Future of Space Elevator Looks Shaky

lurking_giant writes "In a report on NewScientist.com, researchers working on development of a space elevator (an idea we have discussed numerous times) have determined that the concept is not stable. Coriolis force on the moving climbers would cause side loading that would make stability extremely difficult, while solar wind would cause shifting loads on the geostationary midpoint. All of this would likely make it necessary to add thrusters, which would consume fuel and negate the benefits of the concept. Alternatively, careful choreography of multiple loads might ease the instability, again with unknown but negative economic impacts."

Comments

Re:Rockets to the rescue?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Why not compensate for Coriolis force by using rockets?

Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! What problem were space elevators dreamed up to solve?

Sorry for being so caustic, but I am so tired of this fuzzy thinking masquerading as hard science. Space elevators were always, always science fiction that was only ever taken seriously by people with too many dreams and not enough mathematics to ground them. Yes, raising an object into orbit cost relatively little energy-wise. But the reality is it costs metric kiloton meters per second to actually send something up into orbit and you cannot get around this.

Normal surface based engineering has our engineering brains mostly tuned to dealing with energy budgets, with momentum almost always using the earth as a giant sink and so being completely ignored for static and even non static projects. But momentum is there and the universe requires that that book be balanced, and space flight shows us just how hard that can be when you try to do something useful.

You can tell when an idea becomes an ideology when ludicrous notions like towing an asteroid into orbit are seriously put forward by proponents. Space elevators ARE science fiction, at least as far as Earth is concerned. Maybe for some other wierd planet their budgets, physical and economical, will add up, but on THIS world, rockets are still the most logical option. If something like a (working) SCRAMJET comes along and solves the momentum budget problem for us, then we can leave rockets behind. Until that time, if it ever comes, we can stick to rockets in the knowledge that they work and they are cheap.