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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?'
They have a list of candidates for a one way trip. ....
George Bush, Tony Blair
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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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
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.
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.
So, when the elevator gets stuck... how is the Otis repairman supposed to pry you out?
'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.
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
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.