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Space Elevator Rebuttal From LiftPort Founder
TropicalCoder is the reader who submitted the story about the possible demise of LiftPort a couple of weeks back. The resulting discussion was mostly negative about the feasibility of building a space elevator. TropicalCoder writes: "At one point during the discussion, LiftPort founder Michael J. Laine personally entered the discussion, but for the most part remained invisible since he hadn't logged in. I responded to his comment that if he would like a chance to rebut the criticisms, he should contact me and I would undertake to interview him and post the resulting story on Slashdot." Read below for the story of how Mr. Laine's detailed reply and rebuttal to that Slashdot discussion came about. TropicalCoder asks, "After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
Michael Laine called me long distance via cell phone that very day from his back yard near Seattle, and spoke with me for over an hour. Michael came across as a rather sober, likable fellow, not at all like the crackpot image one would conjure up from reading many of the Slashdot comments. He was clearly wounded by the stinging criticisms in the Slashdot discussion, and I couldn't help empathizing with him. Here was man who had put his money where his mouth was, risking everything on his dream, perhaps suffering his darkest hour, and enduring ridicule on top of that.
At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for. It was clear to me that he sincerely believes in what he is doing. Whether he succeeds in the end or not, I would prefer to call him a "visionary." After all, for every great visionary you can recall from history, there must have been a thousand others who tried and failed, but are no less visionary because of that. The jury is still out on LiftPort, and rumors of their death would be premature. They continue their research, and as I write are preparing for the "Tethered Towers" demo on Thursday June 28.
At the end of the conversation it was agreed that I would summarize the Slashdot discussion for him and offer him an opportunity for point-by-point rebuttal. I completed this summary (in which many Slashdot readers will recognize their own words), and sent it off to him the next day. He acknowledged receipt and promised an answer shortly. A few weeks passed, and I imagined that he must have decided in the end that the criticisms were so severe, perhaps it would be best just to try to forget it. It was a total surprise to me when a thoroughly detailed response arrived in my mailbox today, demonstrating that the people at LiftPort at least are still convinced that building a space elevator is possible.
Space elevator themes have been celebrated in science fiction and many Slashdot readers have shared the dream, only to become disillusioned with the apparent pending demise of LiftPort. After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
Michael Laine called me long distance via cell phone that very day from his back yard near Seattle, and spoke with me for over an hour. Michael came across as a rather sober, likable fellow, not at all like the crackpot image one would conjure up from reading many of the Slashdot comments. He was clearly wounded by the stinging criticisms in the Slashdot discussion, and I couldn't help empathizing with him. Here was man who had put his money where his mouth was, risking everything on his dream, perhaps suffering his darkest hour, and enduring ridicule on top of that.
At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for. It was clear to me that he sincerely believes in what he is doing. Whether he succeeds in the end or not, I would prefer to call him a "visionary." After all, for every great visionary you can recall from history, there must have been a thousand others who tried and failed, but are no less visionary because of that. The jury is still out on LiftPort, and rumors of their death would be premature. They continue their research, and as I write are preparing for the "Tethered Towers" demo on Thursday June 28.
At the end of the conversation it was agreed that I would summarize the Slashdot discussion for him and offer him an opportunity for point-by-point rebuttal. I completed this summary (in which many Slashdot readers will recognize their own words), and sent it off to him the next day. He acknowledged receipt and promised an answer shortly. A few weeks passed, and I imagined that he must have decided in the end that the criticisms were so severe, perhaps it would be best just to try to forget it. It was a total surprise to me when a thoroughly detailed response arrived in my mailbox today, demonstrating that the people at LiftPort at least are still convinced that building a space elevator is possible.
Space elevator themes have been celebrated in science fiction and many Slashdot readers have shared the dream, only to become disillusioned with the apparent pending demise of LiftPort. After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
Me: The Space Elevator is a glorious technology that may one day be built by an advanced human civilization, and when it is, it will be a modern world wonder.. but that day is not today.. it's probably not even in the next 30 years.
LiftPort: We disagree. So far as our official road map is concerned, we are on schedule - and in fact, we are even a little ahead of schedule on some projects.
Ok, that's great, but you're the ones making this amazing claim that you could build a space elevator today if only you had the money. Amazing claims require amazing proof. Your official road map doesn't exactly cut it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm working on a space escalator. Sure, it's not as fast getting up there, but you don't have to wait for the car to come back down from orbit when you press the up button. To get down quickly, there's also a space firehouse pole.
In all seriousness, though, I wish the LiftPort guys luck. I'm not sure how feasible it is, but I'd rather have people investing in creative, sometimes radical technologies than just sitting back and saying "no, that'll never work".
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Because even though we can GET to space, all the really interesting stuff you can do up there is infeasible due to the fact that the only way to get anything INTO space at the moment is to strap a rocket to it and pray. Provided it gets there at all, it still costs tens of thousands of dollars per pound to get something up there. And once it's up there, there's no way to get it back down except to drop it.
The gigantic, orbiting space stations we envisioned as children won't be possible until we can get stuff to outer space cheaply and easily. Neither will manned missions to mars.
