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NASA Still Wants Space Elevator
Jerry Smith writes "The Guardian reports 'Each of the groups that will gather in New Mexico is competing to win a NASA prize set up to encourage entrepreneurs to start development work on the technology needed to create a space elevator.' It still might take a while though, progress is slow, so slow."
It still might take a while though, progress is slow, so slow.
There is of course truth in that statement, especially considering the effective infancy of CNT materials science. Many gains have been made in the past 15 years or so, but it takes time...and thus the quote from the summary. We are today seemingly obsessed with instancy; however, this is to our detriment. Patience, patience!
Don't forget GPS. And satellite TV. And high-speed intercontinental data backbones. And weather forecasts based on satellite imagery. Even 'failed' missions such as Beagle 2 resulted in significant scientific advances (in that particular case, reducing the size of a mass spectrometer from the size of two desks to something the size of a Kirk-era tricorder prop).
Seriously, show me the tech that you propose will make space elevators unneccesary. Show me the orbital equivalent of a transatlantic ship, and more importantly show me that it's cheaper.
Otherwise, I don't see why your point is a valid arguement.
Furthermore, the atlantic bridge arguement is a red herring. This is the equivalent of building a bridge where previously ferries were used. Furthermore, even if we did have cheaper ground to orbit craft, a longer space elevator can be used to give the ascending craft enough escape velocity to clear Earth's gravity well, which is something that ground to orbit craft can't do.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
It's true that we may never see a space elevator -- it's entirely possible that the engineering problems involved in deploying one a simply beyond our ability to solve. But assuming for the sake of discussion that it is possible to deploy one, then there's no question that it would be an order of magnitude more useful than any imaginable rocket-based delivery system. Rockets are a good (if risky) way to get small amounts of material into orbit, but they completely fail to scale up past a certain size. The reason for that is because they have to carry their fuel up into space with them.... the more mass the payload has, the more fuel it has to carry, and the real killer is that you also have to carry more extra fuel to lift the extra fuel. So as the mass of your payload increases linearly, the mass of the fuel you'll need to launch it increases exponentially. At some point there simply isn't enough money in any nation's budget to acquire the amount of fuel they would need (never mind building a rocket big enough to hold it all).
That's why (barring the invention of some near-massless rocket fuel) you'll never see massive amounts infrastructure being lifted into space on rockets. With the space elevator, on the other hand, the problem is neatly bypassed: the elevator "car" carries no fuel at all. Instead, the energy needed for lift is beamed to photo cells on the bottom of the car via ground-based lasers. If you want more lifting power, you simply point another (or a bigger) laser at the bottom of the car... there is no exponential increase in fuel requirements, just more equipment (and more power consumption) back on the ground.
So yes, rockets can get us a nice little "lift the rich tourist into low-Earth-orbit for a few days" industry. But if you want to do Big Stuff, like large spaceships capable of carrying a crew to Mars and back, or solar power satellites, then you'll either need a Space Elevator to bulk-lift all that mass, or some way of finding pre-existing mass already in space and building all the components there.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The laws of physics work just as well for any nation.
I am convinced that Man will conquer space. Whether the dominant language is American-accented English, Mandarin, Spanish or Japanese is still uncertain, but your capability remains.
You have a brilliant track record, and a wonderful people. Your achievements have inspired me to a thousand times greater use of my potential, my career, than I would have ever reached without them.
However, from across the Pacific it looks like you're in a kind of perpetual Saturday afternoon over there. Might I diffidently suggest that you, as a country, get up off your arses and start doing what you were best known for again? Your beer is terrible, your automobiles are awful, your cuisine apalling, and your politicians are worse than the French.
But your aerospace engineering is utterly superb, and the hope of the race. Don't let the rest of us down.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear