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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.
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 hate to be the person that gets stuck on the 900,304,564,282,012,373 floor. :(
We don't have any investors,
We don't have a product,
But we do have in-principle government approval!
Woooo!
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.
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountains_of_Paradise
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
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.
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 ;)
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.)
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 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
Remember that you are really talking about a constuction similar to a railgun wrapped twice around the equator then stood on it's end - the extra length is due to having to have a counterweight to keep it up there, and the railgun is the linear motor idea to move things up. Climbers like the machines proposed in the article would cut the mass per unit length and the strength required, but we are still talking about getting in incredible amount of mass up to geostationary orbit by conventional means to build the thing before we can start using it.
It's a chicken and egg thing, one we get the materials we need to have a need to more vast amounts of mass into orbit and beyond before it is useful - and we won't really be seriously considering moving vast amounts of mass into orbit without something like this. It becomes more feasable if we can use some mass doesn't take so much fuel to get it there in the first place - hence the idea of having a great big rock as a counterweight.
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.
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.
They need to get a lot longer for use in a space elevator, on the order of between 1000 and 1000000, before this is remotely viable. There hasn't been much success in that direction to my knowledge.
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.
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
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
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...
Kim Stanley Robinson (_Red Mars_) had an elegant solution to this problem... use a robot factory to push a carbon-rich asteroid into position, then spin cable down from it. The non-carbon mass of the asteroid remains to provide counterweight (and structural support for a space station, which is a handy thing to have at the end of a space elevator.
Still a chicken placed before the egg if considered with today's technology, but it's more feasible and practical than "build all the cable on earth and lift it into space, so we can lift heavy things into space".
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Let's see, mach 20+ in the thickest part of the atmosphere... 300+ G acceleration... What's not to love?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Great, lay a source of conduction across the natural insulation of our atmosphere and discharge the entire ionisphere into the earth. Wheeeee
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
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."
Suffice it to say I don't want to ride in your mass driver unless someone comes up with an artifical gravity field to compensate for the G-loads. (Even at 1000 km long, that's still 5.8 g, not 2.4).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.