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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."
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?
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?
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