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Inflatable Tower Could Climb To the Edge of Space
MonkeyClicker writes with mention of a proposal that could see an inflatable tower helping to carry people to the edge of space without the need for rocket propulsion. This would function in place of previous space elevator designs which featured a large cable and could be completed much faster, if proponents of the project are to be believed. "To stay upright and withstand winds, full-scale structures would require gyroscopes and active stabilization systems in each module. The team modeled a 15-kilometer tower made up of 100 modules, each one 150 meters tall and 230 meters in diameter, built from inflatable tubes 2 meters across. Quine estimates it would weigh about 800,000 tonnes when pressurized — around twice the weight of the world's largest supertanker."
Seriously? Are you, seriously, expecting me to believe this? An inflatable... why? Why do you do this to me, engineers? What the fuck?
yep -world's biggest bounce house
for the world's richest, most overgrown kids
-I'm just saying
I came up with lots of ideas like this in college...I also smoked a lot of weed in college.
n/t
Bot Assisted Blogging
Huh-huh...huh...huh...... Let's break something.
OK. Here's a pin . Pop the inflatable tubes. Huh-huh.......huh.
Yours In Bakinour,
K. Trout
I guess this means that other crap idea of the space elevator is dead? (Maybe if we built a huge wooden badger.)
Note that this is would only extend a few tens of kilometers. It's to the edge of space, whereas a full elevator is aimed at getting *out* of Earth's gravity well.
They're solving two different problems and aren't really that comparable.
They were trying to buld a zeppelin, but the printer did the plans in portrait format.
Could happen to anyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Balloon science ain't no science. Actually it ain't even balloon science - it's a bummer of flashback.
I want pictures
Votator.com implements a fair voting scheme (free
Who else would be at the forefront of inflatable technologies?
Is anyone else getting tired of these stories that make ludicrous claims being justified by the word COULD?
Didn't we do this already? I thought this is how we ended up with all the different languages.
Their 15km version would need ten years of the entire world's helium production to fill it.
The 200km version would use up over half the world's estimated helium reserves.
No sig today...
Can we use these to upgrade our networks, too?
that there should be a Viagra joke here somewhere.
"800,000 tonnes when pressurized" .... fill it with a lighter gas....
um
... but can you imagine base jumping there?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Dangle a really long rope from the ISS and have folks climb up to space.
And in other news Mattel releases the hover board
This could have some use for escaping earth's gravity. Among all the theorized technologies one of the most promising has always been just launching stuff into space via rail gun style. If you have a long tube with nothing but vacuum inside it you can drastically increase the efficiency of such a device. The problem is the end of the device has to exit into something near vacuum or it would be like slamming into a solid wall made of atmosphere.
If a tower like this could be built such that it contained a vacuum corridor inside it then we could perhaps finally pursue this idea with already existing technologies.
Extra points for explaining why this is safer, easier or more useful than a tethered balloon!
A tower into the heavens? Not a good idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
she said...?
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Oh, yeah, put a smiley face on this and it'll be Toppin' Fresh for the kids. "Look, Mommy! It's ... the Pillsbury Doughtower! Can I climb him, pleeeaaassse?"
Heck, if you're gonna mess with inflatables and a lot of mass, why not just make a strong lightweight carbon-nanotube/aluminum alloy airfield and float the thing way up there in the sky with near-space to orbit aircraft/spacecraft? Perfect for Han Solo!
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Note that this is would only extend a few tens of kilometers. It's to the edge of space, whereas a full elevator is aimed at getting *out* of Earth's gravity well.
Well if you just use it as a regular elevator and stop at the top, it's a nice tall observation deck where the atmosphere is really thin but not quite "into space".
But if it can support the weight of the elevator and observation platform, it should be able to provide an equal upward force to a lighter payload that is being accelerated. Such a projectile might leave the top of the structure with enough velocity to put the apogee of its trajectory in low-earth-orbit altitudes.
You'd have to provide additional thrust during that hop to bring the PERIGEE above significant atmospheric braking in less than half an orbit. But you've won half the battle by getting above the significant atmosphere on electric power rather than rocket reaction.
Perhaps lean the thing over to get significant downrange velocity - and support its less-vertical run with more compression members of a similar construction while building a broader structure of multiple members to avoid bending between supports. (Octagon truss, anyone?)
