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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. "
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?
Hell, the Feds burnt though more than 20 million in Iraq this weekend.
Well, launch costs to GEO are $10,000+ per Kg. If you could move up a couple of tons at a time while saving two orders of magnitude on cost, that's economic viability.
Actually there is a project to use large balloons as heavy slow lifters. 1st stage balloon lifts the orbit balloon which uses an ion engine to get into orbit. It will take weeks to lift anything into space but it would be cheap and repeatable. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5025388/
The battery won't and can't "hold out". The thing is, current day rockets consist basically of 90% fuel-tanks and fuel, along with maybe 5% engines and 5% cargo. That's how much energy is required to get to orbit. Offcourse most of that energy goes into lifting fuel.
Batteries are atleast 2 orders of magnitude worse in energy/mass than rocket-fuel, and it gets significantly worse by the fact that batteries don't weigth less as they become decharged (a empty fuel-tank is ligther than a full one, nevertheless rockets jettison the empty ones and are multi-stage)
rocket-fuel could do it, with amounts of fuel similar to those consumed by a rocket, but then you hadn't really won much, had you ?
Current plans call for the climbers to be externally powered, perhaps by microwave or laser aimed at them from the ground. The energy delivered will go down as they get higher, but gravity decreases with the square of the distance to the center of earth too, so that works out ok.