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.""

Comments

Actually...

[The_Isle_of_Mark]

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.

Re:Actually...

[lexarius]

But where did you put your magic bag while you were in there? It's dangerous to bring those inside, you know.

after a thourough scientific analysis ...

[Kristoph]

The reason for the problem wasn't immediately clear. "It could be that the tether got stuck," Lyndin said.

Re:after a thourough scientific analysis ...

[Anonymous Monkey]

I thought it was "ah, I see provlum, wodca lid stuck in gear," and then some kind of wise crack about moose and squirrel.

it's funny because it's true

[User 956]

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.

Re:it's funny because it's true

[Psychor]

I think even dropping from outer space plus the burns from reentry would still damage a package less than the average UPS delivery. They set a pretty high bar, I'm not sure that mere science is enough to top it.

Re:it's funny because it's true

[CRCulver]

Speaking of UPS, what happened to the idea that express parcel companies would be major forces behind private space exploration? In Michael Flynn's novel Firestar FedEx is one of the first companies to buy private spacecraft because it sees major profits in being able to deliver anywhere on Earth in just a couple of hours. But when you read about private space ventures here on Slashdot, parcel companies don't play any sort of role.

Re:it's funny because it's true

[Speare]

A vanishingly small number of situations require a specific material object to cross the globe in a couple hours. The Internet relieves any information hauling needs, and the rise of manufacturing and general ubiquity of export goods has meant that there's probably an identical copy of that object that can be had more locally. So most remaining situations would be fully burdened (not amortized like all 2,000 packages in a neighborhood UPS truck). Now it takes a LOT of energy to get even the smallest object into orbit, ...

Re:it's funny because it's true

[eln]

A couple of reasons I can think of:

1.) Cost. Sure, you could get a package delivered to Russia in less than an hour, but it would cost 3 million dollars.

2.) Right now, the vehicles we have that are designed for quick takeoff, orbit, and re-entry carry rather more destructive cargo. Maybe FedEx doesn't want the Russians mistaking one of their rockets filled with Barney DVDs for a nuclear attack and triggering World War III. I would have to imagine the PR from that sort of thing would be somewhat damaging.

Re:it's funny because it's true

[monk.e.boy]

Perhaps they should employ my mum: Free physical and emotional damage.

Re:it's funny because it's true

[Rei]

I had a friend who was a translator for the US military who went over to the USSR (specifically Kazkhstan) as part of a disarmament mission under one of the nuclear disarmament treaties (I forget which one). She often referred to them as somewhat of a scam, as both sides kind of liked the excuse to phase out older systems and create new ones to replace them. Both sides had teams go to inspect and verify the destruction of said systems. They could inspect anything large enough to conceal a "treaty limited item", which really was just used as an excuse to snoop as much as possible. The US side sent their teams over with laser measuring devices; she said that the Russians were really impressed with that, as they had sent their teams over with a much simpler device -- a stick. If it fit, they could inspect.

Anyways, everything to be destroyed was dismantled and ultimately crushed and scrapped. My friend saw this as somewhat tragic; here were these great feats of engineering that could deliver a payload anywhere on the planet with good accuracy in the matter of time you might spend waiting for a pizza on a busy night, and they were being wasted. Which gave her and some other members of her team an idea; wouldn't that make a great pizza delivery system if it could be retrofit instead? The concept was that you retrofit it with a new heat shield so keep the right temperature for baking, and you put uncooked pizzas in on racks welded into the "warhead". The pizzas bake on reentry, and then it detaches and parachutes down for landing. They even did some off-the-cuff estimates on how much it would cost, and they came up with, if a missile full of pizzas was ordered, a delivery charge of something like then-$20 per pizza -- but what a delivery!

She claims that she told the idea to a Soviet officer, who looked at her like she was crazy.

Close call

[Joe the Lesser]

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.

Re:Close call

[dr_labrat]

I'm a frayed knot.....

So much for...