And the payload might also be composed of something like a long, thin, "cannon" with a "bullet" that is your final payload. "Fire" it (electromagnetically again) when near apogee. Then the "bullet" is circularized and the "cannon" returns to Earth for reuse with less momentum than when it left the elevator/catapult. Reenter and glide down - or land into another similar elevator structure and be gently lowered for reuse while the energy from the cannon stage's momentum and altitude is recycled into electric power.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Remember, the guys from Al-Qaeda are very creative. They will find a way.
Buckminster Fuller (my hero ;-) already came up with this, altho' he intended to use concrete. Basically, if the structure is large enough, making the inside of the structure a few degrees warmer than the outside air will cause it to float. Bucky described a sphere about 1 mile in diameter to be airborne, and somewhat smaller cones to be sea cities.
Later . . . Jim
Wow, three articles of questionable scientific merit make it onto the main page from the same paper in one day?
Geeze, must be hard for NS since they stopped publishing on physical paper.
*Inflatable Tower Could Climb To the Edge of Space
*Black Hold Swallows Start
*Analysis Says Planes Might Be Greener Than Trains
No, I haven't done the math behind this. But given that the force of gravity decreases by the inverse square law, using something like the infltable tower might make the space elevator much more feasible to create.
You mention helium, but why not simply use compressed air, especially at the higher levels?
In any event, this is the sort of out-of-the-box thinking needed to make space travel feasible!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They start out speaking Babylonian and by the time they get to the top of the Tower they speak french
I guess 15km is better than nothing. Unfortunately it's just a tincy bit shy of the 35,790 km needed for geostationary orbit like a real "Space Elevator".
Launch it from San Fransideshow.... from near the Coit(us) Tower, of from the Stanford University "Phallic" (Hoover) Tower:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coit_Tower
http://unixpapa.com/tower/
Now, if an ET sees that thing emerging into deep space, tethered to the Earth, grappling with it could be one "tough nut to swallow", as a saying goes...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Isn't that what people said about Nikola Tesla?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Shouldn't there be a diving board coming off the end of it and a small glass of water down on earth?
To accomplish his task, "Papa" gets a "very" long ladder, and puts in on a "very" high mountain.
Somebody saw the movie "Up" this weekend.
Now that would be something!
Sa da te!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it's the spacenumber bed.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Don't harsh my sci-fi utopia buzz, man.
I'm all about the inflatable towers to outer space. But not until we've got bullet trains from Chicago to Memphis so I can go listen to some R&B and eat BBQ and be home by morning. First the bullet trains, then the inflatable towers to outer space.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did idea of vertical take-off and landing aircraft die out because of the development of aerodynamic lift aircraft?
How about propeller aircraft after development of jet engines?
Or lighter than air and other unpowered aircraft after development of powered aircraft?
How about Macs? Does anyone anywhere use them at all since Windows came out?
Is Linux dead?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No, they said "He's clever with all the inventions, but don't lend him any money. Plus, he looks just like David Bowie."
You are welcome on my lawn.
damn scientists always building bouncy castles in the sky
captcha : girders
Does it come with inflatable "companions" also?
Table-ized A.I.
Has anybody calculated the lateral forces exerted on this structure by a stiff ocean breeze? Say, something like 40mph gusts of wind? 'Cause I, for one, don't want to be one of the guys holding onto the guy wires of this overgrown Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon when it decides to make a break for freedom... I'm just sayin'.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Wouldn't it be far easier to lift a superstructure via deflation? Make a big carbon-nanotube globe and just vacuum it. Then you don't have to worry about harvesting impossible amounts of helium. To control rate of ascension/descension, you would just let air in through an airlock-type-valve for controlled flow to avoid implosion, and naturally just have some specialized pump to lower the air pressure inside to make it rise.
Our space program is a series of inflatable tubes.
if you build it, they will cum
Since it's not in the summary, Brendan Quine is an associate professor at in Space Engineering at York University in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He is responsible for the Argus micro-spectrometer on the CanX-2 nanosatellite, currently operating on orbit. The satellite was developed by the University of Toronto's Space Flight Laboratory.
Aikon-
Young Jack planted some beans today.
Hey, compared to an inflatable ladder, I'm putting my money on Jack and his beanstalk.
This could be for middle-aged men suffering mid-life crises, to fulfill themselves by going out into space - on large inflatable dildo
Anonymous Coward DID get first post, you fuckin' tard!
