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Space Rope Trick Experiment Goes Awry
Tjeerd writes "An experiment that envisaged sending a parcel from space to Earth on a 30-kilometre tether fell short of its goal yesterday when the long fibre rope did not fully unwind, Russian Mission Control said.
It was intended to deliver a spherical capsule, called Fotino, attached to the end of the tether back to Earth — a relatively simple and cheap technology that could be used in the future to retrieve bulkier cargoes from space.""
I climbed up the rope and hid in my secret magic room until I felt rested. Then, I climbed down and did 10d4 damage to Fotino.
The reason for the problem wasn't immediately clear. "It could be that the tether got stuck," Lyndin said.
An experiment that envisaged sending a parcel from space to Earth on a 30-kilometre tether fell short of its goal yesterday when the long fibre rope did not fully unwind
So that's how UPS plans on routing packages in the future. Perhaps they realize that the only way to achieve more damage per parcel is to actually drop them from outer space.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...really long enough? One would have thought that to drop something 150km one would need a 150km rope? ...and something to reduce friction as the probe gets towed along the ground at 17,000 kilometres per hour....
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
This project hangs on a thread. I don't know if they'll be able to pull it off or knot. They have to make sure they don't get tied up on this setback. It really could unravel any day.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
...string theory.
In the years since the publication of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, alternative models for space elevators have been proposed that would not have the elevator falling down upon the Earth were it severed. See the Wikipedia article on the subject, as this is a frequently asked question.
The rope did not only not unwind fully, it started going back into the spacecraft. Representatives from the manufactuer of the rope-unwinding mechanism, Duncan YY Heavy Industries, were unavailable for comment.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Managing big spools of line is surprisingly difficult. Oceanographers run into this all the time, as they try to lower a few miles of line into the ocean. The textile industry runs into it when they try to use very large spools so they can run machinery longer without splicing. Designing something to unspool 30Km of line under near-zero tension in zero G is non-trivial.
Here's a discussion of spool winding, if you're really interested. There are even companies that specialize in spool winding.
HASTOL stands for Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch. This was studied by NASA. We currently have a hard time with a winged craft that can make it to orbit. Space elevators also require "Unobtanium" with unattainably high tensile strengths. But if we combine the two, we get something which is both technically feasible and capable of dirt-cheap earth to orbit. Basically, have an aircraft capable of very high altitude, and about half orbital velocity rendevous with a rotating tether (Rotovator) that can take a cargo the rest of the way to orbit.
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More Cosmic Rope Tricks
> Seriously, get off this planet.
We're trying. STFU.
In Russia, they spend millions of dollars developing space cable to lower object from space. In America, we just wait for gravity to bring it down!
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Interestingly enough, FedEx does/did have satellites. Why you ask? In the 1980's what was then Federal Express worked with the fax companies to develop the Group III fax standard. Every FedEx station got one of these large fax machine complete with hard drives and a plain paper printer. The theory was, people would go to a FedEx location, have their documents faxed to somewhere else, where, for a fee, a courier would deliver it to the recipient. Alternately, high value customers, like law firms, would get a smaller thermal machines for mostly sending to the FedEx station which would forward it to the target station for delivery. The satellites were used to route the data between stations w/o using a phone line. Remember, this was before the Internet, and most companies who used fax would buy them in pairs to send between sites. Almost no one else would have a fax machine that could talk to your fax machine.
Federal Express spend *billions* on the system, and it failed utterly. What happened was the same companies that helped them develop the Group III standard made their thermal machines cheap and interoperatable. Soon, everyone had them, and the thermal paper wasn't too bad. You could always photocopy it once if you wanted a more permanent record. That, and falling long distance phone prices made it overall cheaper to fax a document than to have FedEx do it for you.
To sum up, FedEx has already been to space. They are looking at it, and it's always way too expensive for any kind of regular service. (except some data)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Ambient "temperature" is somewhat of an abstract concept when there's effectively no atmosphere. What matters most to how warm you are is how much radiation you're absorbing and how much you're radiating. I.e., insulation and color.
There's no way that they didn't consider the temperature of the tether. You consider the temperature of *everything* that goes into space.
What probably ruined this experiment is what ruined past experiments: oscillations. You can get axial oscillations from all sorts of sources, even things as little as variations in the speed of the motor can build up because of resonance. There's almost nothing to dampen them. We've had tethers outright snap because of this. We've also had tethers snap because of other things, of course. My "favorite" was the tether whose insulation had tiny pockets of trapped gas that expanded in the vaccum of space. The tether had become very high voltage because of moving through Earth's magnetic field, and the leak of gas allowed it to discharge in a plasma arc that cut the tether in half.
Not so simple a process as it at first seems.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.