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Space Elevator Company LiftPort In Trouble
TropicalCoder writes "The LiftPort Group, founded four years ago with the lofty dream of building a stairway to heaven, has seemingly reached the end the line. The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit. Elevator cars would be robotic 'lifters' which would climb the ribbon to deliver cargo and eventually people to orbit or beyond. Now LiftPort has all but run out of funds, and the State of Washington's Securities Division has entered a Statement of Charges (PDF) against LiftPort Inc. dba LiftPort Group and founder Michael Laine."
Long LONG before you can build a space elevator you need tether materials which are several orders of magnitude stronger than what we can build today...
If you could even get 1/100th of the way there on materials, you would have a great company selling fibers for military and industrial applications.
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Redundant strands don't help you with this. If even one of them fails, the damage it'd cause around the globe would be immense.
So yes, you need a material approximately 3 times the strength of a (perfect) carbon nanotube in order to be a relatively safe civil/space engineering construction.
Chip H.
In his book, High-Tech Ventures, Digital Equipment Corporation pioneer Gordon Bell analyzed various factors in the potential success of startups.
As I recall, one of his great big red flags was any product whose development entailed more than two technology breakthrough.
Yeah, here it is (PDF). He says, flatly, "A successful startup cannot be based on more than two breakthroughs in the state of the art. And for each area requiring a breakthrough, an alternative technology should be available as a backup."
So, by this measure, the Wright Brothers needed breakthroughs in engines and airframe design... so success was possible.
As for LiftPort, I think I've lost count of the number of breakthroughs they need.
And I'm not sure what their backup technology would have been if, by any chance, the carbon nanotube strategy turned out to be unfeasible.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I don't think you need to take an economics course to learn this. Anybody who forms a corporation should have an attorney and a CPA. Oneof those two people, if not both, should have said, "If you want to raise money that way, you need to follow certain rules, or you need to factor jail time for the corporate officers into the business plan."
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
If you're going to say "shit" say "shit." Don't say "S...". Using dots instead of letters doesn't conceal what you intend to say so isn't any politer. All it does is make it look as though someone has the right to stop you using the word.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Who cares? They'll figure that out later. That's just one of those minor details like "the materials to build this thing don't exist yet" and "we don't have anything that could contruct it even if we had the material".
But I bet they've got some lovely artist's renderings of people smiling as they ride the space elevator. You know, the important stuff. Everything else will just fall into place.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
It seems that a good place to try something like this would be the moon. It's relatively close, it has no wind to complicate things, it's gravity is dramatically less, so we could probably build it with today's materials science, and it would make getting on and off the moon dramatically easier.
After all, if your goal is to swim the English Channel, you might want to try swimming across a pool first.
I remember how excited all the nerds on /. were around 1998 about this, and then every subsequent year thereafter when another "breakthrough" on the path to the ultimate breakthrough was announce. If I recall correctly, the space elevator was supposed to be functional in 10 years from 1998.
I do wonder where all the money went. Will this be on one of those specials on Discovery Channel?
Well in that case, I'm not really convinced. I don't think it is the percentage that matters. It's how your margin of error compares to the variability of other factors that affect it. An example would be threading a needle. Say the thread is 80% the width of the needle's eye, then that doesn't give me much space on either side to get it right. But suppose I'm 80% as wide as my doorway (that's about right for a UK doorway and most people), does it take as many attempts to get through as it does to thread the needle? Of course not. It's not the margin of error as a percentage that is critical. It is the margin of error as a real value that matters. Obviously they increase together, but it's not acceptable to say 62% is too close. It would depend on scale of the thread's strength to the variability of the factors affecting it.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.