Are you fuckin' blind or what?
The article is sketchy on details. Are these going to be air supported, or is their some sort of substructure? Because if the thing is 230 meters in diameter and needs to support 800,000 tonnes, I get something a little over 1 million kilograms per square meter, which is something like 60,000 PSI. That's a lot of pressure.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Okay - just say you could build such a structure, and hoist your payload to the top. Then what? Even if it's 150Km up, you'll just watch it plummet back to the ground.
It's not the altitude that is critical, it's the velocity. Let's say I were to teleport upward 100 miles, but with no other change in my velocity (also let us assume I am wearing a space suit). What happens? I fall down - because I have no where near the velocity to stay in orbit. Even if we keep the same angular velocity with respect to the earth's core I have now, I still fall down - I just miss hitting my house.
OK, I happen to have an unobtainium mine in my basement, so I build a tower a thousand kilometers high in my back yard. So, we hop on the elevator and ride to the top. We are OVER many of the orbits of satellites, so I should be able to just push something away, right? No: it falls down. Only if I can build my tower to 22000 miles (give or take) can I just release things and have them orbit, and that only because in order for my tower to be rigid, the end has to be moving at an angular velocity that matches orbital at 22000 miles (give or take), and that as any object ascends my tower, it will be pushed laterally as it goes up because the tangential velocity of the tower increases as the distance from the center of the earth increases.
So, even if I could build a tower 15km high, it's really not going to help launch things into orbit. Yes, it gets it above the bulk of the atmosphere, but the cost of overcoming atmospheric friction is much less than the simple energy cost of accelerating an object to orbital velocity.
While a 15km tower might make a great weather observatory, and it would be a wonderful transmitting platform (dibs on the 2 meter repeater!) it wouldn't make all that much difference for a space launch.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sounds dangerous, reminds me of the joke about the inflatable kid who went to an inflatable school.
One day he had a tantrum, and took a compass and
punctured his inflatable teacher, then his inflatable headmaster. On the way out he punctured the infaltable school. When he got home he punctured his inflatable parents, and then himself
The next day in the headmasters office.
"I am very disappointed in you, you know what you have done, you have let your me down, the school down, your parents down and most importantly yourself down"
(-:
Space fountains beat elevators every which way. Easy to make too. Just put a cylcotron at the bottom and magnetically bend the particles up, then put a cap at the top of the fountain to return the flow. Magnetic charge stabilizes the pnemautic tubes and powers the gyroscopes, not to mention pushing payloads up.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I just had a flash back from my Newtonian Mechanics class: A Spider lands on the center of a record player rotating at 45rpm's. The Spider attaches a web to the center of the record and begins to walk to the edge of the record looking for a way off. Given the weight of the spider, speed of the record; How far will the spider travel before being thrown off?
I RTFA; but some of the details seemed a little fuzzy, like the density of the outside with respect to the inside of the tube, load bearing. Maybe a 3D Real Time Model could be fashioned in something like Blender3D. If the math proves out, cool. But if not, then maybe the model could be applied to some other similar engineering solution. That in itself would be a worthy engineering accomplishment.
Isn't that what people said about Nikola Tesla?
For the first part of his life, those people were wrong. For the latter part of his life, those people were right.
A 20km-tall inflatable structure is indeed admirable, and a realistic step in the right direction towards building real super-structures like a space elevator, a floating Buckyball, etc.
An novel approach for non-rocket launch, which may be more possible with the current state of technology than a space elevator (in that it requires less quantity of unobtanium), is a launch loop. It uses reactive centrifugal force to hold itself aloft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
Instead of filling the structure with light gas just fill it with nothing.. Nothing weighs less than hydrogen and will not explode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighter_than_air#Vacuum_balloon
This reminds me a bit of JP Aerospace's airship-to-orbit concept.
There have been unofficial studies done of 100 km tall towers using "aerospace grade" materials. Balloon-tanks of extremely high-pressure gas made out of boron would be amazingly light but have staggering compressive strength. (You'd use lots of small ones to avoid ultra-high pressure in super-long columns.) There have also been studies of towers made form carbon fiber, aluminum, and steel. These have an exponential profile, and a "fractal truss" structure. Though huge, they'd me mostly empty space, to the point that most of the tower would be hard to see from the ground. The tubular beams would have teardrop-shaped fairings to minimize wind loads. The towers as a whole would be staggeringly heavy, but still *theoretically* possible to build, and *theoretically* affordable by superpowers like the United States. Will they ever happen in real life? No way. But engineers and physicists love thinking about this stuff and doing the calcs.
