avoid colliding with junk.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
As if it was done on cue - the moment the doors close on floor 1 ... ...the fat guy lets one rip....
They're not likely to be useful for launching humans or fragile hardware, but if you're trying to get bulk materials into orbit, they may do just fine. Some of the obvious materials you might want to launch include rocket fuel, food&water for space station crews, building materials to build space stations and other rockets with, etc.
In particular, if you're trying to build an elevator and need something to anchor it to, the choices are either to lasso an asteroid or else haul lots of dead weight up into geosynch orbit, both of which are fairly extreme concepts right now; railguns might be able to do the dead-weight job for you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It may sound great an elevator. I just wonder how to keep a rope straight up in the sky, while the wind is blowing. You don't want it to come down and fall on a nearby city, loaded with heavy cargo. Perhaps that may require a lot of feul. (it's not a small rocket blowing it's full away this thing has to stay up forever) And uhoh forever... ehm how about radiation and UV light it will break down a lot of materials, over time..(oops).
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Er... Oops. Never mind.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Ironcially enough, it's this multitude of languages that causes a lot of the strife in religion. I mean, just look at the debates over how to interpret the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. The word does not directly translate out to "kill," closer to "murder," which leaves the path open for self-defense and defense of others. Or heck, just look at the parables. "You must love each other as brothers." "But Lord, who is my brother?" It kind of reminds me of a sci-fi story I read years ago where a writer was approached by aliens and offered the gift of an entirely clear language. The metaphor they use is that the average word is like a closed box. You can weigh it. You can shake it to hear if it rattles. But in the end, you don't really know what's in it. What the aliens proposed was opening that box (presumably through some form of mass granted telepathy) to everyone. The writer refused the gift and drove off the aliens by writing up the story as a piece of science fiction. Basically, his reasoning was that without the lie of language, writers would be out of business.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.