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Space Elevator vs Wildlife
An anonymous reader writes "The longest test yet of the technology that might one day lead to space elevators has revealed some unusual problems. From the article: "There were several unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg colonies had been laid on the tether and curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to sip the morning dew on their surfaces." Maybe all the critters just want to go to space too."
How adaptable nature really is. Other than things that really destroy an environment, all human interaction and structure isn't harmful. Who knows what type of new eco system could be in the works!
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No, you fools! It's mother nature trying to keep us from leaving this planet! She wants to take us down with her!
"Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese." - C. M. Burns
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The space shuttle sucks, a space elevator swallows.
Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons ...
african or european swallows?
Once it gets out into space, wouldn't the long carbon tether become charged?
Like the static we discharge walking around the office, any critters setting up home will be in for a nasty shock.
liqbase
Hm... do you think that if your tether is beginning to BUCKLE AND DEFORM, you might have a slightly more fundamental problem than just needing to redesign the robot?
Well, I'm sure they're aware of it. But this kind of thing probably won't become more obvious until they do a 6-month test, I guess. Or 6-years. But the potential for your tether to break off eventually is probably going to be a slight drawback.
Come on Nature does NOT abhor vacuum. 99.999% of nature IS vacuum.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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actually, they'd be able to travel faster because there would be more accelleration time. It would take just over ten seconds at 1G (2G force on the passangers) to get to a velocity of 100meters per second, at which point you have 360,000 seconds, or 100 hours. Now with a lower accelleration, but a longer acceleration, that could be cut down significantly. Once acceleration stops, you are back to 1G (minus the effects of your distance from earth).
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Crazy thought:
Assuming ants can climb up the elevator, I wonder which altitude they could reach, given the fact that they supposedly don't need a lot of oxygen with their small bodies. (I know that ants don't have lungs and breathe through tiny pores, but still)
This idea just doesn't seem possible. A 60,000 mile tether, strong enough to carry a satellite sitting on a robot elevator all the way up into space. And then successfully deploying the satellite off the elevator. And this would be cheaper than rockets that send satellites into orbit now?
A space elevator sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go.
Ah, I see that your glass is half empty. While you say "A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" implying it's impossible, we say "A 100 meter test! Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" with the idea that we're simply going to do that 100 meter test 965,600 more times. Yes, that oversimplifies things, but it's a half glass full kind of perspective.
Consider: As I understand it, the wiring in the Golden Gate Bridge, if layed end-to-end, would stretch around the globe three times over. Considering the circumfrence of the earth is something like 40,000km, that would mean that we've already built bridge structures that incorporate over 100,000km of cabling. Granted, the design of the space elevator is completely novel; but this stuff is based on modern engineering understanding.
People get the scale of this whole project wrong. The initial ribbon would need to be small and slender and thin for weight purpouses of the initial ribbon. After that's established, we would start adding mass to the space elevator, until it's a megastructure, not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge. Eventually, the dream is to create a verticle subway system of sorts. Access to space would be cheaper than rockets once the space elevator was built up to the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge or the New York City Subway System.
..when you compare it to the support city that will spring up around the base of any such endeavor.
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, btw. If done will, maybe this technology would be cleaner overall than rockets or some kind of mythical antigravity fusion powered jet-pack thing.
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I think you mean two orders of magnitude off, not 100.
That being said, how far off were we when this idea was first concieved, or practical work began? A factor of 1000? 10,000 ?
Anyway, we do stuff like this because it's fun and achievable. Most people who follow this sort of thing know that material strength of tether is the current limiting factor, and there is ongoing research in this field.
But there are plenty of people who don't have the expertise to contribute to the material strength problem, but they can sure have fun screwing around with climbers, can't they? The work has to be done sometime anyway.
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"A circumnavigational flight sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. An 852 foot test. Only 131,472,000 more feet to go."
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Here's a quote from an IEEE Spectrum article (Aug, 2005):
"It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram. With space elevators we could eventually make putting people and cargo into space as cheap, kilogram for kilogram, as airlifting them across the Pacific."
The article answers many space elevator-related questions. Those who want to know more about the project can read it here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug05/1690
There are some technical problems (mainly related to construction of the cable) to be solved first, but the space elevator idea is definitely worth serious consideration, as it could provide humanity with extremely cheap and easy access to space.