Slashdot Mirror
Skyhook Robot Passes 1000 Foot Mark
JhohannaVH writes "MSNBC.com is running a story about yesterday's successful test of the Space Elevator!! Maybe it will become a reality after all." From the article: "This week's testing involved a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter balloon. Safety lines held by team members kept the balloon from floating away. The ribbon dangling from the balloon was made of composite fiberglass, with the robot lifter running up and down the tether ... During the day, the highest altitude reached by the balloon/ribbon/robot combination was 1,000 feet (305 meters). 'It gives us complete confidence that the mile goal is well within reach,' Laine said. Laine said that the Federal Aviation Administration has been very supportive and helpful in orchestrating their test flights. "
Maybe it will become a reality after all. But only after we put a man on the moon! heck, can we put man on the moon with this thing?
117,407,136 to go
I've always wondered what keeps the orbiting counterweight of a space elevator in orbit. If I start to climb the elevator, don't I pull it down? Does it need some sort of thruster to keep it up? How come pulling myself up and counter-thrusting at the top uses significantly less power than just thrusting up from the bottom?
1000 feet? Nice, a "space elevator" (circa 2005) almost two-thirds the way to the top of the Sears Tower (circa 1973).
This makes my launch of my Estes Andromeda a successful test of intergalactic travel.
If my elivator is in flight I think i'd decide that would be a good time to choose a religion.
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
~/Desktop/ $ units
2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 1000 feet
You want: miles
* 0.18939394
/ 5.28
You have:
cally@inego(23:24:09)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
we could build a partial one about a few kilometers above see level and lunch space craft from there. It will reduce fuel consumption by some ammount.
A fifth of a mile may be a tiny fraction of the distance needed to climb a real space elevator, but that's almost beside the point. If this doohickey can climb 1000 feet it can climb a hundred million, assuming the battery holds out. It just has to keep trundling upward.
The cable is the scientifically hard part, not the climber.
I have been following the progress of research concerning space-elevator for some time now. The LiftPort Group of companies working towards a space-elevator are making a great deal of progress. See here and here for more LiftPort specific information. Slashdot reported on the faa approval of their high altitude tests several days ago -- refer to that thread for some interesting discussion. Check here and here here for several reports concerning the viability of the elevator -- be sure to check the NIAC pdf. Also, Blaise Gassend has a great collection of information. Finally, though carbon nanotubes are still in their infancy (its been a little over 12 years since they were discovered) - their theoretical tensile strengths are perfect for use in the construction of a space elevator tether. This recent development spells a rosy future, and many innovations yet to come.
...Stairway To Heaven was looping on the Muzak. Frickin' annoying!
"This visionary concept would make use of an ultra-strong carbon nanotube composite ribbon stretching up to 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth into space." 62,000 miles?!?
This thing is of course, pretty cool, but it seems to me to be a pretty basic mechanical device. My understanding is that developing ultra-high tension/flexibility nanofibers capable of stretching from Earth to orbit, and developing the orbital platform was what made construction of a space elevator difficult.
My two cents.
_________
As Diddy says: Don't pull out your wallet if you ain't going to use it.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Nice, only of course this 'test' misses the one crucial, difficult part; the material to make the wire from. The space elevator will be built (either in tether form or in straight up crawl-up-the-nanotube form)...as soon as we can create the lenght of the material needed. That is the only technology needed to be tested; the rest (ie what they tested here) is a relative no-brainer on which funds needn't really have been spent. Proof of that; I doubt they learned anything crucial (or even really relevant) which can be applied to the real, fuill scale thing.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I mean, it's all very well and good that CNT's may be able to THEORETICALLY provide the strength necessary for the cable, but you know there's always this annoying discrepancy between theory and practice. Afaik, they still haven't achieved the necessary strengths in lab tests.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"A Slashdot analogy: the /. effect is to a DoS attack as a Zonkism is to a crapflood."
its more of a DDoS attack
why didn't the robots just climb up the safety lines instead?
Please, someone convince me of the economic viability of a 23,000 mile train journey. Not the technical viability, assume it can be done.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"This lifter is much smarter than our previous versions. It's our 18th version..."
...
...?
Version 1 Logic: Go up.
Version 18 Logic: Go up.
aoeu
The climber is trivial, compared to the cable. Wake me up when they have a cable that can hold 100 GPa and is longer than a millimeter.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
This is very relevant to the topic of conversation.
Pasta la vista, brother.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I've been editing the video from the 1,000-foot robot test. Since I've been busy lately with grant writing etc., I wasn't involved in activities like making the ribbon. So it wasn't until I was watching the video that I noticed the sentence written in block letters on the 2-inch wide ribbon (which alternates color in 50-foot strips of bright yellow and fluorescent orange) near the top:
ATTENTION PILOT: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU'RE TOTALLY SCREWED.
Our sense of humor (or at least Nyein's) may not (or it may) be visible from far away, but it's there.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
s/successful test of a space elevator/successful test of a balloon/g
How comforting that must be, knowing that hurricane Katrina recently caused several oil rigs to drift and another one to crash into a bridge I'm sure you have all seen videos of what the sea can to do anything that doesn't belong there. At this point, I'd be more concerned with finding a suitable platform to restrain the muscle of the sea, rather than work with the altitudes.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
The thing that I wonder, is how to do you anchor it? Wouldn't the forces be strong enough to just rip the platform you're anchoring it to out of the ground?
#include ".signature"
Wake me up when they have build a carbon nanotube 1000 ft long of the required strength. That'll be something significant.
Making a little device to climb 1000 ft is not significant. It's like building a single rivet, and saying, "look, we're part way to a 777!" Technically, yeah, but you haven't done any of the hard bits, such as all the materials science that goes into the fanblades in the engine.
The hard part of the space elevator is NOT the climber, it's the bloody cable.
I could get in my pickup and drive 1,000 miles today and not have any trouble. However, if I drove 100,000 miles, the engine would sieze up and the tires would blow out.
Give 'em enough rope...
and they'll hang themselves.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Although there are probably a good number of technical reasons for this test, it's probably about as much (or even more) a PR event as a technical test.
Among other things, they still have to come up with a microwave power delivery system before this thing is really gonna fly -- not to mention the ribbon material (hopefully within a decade or two).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
a break in the line isnt all that catastrophic. It wont fall to earth or spontaneously combust. All that happens is you have a sever in the line. the balanced mass ratio will keep it from flying away, or falling to earth. It will remain mostly stationary.
The tether would be already equipped with thrusters every now and then to counteract natural wind and gravitational forces and the inevitable inaccuracy of the mass ratio that cause it to shift. These same thrusters can reposition the line after a break occurs, at which point an automated repair robot could patch it back together in moments. I doubt the system would even be down for a day.
Of course, damaging such a line to that extent is difficult because of the strength of the material involved. A plane hitting it would be destroyed, but it would barely scratch the line itself.
If you do some reading into the materials and idea involved, a space elevator is not only feasible, its downright the thing we should be focused on. From an engineering standpoint, once you've the got the material down (we do), and the mass production means ready (we do, just need to construct the plants to make it), its technically much simpler than building volatile fueled rocket launch ships and all their various specialized equipment and facilities, maintenance programs etc.
-
The article claims the climber is much more smarter. Couldn't imagine why it would need to me smart. Unless the definition of smart is, "Turn motor clockwise/anti-clockwise"! Can someone explain why the climber would need to me smart?
-ItsME
This "Important Stuff" below the text area when posting the parent comment:
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Shameless editors! Not even reading what they post, but ask us to read the posts of other users!
-ItsME
This makes my launch of my Estes Andromeda a successful test of intergalactic travel.
Ah, the Andromeda was the first model rocket I built when I joined the model rocktry club in high school. Kind of miss those days. Funny thing is is that at the tyme I was living in Mass and when I moved back to Florida, less than an hour from the Cape, there wasn't any rocktry clubs there.
FalconShould there be a Law?
...is what happens if an aircraft manages to fly into this 62,000 mile long carbon nanotube ribbon. Does the ribbon break or does the plane? Either way someone is going to have a bad day.