With a space elevator, all you do is load it up onto a climber and send it up the cable. It'll get there in a few days. Not as fast as a rocket, sure, but a hell of a lot cheaper, easier, and safer.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Look, I don't blame you. There has been little to no public discussion of why space is such an important place to go. Let me try to explain just a little here for you now. For starters, we have an increasing population on Earth. Traditionally, this hasn't been much of a problem because the majority of the population has been too poor to pose any real threat to using up all the resources on Earth. There's a finite amount of coal, oil, and precious metals on this planet, not to mention land you can use for growing food. As they say, they're not making any more of it. So, what to do?
Well, there's some people who think we should force people to stop breeding. Put a limit on how many children you can have so that the birth rate is less than the death rate. Stop treating the sick and old. Stop giving aid to third world countries. Just let em all die so that the population of Earth gets down to a nice manageable level. These people rally under the banner of "Limits To Growth".
Then there's the space advocates. Of which I am one. We believe that the best solution to there not being enough resources on Earth for everyone is to go get resources off Earth. There's thousands of Near Earth Asteroids which contain hundreds of times more metal than the entire crust of the Earth is believed to hold. There are only thousands of them because the Earth has this giant deflector that thankfully stops them from falling on us (although every 60 million years or so we get a big one that nearly wipes out all life on the planet, the last one was about 65 million years ago). This giant deflector is called The Moon and it has millions of craters on it, most of which were caused by these big metal asteroids.. the metal is still up there.
Getting to the Near Earth Asteroids is considered easier than getting to the Moon, but the Moon obviously has a lot more resources on it and, hey, we've done it a dozen times already. The cost of expanding our civilization into space is great. I don't argue that. But the cost of not expanding our civilization into space may well be much much greater. We're eating up this planet, and we don't (yet) have another one.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Reading the Slashdotters' comments was really painful. Do people around here lack vision and research skills?
Carbon nanotubes are a miracle material. Not just for space elevators, but also for strengthening building/vehicle frames and nanotech. Any research on mass production of high-quality carbon nanotubes will have plenty of spill-over effect.
Unrolling the initial fabric from orbit down to the surface without snagging is a challenge, but hardly an impossible one.
Tesla was playing with remote power transmission a century ago. There's still work to be done, but all the major breakthroughs are in place.
Speed to orbit? Why do you need to go fast? People used to take months to cross the Atlantic, and the treasures offered by cheep space travel are massive compared to the treasures of the New World. Or just send up cargo on the elevator and send people on a rocket (expensive and dangerous in comparison, but quick).
In short, this wasn't Slashdot's finest moment.
Not a typewriter
Let me preface this by saying I work with carbon nanotubes (as an "innovator," not an engineer).
Where these guys are right on is that building a CNT factory would generate the kind of money they need to get going, especially if they can reliably grow high quality tubes. They are absolutely right that spin off technologies could more than make up for their current investments. But, as they recently found out, nanotubes are very hard to grow in large amounts, and they grow very slowly... hence the current high cost.
That leads to where they went wrong: They had "contractors" working on nanotube growth. It's not easy to grow CNTs, and it's not well understood. It's very difficult to reproduce published work on CNT growth unless you really, really know what you're doing. They need to form partnerships with the people working with nanotubes who are on the cutting edge of growth research. While they've tried and failed to build a factory, Iijima's group has made major breakthroughs in growing nanotubes in bulk, and he's the obvious person to start off trying to get on board with this (as a well known Nobel laureate working with nanotubes). If not his group, then any number of dedicated CNT-growth research groups in the US.
At some point, it would not be a bad idea to let a scientist into the upper management of a space elevator company. Just as a smart inventor will let go of some control of a company to a business person, these business people would have been wise to let a scientist make some of their decisions.
By (publicly, at least) focusing on robotics, they missed the boat on one key technology they needed which would have also provided them with the funds to keep everything else going. Hopefully whoever takes over leadership of the space elevator community has more luck.
I know it's slightly offtopic, but I always wonder why a highly speculative and fragile concept like the space elevator which is barely theoretically possible is getting so much press, while space guns, which are cheaper, more robust and don't require any new technology, are practically ignored.
h tm
In case you're not familiar with the concept: It's basically about accelerating a small vessel (by a light gas gun, a RAM accelerator, electromagnetically or a combination thereof) in a relatively short (about the order of one km) barrel / tunnel to about orbital speed. The vessel itself will only require enough fuel for circularizing its orbit, so unlike conventional boosters, a much bigger part of its mass can be actual payload as the exponential regime of the rocket equation can be mostly avoided.
While the capital costs will be high, a space gun is still dirt cheap compared to a space elevator, and isn't prone to be completely destroyed when hit by lightning, space debris or, for the matter, a shotgun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/05/980500-bull.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/julncher.htm
Well, just saw this
EuroSpaceward was just awarded funding by The National Research Fund of Luxembourg to hold a workshop on space elevator climber and tether design primarily focusing on systems for entry in the US and German competitions. The tentative dates are Nov. 14-16, 2007 and the workshop will be held in a yet to be announced venue in Luxembourg.
found at http://www.spaceelevator.com/
So it does seem there is still some interest outside US, albeit for entering a NASA based competition. I think that the immigration problems in the US for foreign students will quickly have some negative effect on innovation in the US in the long term. Innovation in the US has always been due to it's courting of students world wide to study and then contribute.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa