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Canadians Vie for Space Elevator Victory
unc0nn3ct3d writes to mention a CBC article about some plucky Canadian teams planning to go for NASA's space elevator challenge. From the article: "Teams based in Saskatoon, Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto are among thousands of space enthusiasts expected to converge on a desert site in Las Cruces, N.M., on Friday and Saturday for the X-Prize Cup, a festival mounted by the X-Prize Foundation ... The competitors are gearing up for the Spaceward Foundation's Space Elevator Challenge, which requires them to surmount technical obstacles in the development of a new type of vehicle that would take people and cargo from Earth into space."
'Hey, how come there's no 'call space elevator' button at this end of the space station?'
Canadians Vie for Space Elevator Victory: The competitors are gearing up for the Spaceward Foundation's Space Elevator Challenge, which requires them to surmount technical obstacles in the development of a new type of vehicle that would take people and cargo from Earth into space.
Who knew that Willy Wonka was Canadian?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Do any of you actually believe we are close to being able to produce one of these monsters? I am guessing we are still thirty years away from the appropriate tech.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
No! Not the canadians! Noo'oh! It ruins my self-esteem.
They have a list of candidates for a one way trip. ....
George Bush, Tony Blair
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
So they are going to concieve, design and build this space elevator over the weekend?
God Be Gone
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If you lived next to 300 million Americans, you'd want off this stupid rock too.
My little site.
Not long, There are only three.. Earth, Menswear and space.
God Be Gone
Forget space elevators, I'd use gyroscopes so as to use the earth's angular interia to leverage them and a payload into space. Leverage being the key word here. You'd need some tethers or boons to control the contraption and keep it from precessing in the wrong directions. Of course once it's up there, it might look a lot like a space elevator.
does it run Linux? I for one welcome our elevator building overlords. In Soviet Russia elevators build YOU. etcetera
Where is this free beer everyone on Slashdot keeps talking about?
The Vancouver team will win, I have no doubt. Their best minds will be hard at work trying to design not only the space elevator, but also the world's first orbital growhouse. This will lead to a boom in the Canadian space industry, as the sale of..ahem..alternative tobacco products skyrockets them into superiority.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
I hope we get it done first.. -50% mineral costs for every Nessus orbital device makes a big difference in the endgame.
:P
But seriously though, it'd be nice if my country could pull this one off. We're always so busy cleaning up other people's messes with our peace keeping missions that nothing big ever happens at home. Canada may be once of the nicer places to live, but the only thing this country's a leader in is taxation, and that's not a good thing
Oh and uh, we have better broadband than the USA *snicker* But still not as good as Sweden
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There are two failure points in the "space elevator" idea. The first is a flaw in the theory, the other is a danger that is known but ignored. The theoretical flaw is exposed by the name "space elevator". Almost everybody tends to assume that getting into orbit is a matter of gaining altitude. It is not. A ship can orbit as low as 60 miles or so, but but it has to accellerate to about 17,000 miles per hour to do it. To get into a geosychronous orbit requires a much higher velocity. Space nerds call that "delta v", and it is the coin of the realm. Altitude is of interest, but it's delta v that gets you from one altitude to another. The energy to lift a pod is drawn from the anchor already in orbit, pulling it down. As it drops it moves ahead. The tether won't allow it to move ahead. The tether pulls on the anchor, causing it to drop more, and the anchor wraps its tether around the earth and crashes. The only way to prevent this is to apply rocket power to the anchor; exactly as much power as it would have taken to lift and accelerate the pod without the tether. The other danger is lightning. We have this thing called the ionosphere. The "ion" part means electrical charge. Meteors and ships passing through this zone often trigger a discharge of the stored energy. The amount of stored energy varies, but anything that crosses that zone can discharge whatever is stored there. The space elevator's tether would be the world's tallest lightning rod. BTW, I anticipate that there will be at least one response from someone who thinks the physical laws can be circumvented by careful design, and another from someone who thinks all laws are subject to a vote.
A few thousand people gathering in the desert to make a space elevator. Sounds good in theory but in reality the guy at the bottom will never be able to support the weight of all the others on his shoulders.
It was pretty cool seeing the teams trying to climb the tether. I only saw a couple make it to the top (200 ft), but several got part way. I don't believe anybody beat the 1-minute time limit to meet the goal.
One interesting thing is that, having to power the climbers from beamed power, they had to make them as light as possible, relative to the area of solar panels trying to capture energy. So these were pretty flimsy looking devices, and you could see wind causing trouble. Stripped bolts and computer glitches also caused their share of failures...
It was also nice to see all those young teams of excited people trying to do this - mostly undergraduate engineering students, but there were even some high school students participating.
And having John Carmack hanging out chatting with the crowd while his crew was trying to get his "hover" craft back in shape was fun. They had jumbotron displays for their challenge attempts, but you could also see it just hovering there a hundred feet up (not too close to the crowd, but quite visible). Of course the crashes had a bit of a car-wreck interest too... The most successful things seemed to be some straightforward high powered rocket launches. But there was a big enthusiastic crowd, and lots of sideshows. Definitely worth a trip to the El Paso area if they do this again!
Energy: time to change the picture.
So, when the elevator gets stuck... how is the Otis repairman supposed to pry you out?
Space Elevator and the X-Prize competition, or the Canadian participants of it?
"Oh, look, Canadians — how cute"?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Enthusiasts are hoping ot have a working flying car to take people to the PROPOSED space elevator. Says G Pangloss, ceo, we expect a working elevator protype to be built sometime in the next 20 years, and our flying car will allow you to get priority status by going directly to the landing station at 15,000 feet...
/.ers continue with wierd offf the wall fantasys..
In other news,
'Cause if there's one thing Canadians are good at, it's getting an entire carload of people high.
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
What...
[1] Earth
[2] Care-a-lot
[3] Space
All you're going to do is piss off the care bears.
Can the elevator be built at the poles? There were issues with animals and insects making homes on the test cables in friendlier climes. I don't think the rotation of the Earth is what keeps the elevator up...
a massive structure of granite rock up there, and once we get close then build something people in the X-Prize have thought of. By massive, I mean... (everast height)*X = height to space, X times the size of everast Big.
Didn't good 'ol George just say something about attacking anyone that tried to walk "on his turf"?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The space elevator isn't the only thing required to get to Alpha Centauri. Noobs.
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Now then, while we're up, there's a few things we could dump off in orbit that we've been meaning to for a while now. Celine Dion will be taking the first trip up. She won't be coming back down.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Take the weight of photovoltaics off the car and put it directly on the cable, with big solar arrays at intervals (optionally lit up from the ground) and car power through the cable.
With no atmosphere to create corona discharge, you could transmit power over remarkable distances by going to really high voltages.
A small nuclear power generator will prove to be the best way to power the space elevator. Problems of aiming
may prove intractable for laser power systems. Lightning may prove another hazard, but a large ground tower that is taller than most weather may obviate that difficulty. The elevator cars for the space elevator have been projected to weigh a much as fifty tons. The payload capability would be huge, and cost per pound of delivered cargo to synchronous earth orbit will plummet. This is not 'low orbit' sports fans! It is regular standard orbit such that once there you will not fall down eventually, but just as likely would fall 'up' into interplanetary orbital space. This would be the most useful place to be to construct off planet any and all interplanetary exploration craft. Interplanetary exploration craft would never be intended to land on a planet, but to travel to and from there with cargo that could in craft designed for that purpose. Furthermore, if we build an elevetor from earth to space, constructing similar smaller tethers for access to other target bodies in our solar system would be trivial. Much easier to go from up to down. As for nuclear power, what's not to like? You have the best possible long lived power source with little need to refuel it for a long time, and the fuel has the best energy density that we know of and can lay our hands on. Sure it has its hazards, but most chemical systems are
an expensive and even more dangerous hazard.....and take up over ninety percent of any ship with fuel that one literally throws away. Detractors from nuclear have mostly proved to be luddites, enemy agents, and publicity seekers peddling fear. Well, space is dangerous and we do not have the dubious luxury of not going, so why not go in comfort and safety and independance instead of in a cramped artillery shell. The space elevator will give
us this freedom. The Chinese think so as well and are developing the technology as fast as they can. They only hope a rear guard action using Viet-Nam era subvervion tactics that worked well for them in the past will again work in the present with the stakes astronomically higher. Literally!
I love all of this talk about space elevators... it's like witnessing people saying the world is flat or the moon is made of cheese back when thsoe ideas weren't considered to be hilarious. Space elevators are the sort of thing that our kids/grandkids are going to look back on and laugh and laugh and laugh.
We need a new X-Prize. An X-Prize for coming up with a psuedo-science "flying car" of the future and selling it to a uneducated and unwitting public. The first person to get 10 million believers wins.
I'm working on developing a space catapult that we can use to launch payloads into space. We haven't developed the supertension springs and bands we need but with advances in carbon nanotubes, the human genome, and nanobots we should have that technology in full production in the next 30 years so I'm going to focus on the catapult "cup" used to hold the payload.
And if that doesn't work I'm also developing plans for a capsule that will burrow to the center of the earth using two simple principles weight and edginess (meaning sharp not hip but disturbing). The capsule will use nanobots (which will be commonplace in 15-20 years) to farm bacteria that will sharpen and resharpen a super-carbonnanotube-alloy shell to the finest point ever known in the universe. A point capable of cutting through any material known to man. The capsule will use an EOD (extremly dense object) attached to the opposite end of the point to provide weight to push the point into the ground. This EOD will use new alloys and atomic manipulation techniques that will only be available in 10-15 years. Since we know we'll have these things I'm going to focus on creating a comfortable chair, probably made of leather with a racing stripe, to be installed into the capsule.
Indeed, seeing this first hand was quite interesting (I was there both days, and spent some time in neighboring Truth or Consequences, Aguirre Springs Recreation Area, and White Sands National Monument). I was really impressed with the high school space elevator team, as their device made it all the way up without much of a problem. I wish I was able to get more videos of the Tripoli rockets firing, as those were really neat. I was a bit under-whelmed by the lunar lander challenge though, if only because of the lack of teams competing and the problems encountered. But I suppose that is the nature of experimentation! :^) I thought the rocketman was going to fly around the crowd (like at other events)... Just seeing him float up 30 feet and back down was not too impressive. Seeing NASA astronaut Mike Foale's presentation about life aboard the ISS was really interesting and humorous. It is really neat to see the general enthusiasm surrounding rocketry and space exploration/travel at the event. I would like to go again when Virgin Galactic sets up shop in Upham, NM at the New Mexico Spaceport...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
*Goes to check the property values in Iqualuit*
At least the people in the second-most-recent wave of immigration don't demand reparations from the people in the most recent wave of immigration, unlike the people in the third-most-recent wave of immigration, who were somewhat more thorough in their genocide.
Why not have a multi-stage space elevator? Multiple lines sharing load down to a junction, and one line dropping from there. An upside-down tapered building in tension. ;)
Put the junction just inside the atmosphere, and you might float it as a high-altitude balloon. Which might simplify deployment - drop the high part, float up the low part, and join.
Multiple lines makes space-section ribbon failure non-critical (for the elevator at least - if you happen to be climbing the particular ribbon... you still need your parachute). Perhaps you could also hang a backup lower ribbon from the junction, to avoid downtime. And where you have multiple ribbons, you can climb up/down spares rather than float/dropping and chasing them.
So what problems? Possible destructive interference between multiple ribbons. Junction complexity and weight. But simplification of deployment and repair logistics might be worth it?
How do they get the freaking sharks to keep pointing their heads straight up. Wait theres no ocean in New Mexico anyway... Nvrmnd....
This is a good point, which is why purists often refer to these devices as "Beanstalks".
Nice try though. Read a physics book, look up the chapter on rotational kinematics. Note how things can spin and stay extended without having to be in a gravitational orbit.
It's EXACTLY the rotation of the earth that holds it up. It's like swinging a rock on a string around your head. The only difference is that the hypothetical rock will be help in its circular path by the balance of the string's tension against the centripetal acceleration, whereas the space elevator is held in place by the balance of the string's tension AND gravity against the centripetal acceleration.
Canadian taxes average to 40% of earned income, American taxes 30%. Seems like a big difference, until you note that Americans get piss all of their money. Shitty schools, no health care, prisons that are basically slave labour camps, universities that only the ultra-wealthy and a few token geniuses on scholarships can attend, ghettos, etc. In terms of actually getting value for one's tax dollars, we're so far ahead of Americans that I'm surprised they're willing to show their faces in public. Seriously -- we're talking about a country where pork-barrel projects are standard operating procedure (something like 80% of NASA's budget is "earmarked" for make-work projects...) A country where there are two national healthcare programs and a drug program that all together cost about a trillion dollars yearly and manage to help a grand total of zero people. A country that spends more on its military than the GNPs of most of the world's nations combined, and yet can't afford to pay its crippled veterans' pensions.
Seriously, the next one of my fellow Canadians I see whining about taxes is going to get a ballpoint pen through the eye. Then I'll dare them to stand up for their belief in how bad taxes are by NOT suckling off our healthcare system, police force, surprisingly costly legal system, or disability programs (assuming they're slow and I manage to tag the other eye as well).
Do any of you actually believe we are close to being able to produce one of these monsters? I am guessing we are still thirty years away from the appropriate tech.
I think we'll get a space elevator really soon: right after the first flying cars go into production, and the first bridge across the Atlantic is finally built.
It's actually very cost effective to offer the X-Prize for the climber now. By the time we can actually make the cable, in 50-100 years, hopefully all the good ideas for the climber design will have become public domain. Spend a few million now, and you don't have to spend billions to license the technology later.