My sig beat up your sig.
Stop asking stupid questions.
How we know is more important than what we know.
For everyone declaring this useless, how stupid would you feel having made this huge-ass ribbon only to have no robot ready for it?
Then, imagine some form of spring tension on the car to emulate the force of gravity (electronic? magnetic? a column of compressible gas? Someone with enough clue, time and resources to build a digital simulator?). Could this be scaled to give us an idea of the dynamics involved?
Would there be one point during the travel of the car running along the tether where the car would assume the same tendency for outward travel as the counterweight? After all, it's a tethered mass too, with it's own tendency to tangential travel. At some point, would the car start to race toward the counterweight on its own? And what would be the energies that would need to be dissipated on contact with the counterweight if this were true? What impact on the energies used for the lift and the point of greatest tension of the ribbon would this effect have?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
when even the joking comments are dupes. . .
The other day, while at a bar, I told people that I can jump over the moon.
I'm proud to announce that today I jumped 2 feet- a critical proof-of-concept that demonstrates the feasibility of my claim. Maybe I'll be able to back it up after all!
If you want to be rational about space elevators you have to face the fact that nanotube ribbons don't yet exist but ribbons made of materials like Dyneema or Spectra do. So what? Here's what.
Seastead this.
Centripetal acceleration is tangential to the curve, in a purely circular path, the vector can be envisioned going away from the center of the circle, not towards. You imply that centripetal is what keeps us on our feet. No way, Jose. You're off by pi.
Centrifugal force is the force that goes away from the center of the circle.
Centripetal force goes towards the center of the circle. Gravity is a centripetal force.
'The big one' has to be funded by someone.
For every successful test they can say they've done, that's another milestone to use for more corporate funding.
However insignificant scientifically it may be, it still looks good on paper.
"Lead my skeptic sight."
Enough with the dupes about the retarded space elevator. We get it and we don't care. Whoever keeps posting these stories must from Attention Deficit Dis... Ooh shiny penny!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
...robotic overlords! I, for one, welcome thee.
There is a problem with the space elevator that I haven't seen discussed anywhere. If you have a space elevator you can't have any satellites at an altitude lower than or equal to the height of the elevator, since eventually they will run into the elevator with rather unpleasant results.
From my limited understanding, the problem with a space elevator is essentially that the ribbon is kept tight (and under massive strain) due to it's length and the mass located out in space. So why not have a sequence of ballon mounted elevators (ie. one at 1000 feet, another from 1000 to 2000 feet, etc) allowing some slack in the ribbon? Once we get to a point where balloons are no longer feasible we can start using a real space elevator. The final "real space elevator" would no longer extend so far into the Earth's gravity-well and so is more easily built.
"62,000 floor ladies and gentlemen - tires, men's wear and housewares....watch your step"
Good grief. Here I thought people would be intelligent enough to see how blindly impossible my suggestion was, realize that I was joking, and take the light humor as it was intended. That'll teach me.
Unfortunately, we don't have the material down yet. If we did, somebody would be spewing out kilometers of the stuff and shopping around for a suitable asteroid to move into synchronous orbit.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Well that's nice, just yesterday I submitted that same story and got rejected!! I guess it's slashdot's editors that just get convinced to publish the story when they see the same article twice.
Many of us "see how blindly impossible" your suggestions was. We just weren't all convince you did. Most slashdot discussions about space elevators include several retarded "to the moon" comments from folks that don't have a clue.
seroiusly, what is an elevator to space going to be used for? This whole thing seems to be a 'because we can'-type project.
The theory seems to be that you start small, and you get progressively bigger and bigger until all of the problems are solved. The first time it may have been a small motor with a battery climbing a 100 foot rope up the side of a building. This time it was an 18th generation lifter with cargo capacity climbing a 1,000 foot high tensile ribbon connected to a balloon. Next time it may be a climbing a 10,000 foot high tensile double ribbon using laser power. Or maybe it will be a 1,000 foot carbon nanotube wire in a year-long stress test, with a climber specifically designed to do maintenence on the tether.
Eventually they'll get there, and this is a definite step in the right direction. While the tether may be the biggest unknown of the project, we still don't have much experience with this sort of thing. What safety systems should be on the lifter? How should it be powered? How long will such a thing last before it breaks down? How long will the tether last? How will the system weather storms? How will it weather space debris? How will you find a patch of ground strong enough to anchor the thing to? How do you keep the climber from jumping the track? How do you keep parts from freezing as it goes from wet tropical climate into space? The theoretical engineering may be done except for the cord, but many, many practical engineering considerations remain.
I applaud this team's efforts, and wish them much luck.
The ______ Agenda
So instead of tethering the cable to a balloon and having it climb a measily thousand feet, why not loop the cable around a couple of pulleys to form a cable treadmill, and let the climber "climb" all the way? Give the climber a real workout. This test smacks more of publicity stunt than of useful research to me.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Funny thing is is that at the tyme I was living in Mass and when I moved back to Florida, less than an hour from the Cape, there wasn't any rocktry clubs there.
I did start a club, er was a founding member of, but not of model rocktry. Together with a biology teacher a group of friends and I started a marine biology club. At the tyme a group of us were talking with the teacher about scuba diving, we all loved it, and she said she'd sponser a club. We were also talking about how it would be nice if a class was offered so she went to the administration and they told her that if enough people would agree to sign up for it she could teach a marine biology class. Within a week we had enough students sign a pledge to take the class, so the school offered one the following year. That class ended up being one of my favorite classes in high school.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If I remember correctly all we really need to make a strong enough ribbon for the elevator is a whole lot of Superman's hair. I mean, theoretically, the closer it gets to Earth's yellow sun, the stronger it gets.
theres no need for an asteroid. that was a crackpot idea from several years ago that is totally impractical and based around more traditional materials for the cable, and required a cable that was some 30 feet thick in places. The nanotube cable is going to be very thin, and quite lightweight (relatively, for something 62,000 miles long), meaning its counterweight will be very modest - the equipment used to build the cable can be used as the top anchor and park themselves when they're done.
the material *is* down. The method for making it *is* ready. However, the actual plant to build it hasn't been constructed yet because the funding doesn't exist yet. Multi-billion dollar plants dont spring up overnight.
Look at it this way. LCD technology has existed for quite some time, but its only been in recent years we've been able to make them in large scale sizes suitable for monitors. This is because the plants that churn them out cost billions of dollars in capital to make it, and it took awhile to get that kind of investment going.
Sure enough though, as carbon nanotubes have countless applications in every possible industry, the plants will be constructed, and not too far in the future.
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We currently build transoceanic fiber optic cables that can be completely powered from one end using DC power, with the ocean acting as ground (current technologies require a powered repeater every so often), so we have already built power cables within an order of magnitude of the required length (though the energy it would need to carry would likely be much much higher - a single crawler might use several megawatts continuously)
I would be curious to know how a power cable on a space elevator would interact with the Earth's magnetic field. Would it impart a significant force on the cable? Would the cable need to be shielded?
Alternatively, what are the power generation options in space? Could a nuclear powered crawler be built, and/or could power generation facilities be spaced at regular intervals along the cable?
Create a SPACE PULLEY instead of Space Elevator. We can have a pulley hanging form space just above the atmosphere. The pulley hangs from a geo-stationary Space Taxi Station. A small Space Taxi is released up using a very very large helium balloons. A platform can be made that has large number of huge helium balloons below it. The Space Taxi is stationed on this platform before the whole platform is released. When the platform reaches to the limit that it rise up in the atmosphere, Space Taxi takes off form the platform using jets propulsion and quickly reaches to the hook of the Space pulley which is just above the atmosphere and hooks itself to it. After this the Space Taxi station just pulls up the Space Taxi. Note : All this is done with minimum fuel requirements compared to the other technologies, so what say ? Space travel cheaper than land travel say from India to USA ? PS. A compressor can be used to bring the balloon Platform back on earth.