[Delusion_]

...string theory.

Previous try

[Harmonious Botch]

From new scientist

Experimental space tether fails to deploy * 15:17 11 May 2007 * NewScientist.com news service * Kelly Young A trio of mini-satellites has failed in their attempt to deploy a kilometre-long tether in space. The setback means the low-cost Multi-Application Survivable Tether (MAST) experiment, launched on 17 April, may not achieve its goal of testing the survivability of a thin, braided tether in space. Over the past week, mission managers determined that the tether-deploying element, known as Ted, had properly separated from the tether inspector, a tiny satellite called Gadget. But a glitch in the restraint system kept Ted from pushing away hard enough to keep unreeling the tether from its spool. So the tether deployed just a few metres, rather than a full kilometre. Robert Hoyt, chief executive officer of Tethers Unlimited, which designed the picosatellites, says mission managers suspect they know what caused the glitch, but the company is not ready to disclose this to the public yet. "I don't think we'll ever know for sure," he says. Space tethers could one day be used to fling satellites into different orbits, thus saving satellite companies money on fuel. Or tethers could enable clusters of satellites to fly in formation and prevent them from drifting away from one another over time. Such an application might be useful in interferometry, where images from several telescopes, spaced some distance apart, are combined to give greater resolution. Some data Despite the setback, the MAST team at Tethers Unlimited, a company in Bothell, Washington, US, still may be able to get other data from Gadget to learn how a short tether behaves in microgravity. MAST team members discussed having Gadget crawl down the tether to Ted to try to restart the deployment, but they decided that option was too risky. "If we were to have Gadget start to crawl, there is the possibility of the satellites banging together, which would be very likely to damage solar cells and other systems," Hoyt says. This was not the first setback for the mission, which costs less than $1 million. After launch, the satellite team could not get a signal from Ted (see No signal yet heard from tether-deploying satellite). But they said that this should not have affected Ted's ability to deploy the tether. Longest tether Then, sky watchers who had been on the lookout for the deployed tether and satellites from the ground had not seen anything when MAST was scheduled to appear overhead. "That's one confirmation that the tether is not deployed to a very long length," Hoyt told New Scientist. In other space tether news, the longest planned space tether just got a little closer to launch. The satellite, a project of 500 students in Europe known as Young Engineers Satellite 2 (YES2), was shipped to its launch site in Russia from the Netherlands on 10 May. YES2, a project of the European Space Agency, is scheduled to launch in September. If everything goes as planned, the satellite will unroll a 30-kilometre-long tether that is a mere 0.5 millimetres thick. The end of the tether will be attached to a small round capsule called Fotino that will eventually re-enter Earth's atmosphere and attempt to land

Re:Space Elevators endanger EVERYONE.

[CRCulver]

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.

Story is not complete

[The-Bus]

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.

Spooling is hard

[Animats]

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.

Tether Enabled SSTO

[StCredZero]

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

Re:Tether Enabled SSTO

[StCredZero]

Basically, the Rotovator stores kinetic energy which is transferred to the cargo being lifted. The Rotovator can be gradually accelerated back to its former speed by very high efficiency engines, like ion engines. This is much more economical than chemical rockets because: 1) the very high exhaust velocities reduce the fuel required by a couple of order of magnitude and 2) you can refuel periodically using the Rotorvator itself.

In addition, power can be beamed to the Rotorvator from the earth using lasers or microwaves, which further reduces the weight of the entire system.

Re:Is a 30km rope

[clambake]

One would have thought that to drop something 150km one would need a 150km rope?

You don't know anything about space, clearly, so just shut up. Leave this stuff to us experts.

(aside: Hey Bob, I have an idea why our space tether idea didn't work our right, get this: what if we used MORE than 30km of...)

Re:Space Elevators endanger EVERYONE.

[lewiscr]

> Seriously, get off this planet.

We're trying. STFU.

Re:After a minute and a half on Google.

[Rei]

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.