Thoughts on the Space Elevator

Keith Curtis writes to tell us that Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, has posted his thoughts on why NASA should be building a space elevator instead or their current plans. Keith has also posted his throughts from an engineer's perspective (although admittadly still not a rocket scientist). "The challenges are many, but it has been a viable option since carbon nanotubes, structures so strong that one the width of a human hair could lift a car, were invented. A space elevator could be between 10 and 2000 times cheaper than conventional technology and will force NASA to change just about everything they do. Hopefully one day that bureaucracy will wake up and realize it."

Comments

Launch Loop

[QuantumG]

Sigh. Ya know, we could build a structure to space with todays (hell, 20+ year old) technology if we wanted. The Launch Loop concept was published 20 years ago and is viable today. It costs less than a space elevator is predicted to cost and, unlike the space elevator, can be built from the ground up instead of from orbit down. So yeah, please stop saying stuff like: once we have strong carbon nanotube fibres we'll have a space elevator two weeks later. It doesn't work like that. The majority of studies that remain to be done to make the Launch Loop a reality are much the same as the many studies that still need to be done to make the space elevator a reality. Someone has got to finance those studies and unless you can get PhD students to do it on government funding that means you've got to pour money into a hole that might never fill up.

Article in IEEE Spectrum

[cetialphav]

The August issue of IEEE Spectrum also had a story about the space elevator. This article is available online here. Not knowing much about the space elevator, I found this article very informative.