Sure, it's not been brought up, because it doesn't need to be. Most communications satalites are in geosynchronus, geostationary orbits over the equator, that is, they stay in the same position relative to a position on the ground. It's actually getting to be a bit of a concern, because satalites need to be at a specific height (around 35 thousand kilometers above sea level), and there are getting to be so many, it's getting fairly crowded (and by crowded, I'm guessing this means within a few hundred miles of eachother). Since this thing requires much more mass, its counterweight will be about twice as far out. obviously, this doesn't preclude a non GEO satalite from running into the teather, but since GEO satalites don't move, you can count them out as a problem. As for the rest of the satalites (mostly non communications satalites), they tend follow predictable and repeatitive orbits, though if someone can elaborate on this, it would be greatly appreciated. In any case, even satalites like the early ones of the 60s (Sputnik, etc.) there's so much space up there, there is probably more of a mathmatically likely chance of us running into a planet changing astroid than this thing getting hit by one. --Eric
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
What happens if it "breaks?" Say the counterweight falls off, for whatever reason. Would the whole x miles of cable come crashing down to Earth? Would it burn up? If it did make it down to the ground, I assume it wouldn't fall straight down. Would it fall over x miles? Could that potentailly cause some serious damage? Or am I just barking up the wrong tree?
Digital Sailor
Sure, balloons can reach high altitudes, but they still work on "lighter-than air" principals, out of the atmosphere, they're not lighter than a vacuume, thus, no lift, so while theoretically correct within the atmophere (a technical implaussibility using static balloons to hold a multi-sectioned teather in place, however, due to air movement, maintenance, etc.), you're back to square one once you get outside the atmophere, which makes up a large majority of the space elivator distance. --Eric
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
i can understand the lakers might want to build a robot that plays like karim abdul jabar, but 1000ft is over kill.
But then, a pretty plausible answer has occurred to me. If you've already been working on this problem for some time, you stand a better chance of sending some of those billions of dollars your way when the stampede happens.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"Centripetal acceleration" only says it will keep this thing from flying into space, nothing more. Tie a string to a small object and spin it. The centripetal force is the part of the tension in the string pulling the object towards the centre. Centripetal acceleration is the effect of that force that curves the object's trajectory, instead of letting it go in a straight line.
But here's the catch: centripetal force is _strictly_ the component pointing at the centre of the circle. It can't accelerate or decelerate the rotation. The reason you can accelerate that small object on a string is precisely because the string is a little crooked, and it pulls a little forward too, in addition to the centripetal force pointing at the centre.
The apparent force pulling it outward, that they mention there, is called "centrifugal" (runs away from the centre), not "centripetal" (pulls it towards the centre). This one doesn't do anything to keep it from losing angular momentum. Hold your hand still after you've made your object on a string rotate. It's seeming to tug outwards is centrifugal force. Note how the item can slow down due to friction anyway.
And things get even more screwy in a gravity well.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that while I'm sure some actual physicists did some actual calculations for that project, and they probably have a very sound theory of how it regains lost momentum (and how much can it safely lose or gain before that string breaks), that quoted explanation isn't it. It's some handwaving that's as "scientiffic" or "informative" as saying that Santa's reindeers keep it up.
"It's kinda annoying to see every space elevator article attract a swag of ill-informed comments that get modded as insightful."
I feel your pain. I found it slightly annoying too to see your quote of that pseudo-science babble modded as "+5 Informative". No offense, since you're not the one who wrote that, but it's got exactly zero useful information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
I'd imagine that the reason people keep asking is precisely because that handwaving doesn't answer it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
everyone knows there's no such thing as a free lunch, or a free (as Pratchett said) a free launch!
Please send me a postcard if you find my baloon (hot to get in space from just 1000 feet?, using another baloon? and again and again... ohmy..)
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.
I would be curious to know how a power cable on a space elevator would interact with the Earth's magnetic field. Would it impart a significant force on the cable? Would the cable need to be shielded?
Indeed there would be interactions, there have even been plans, and some developments, in deploying long conductive wires ('tethers') from the shuttle to study this (and possibly generate energy from the tether crossing mag field lines). Up to now actual tests were not very successful I think (the last tether I heard about, a Nasa/Esa/italian development, catched fire during deployment)
But even more than this, I think adding to the wire the need to feed electrical kilowatts upwards and downwards would mean yet another constraining specification to a system that is already quite intensely constrained by the pure weight issue, and just this may be a show stopper.
