Space Elevator Challenge

MattSparkes writes "For the second year in a row, no team has won the $200,000 prize in the Space Elevator Challenge at the Wirefly X Prize Cup. Three teams were disqualified before the contest even started. Another competition at the event has been held up by confusion. Incredibly, it seems the organisers of the competition are not sure whether the ribbon used was 50 or 60 metres long, and whether any team completed the climb fast enough to win."

Comments

Re:How could you do this now?

[Smidge204]

The competition was for building a vehicle to climb the ribbon, not making the ribbon itself.

There is a seperate competition for designing/making the actual ribbon.

Ref: http://www.elevator2010.org/site/competition.html

=Smidge=

Re:How do they work?

[MichaelSmith]

How does a space elevator work?

If you attach a weight to a rope and spin it around your head the inertia of the weight will keep the rope tight. Because the Earth rotates, a large mass a long way out in space should be able to keep a line tight. The bottom end would be attached to the Earth, preferabley close to the equator. A station close to Geosynchronous orbit will be in microgravity. The weight at the end of the cable will experience rotational pseudo gravity. Objects dropped from this point will enter solar orbit.

Re:Other end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone enlighten me how that thing supposed to work?

See Wikipedia.

We fasten one end on ground and second end is fastened... where???

To an orbiting counterweight.

And what about Earth rotation?

Earth's rotation is what makes it work. Otherwise:

I still think that normal elevator - a-la tower - is much saner idea and can be achieved easier

Yeah, nobody ever thought of that idea. They're pursuing orbital tethers because they're all insane masochists.

A tower would be much more massive and would have to support its full weight. Tethering to an orbiting counterweight allows centrifugal effects to lighten the total load, since the Earth is rotating. You couldn't build one high enough to reach geosynchronous orbit, and thus whatever you brought to the top wouldn't be in a nice circular orbit when it got there; it would still need something like rocket thrust. With a tether, as soon as you get up to geosynchronous, you're automatically in a circular orbit. See the "compressive structure" entry on Wikipedia.

Re:X-Prize

[YA_Python_dev]

The cable will probably not oscillate at all (almost) because the cars will ascend at approximatively 100 km/h, by far too slow to do anything except a very small (less than 1 degree) lean at the very bottom of the cable (remember that a lot of payloads will probably be release before reaching 10% of the total cable length).

More details on Wikipedia and googling for "Annual Space Elevator Conference" (there are several simulation for the dynamic behavior of this thing).