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Space Elevators Could Be Lethal

Posted by kdawson on from the fried-by-van-allen dept.

Maggie McKee writes, "A new study reports that passengers on space elevators of current design could be killed by radiation. Even traveling at 200 kilometers per hour, passengers would spend several days in the Van Allen radiation belts, long enough to kill them." Looks like the elevator scientists will get this one solved before liftoff.

4 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Aqua viva by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One of the most popular (and massive) items that will need to be shipped to orbit will be water; and water makes a good shield against radiation. Just make your passenger cars with a living unit inside a larger freight unit, and fill the gap in between with water. If you used filtered fresh water you could even have windows on both walls and be able to look through.

    1. Re:Aqua viva by malsdavis · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Many water companies already treat tap water with gamma radiation to remove things like bacteria.

      Radiation - unlike radioactive particles - won't cause any further radioactivity within water.

  2. Rockets? by Odin_Tiger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How much thrust would a rocket need to zip you through those sections if you waited to fire it until reaching, say, 500 - 800km? Surely by then you'd be far enough away from Earth that a little bit of push would go a long ways, compared to firing a rocket from the ground?

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  3. Earning the Penthouse Suite by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why would I travel at only 200KPH? How about 2000Km:h, on an engineered track, through the near-vacuum past 100-200Km out? Space is an acceleration game, so really I'm concerned only with how long I have to spend under the crush. At 1G, I could get to 2Mm:h (Megameters per hour) in under 1 minute. 15 minutes through the atmosphere, another minute up to 2Mm:h, then a couple of hours to the top (another 1.5G deceleration for a minute) once friction is immaterial. At 1.5G all the way up halfway, then slowing 1.5G the rest of the way, that's 2 minutes to the top. I don't know if I'd want to fry on a daily commute, but why live with Earth limits when we're leaving the Earth?

    The other solution they're not considering in that article is to engineer the elevator car to travel inside the cable, rather than outside. Use the mass necessary for tensile strength for radiation shielding, too.

    These are 30 second solutions. I'm sure the next decades before we actually deploy the spacehooks will find lots of better solutions.

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