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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?'
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
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
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.
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.
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?
Uhm, you can put the rockets on the earth side, actually, and by rockets I mean a large mass sitting on the earth's surface. The other end of the tether can have a constant outward pull that is more than capable of counteracting any and all mass sent up the line.
As for the ionosphere, they've actually done a lot of research entirely unrelated to the space elevator including physical tests. From what I've read on it, they're not ignoring the problem, it's just not significant. The proposed carbon nanotube cable isn't really conductive and would only be affected by the very local area anyway. That doesn't ammount to much. They've even bothered to calculate whether having a conductive cable could generate any useful power. The answer was no, there's just not enough energy there to do anything useful with. Even if the cable could act as a lighting rod, lighting is the result of built up potential. Having a lightning rod to the clouds would prevent any potential from building!
A concern you didn't raise, that's nonetheless of interest (to me anyway) is the scale of the project. IIRC, the individual wires that make up the cables of the golden gate bridge if placed end to end would actually be as long as the space elevator. Probably heavier as well. Since the cable has so much surface area, and most likely would be cut very very close to the ground (ie still in atmosphere), the cable would flutter harmlessly to earth. So disaster situations are unlikely.
'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.
No, the structure of carbon nanotubes (there are many variations) determine its electrical properties, as well materials that the tubes can be doped with. You can make them insulators or conductors.
In addition, the current idea is that the cable will be made of short filaments of carbon nanotubes glued together in some as-yet-to-be-developed fashion. The glue alone would probably make the cable non-conductive.
As a material, nanotubes have very flexible properties. By the time we're able to produce the quality and quantity necessary to make a feasible cable, we'll probably have the technology to pick and chose its attributes.
For those of you who wonder why we (Canucks) are so self-congratulatory allow me to explain:
We are the only nation on earth who borders no one else but the most powerful country in the world. We live and die under the shadow of the United States. In fact many parts of the world view us as the little brother of the US. So like a little brother we are always looking for something that proves our importance. Even better if we find one or two things we can do better than big brother. (this article not a good example of such) We are always looking for acknowlegement.
Also like a little brother we aren't taken seriously, even on those occasions we might have something good to say. "Shut up and let the grown-ups talk, little guy..."
Personally I am a fan of honest criticism and not bowing to the greater powers when it's not appropriate. That part makes me proud to be Canadian. But I'm not a fan of merely insulting the greater powers. Isn't that a form of intolerance? But just so you know, when you're a little brother you mouth off quite a bit but deep down you can't change the fact you love your older brother. You just don't like to admit those things out loud.
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
> The rotation of the earth is exactly what keeps the elevator up, much like swinging a weight on the end of a rope. Although it
> would be theoretically possible to anchor the cable at the pole, the additional problems would far outweigh the benefits.
I am amazed at the many incorrect comments here, this is a typical one which doesn't make any sense. I thought we were supposed to be nerds who know about this sort of stuff?
It is almost completely unlike swinging a weight on the end of a rope. It's the rotation of the elevator cable itself that keeps it in orbit, not the Earth. A space elevator would effectively be a long thin satellite in geo-stationary orbit. Therefore, it can only be built near the equator.
While theoretically quite possible, a space elevator has huge practical problems to overcome, and for those reasons I doubt it could ever be built. Not least is the problem of powering the car over a 35,000+ km journey. I will be very impressed if they can achieve even 1% of that distance. Then there are the political and insurance implications to be dealt with.
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.