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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."
But would we be able to hold miles of it together, without anything going wrong? That's the challenge.
That, and the money needed to build and maintain it.
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
Oh, c'mon - the grandparent here must be bollocks... an unqualified ridiculous statement.
/me hums a song about Cuba.
By that logic, a US citizen, couldn't come to say, the UK, get a CAA issued license and fly with it coz they don't have permission from the FAA?
I know the Seppo's have been going a bit nuts lately, but, how do you imagine they'd enforce these sort of rules, arrest folks on re-entry into the US?
Why start investing in a project when you don't even know if you will legally be able to do it? Get approval first.
Uh, no? Geosynchronous/geostationary orbit means that the whole thing will rotate at the same speed as the point it's attached to. Besides, think about what you just said. Man-made structures are infinitesimal against the scale of an entire planet. I don't have numbers on it, but rest assured that even a big space station with a tether going all the way down to the surface of the planet would not have anything close to the mass needed to exert any real force against Earth's rotation.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
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.
Of course, there's a massive waste of time, effort and money in the meantime. And who is to say that by the time this "space elevator" comes around and is usable to launch space vehicles, we won't have developed a more efficient, cheap, powerful fuel to launch shuttles?
It's like high power computing. Sometimes waiting is the best solution. You could start computing in 1980 with whatever power is available and it could take - what - 30 years for the computing to finish on that power? Or we could wait until 2005, toss a couple of cheap boxes together and achieve the same computing in a few months - coming out ahead of if we had just started in 1980. Saving time, power and money.
I don't think we'd ever use the elevator. At best, it'd just be a technology that comes and goes without being useful to anyone - except that in the process of creating and building it, we'd probably have acquired some useful degree of scientific discovery and experience that would help with future endeavors in other areas... The question is, will what we gain from it be worth the money invested in it?
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!
Increasing computing power is easy, the laws of thermodynamics are a bitch. That's why we have yesterday's supercomputers in most houses, but flying cars don't exist.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
While I agree with your response in principal, your example of the flying cars is a poor choice.
The difficulties with flying cars aren't rooted so much in technology (fuel source) but rather in the inherent problems created revolving around traffic monitoring/control, the necessity for a pilot's license, the stupidity of the average driver, reduced control leading to an increased number of collisions, issues of collateral damage from an accident/auto-failure, the drastically increased mortality rate for such incidents, etc.
The problem of finding a cost-effective fuel source is almost a moot point as nobody would vote to allow people to fly over their houses/cars with them with all of the potential complications. The concept of the everyday man zooming around in a flying car is a grand concept of the future planted in our minds by fantastical books and movies, but it isn't really a realistic notion in today's civilized society.