I for one would confirm the 'laser feed' choice as the best one, even if this means a bit of pointing / tracking from ground.
Herve S.
as stated earlier when the idea announced, launch of future shuttles rather than the major energy "waste" the traditional shuttles use today, and that is just to get off ground.
You are correct, but, well, that's just the thing.
Saying that the cable gets slanted and pulls the counter-weight back to speed is something that's palatable physics.
Their faq on the other hand, and that analogy with the pendulum are, well, too dumbed down to be still called physics. It's the kind of over-simplification that might be good as a metaphor for laymen, but doesn't even touch the real physics involved. Their metaphor that the centrifugal force pushes the counterweight back to it's place breaks down when you think of the physics involved. There is no centrifugal field as such, it's just an effect of the counterweight's rotating, and exists only as long as it spins fast enough. (Well, it exists at any rotation speed, but below a certain point it becomes lower than the gravity.) If the string was tied to a point instead of on a large rotating circle (the equator), that force wouldn't make it stay up to speed. It's the difference between you moving your hand in a circle and keeping it still in my small object on a string example.
Basically all I'm saying is that I wouldn't throw too much of a fuss if people have read that FAQ and still need to ask. The FAQ just didn't really answer the question, IMHO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The space pulley idea seems to be addressing only one fundamental issue, the provision of energy to the transporters, replacing top-end or transporter motors by pulling on the pulley rope from below. Unfortunately that doesn't consider the effect on the extremity in geocentric orbit, which isn't really "anchored" at all since its mass is relatively small.
When you pull on the rope from below in an ideal lossless system, half the energy will be transferred into making the payload rise, and half into making the pulley drop. That's not what you want at all.
There's an almost unlimited supply of energy from the sun available up there in principle, and no significant limit to the size of energy gatherers, so really energy is not the key problem, just an engineering challange.
The troll in this, I, err . . .ahh, fail to see. Speaks he, the truth, he does. To ahh, death discussed, this has been. When 2,000 feet they reach, another post, I'm afraid, suffer we must.
Err . . . ahh, Insightful, mod this parent, for the future he has seen. Truth, you dislike? A troll, ahh, not always.
May the force be with you,
Err . . . ahh, Yoder Kennedy
Have you thought how long it would take to travel 23,000 miles, essentially by rail, in an elevator which is what you'd be doing in the case of a space elevator.
The cost per launch of a space elevator depends on it's rate of launches which depends on how quickly it can haul stuff into space which is rather dependant on how long it's taking you to travel that 23,000 miles. What's the rate of launches required in order to pay for the capital cost, the interest on the loans, the maintenance and running costs.
Does anyone have any idea how many launches per day it would have to cover it's costs? Does anyone have any credible numbers for any of the costs? I keep hearing $10 billion, but the ISS (a tin can in space) is more than $35 billion so far which means that the $10 billion being bandied about for a 23,000 mile long cable plus infrastructure is rather a joke.
Deleted
Design the ribon to fold like a protein.Put it togeather as a chain .Place a carbon bungie cord to the links so they fold and lift the robot into space ,flicking it like a buger into orbit.
I was reading the MSN article, and I clicked on the "NASA: Space Elevator Concept" link under "Going Up: Resources", and got a "404 error: This file name does not exist on this server."
Now that's a timely comment.
You may think you understand what you thought I said, but what you thought you heard was not what I meant!
a plane is nothing to the tether. wouldnt even scratch it.
the plane would be sliced up though.
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This does address the safety issue a bit. No 22,000 mile long line of death whipping around the planet attached to a point on the equator.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In a related story, a scientist involved in the test had to be committed because, according to eye-witnesses, he went "nuts", after listening to the song "The Girl From Ipanema" over 100 times during the hours-long elevator test.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Let Cybertron show you the way!
practically, I'll eat my hat
Not wanting to state the bleeding obvious but its a balloon with a bit of string. Even the French were flying (and crashing) things like that 250 years ago.