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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. "
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
If I could, I'd destroy you all.
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.
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.
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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?
Yes, why not? In theory you just need to go a short distance past Geosynchronous orbit, which is about half that, but only if you have a very heavy counterweight.
By increasing the distance they reduce the counterweight mass.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I believe what I said here still applies:
Makes some sense to me.
And me too
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The hard part of the space elevator is NOT the climber
There are a lot of hard parts of the elevator's "baseline design." The climber is one of them. It's not easy to make a robot that can climb 62,000 miles reliably. The first thing you have to do is make a robot that climbs at all. Then you improve its reliability a whole, whole lot - by having the robot climb a whole, whole lot, find out what fails, and improve that piece.
Besides the cable, and the robot, you also have to worry about power delivery, deployment, ribbon design (not strength). Each of those is not an easy problem. You do need to solve all of them.
Of course it's a PR event. Guess what? Our lack of a space elevator is a PR failure. You seriously think that with one or two hundred billion $ (i.e .5 fewer oil wars) we couldn't overcome every lingering engineering hurdle and build one of these things? So many of today's problems are described as scientifically insurmountable when really, it's just a question of misplaced priorities. With a really large (but not infeasible) amount of money we could cure cancer and AIDS, blanket Africa with enough doctors and teachers to spark a humanitarian revolution, and have prolly enough left over to get fusion/microwave power off the ground. Take your pick. The American voters have, and that's why things are the way they are. Launching a public awareness campaign for whatever your pet cause is looks like a smart move to me.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
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