Helium baloons strung along a cable will be more practical.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Alright, lemme get this straight:
The structure is supported by blowing air through it, and extends all the way into space?
Won't the aliens swoop by years from now laughing that our planet self annihilated not through proliferation of nuclear weapons, but because some idiot blew all the air out a straw?
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
The air has to expand, the container does not. You must of course allow the excess air to escape as you heat it or pressure will build up. The density of the air inside is greatly reduced at the higher temperature, so the container weighs less. If it manages to weigh less than the same volume of cold air, then it will float. Somehow I have difficulty seeing this with a concrete container, but the principle is fine. The gas bags in the old Zeppelins were flexible, but were not particularly elastic. That meant they had to vent gas as they rose, to avoid excess pressure on the bags. There is a limit to this kind of thing, as you will no doubt be able to imagine....The available lift is dropping as you go higher, since the air outside is geting less dense.
And the magic word I have to type is phoenix...somehow I can't see the old Zeppelins arising from their ashes, although it was a great thrill to see one of the new ones in flight in Germany back in 2000.
when they are told the story of the little apes that destroyed their planet...
Once upon a time, 3 little apes made an inflatable tower that reached all the way to space. when it did, space vacuumed all the atmosphere off their planet...and all the little apes could do was jump up and down squealing.
"hehehe. mommy! those little apes were silly!"
"I know, dear. Now hover along and brush your radula. It's time to go into stasis."
This didn't go well the last time. Newspaper headline:
NIGHTMARE ON DREAMSPACE: MUMS, DADS, KIDS PLUNGE TO EARTH
HORRIFIED witnesses told last night how they watched helplessly as parents and children plummeted to the ground after a huge bouncy castle was sent rocketing 120ft into the air.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2006/07/24/killed-by-the-bouncy-castle-115875-17435718/
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=dreamspace+inflatable
A quick calculation of the pressure required at the top of the inflatable tower to hold the mass of the rest of the tower up ...
Force = ma = 800,000,000 kg * 9.8
Pressure = Force / Area
Pressure = 800,000,000 kg * 9.8 / pi * 1 x 1 ( because it is 2 meters across, it has 1 meter radius)
= 2.5 GPa
Thats a lot of pressure, and with such I tall cylinder of air the pressure at the bottom would be even greater.
If you do the sums: Work to raise 1 kilo 20 km = F*d = 10*20000 = 20,000 (here F = force due to gravity) Work to speed 1 kilo to 6km/s = 0.5*m*v^2 = 0.5*1*6000^2 = 0.5*60000^2 = 18,000,000 So you don't save much energy in terms of getting stuff to orbit (caveat maths might be wrong - I'm no physicist). But if you gain any advantage it's that gun-launches becomes more attractive. The main advantage of that is that gun launch is cheap and simple. Or at least cheaper and simpler than throwing away a rocket engine every time you send something into space. You get this advantage because the atmosphere is thinner the higher you go up. Air resistance is proportional to the volume of air you have to displace (think mythbusters shooting bullets into the swimming pool) so less air density means less drag. I have a feeling though, that at 20km altitude it's not going to make too much difference. One disdvantage of gun launch is the G force the load suffers. But that'd be fine for a lot of goods: water, building materials, electronics (some modern artillery shells have electronics in them). If you want to use gun launch you probably have to go higher. Which begs the question why do you need to build a tower? Why not have a blimp with a gun rather than a 17km tower? Ballons can get to around 50km. Space starts at about 100km (the point where drag is near negliable). The problem with this approach is distributing the shock through the balloon without ripping it to shreads. Finally.. you can't get orbital insertion without a rocket to make your orbit more circular. So you either fire your bullets into a net in space, or you attach a rocket engine to each one. If the later, the rocket engine has to be heavier than usual because it has to be reinforced to stand the launch g-forces. So, in short, the air filled tower sound like a dud idea to me as far as a means of access to space, probably a dud from atmosphere research as well.
How many stairs will that be to the top? And tourists are supposed to make it?
I fucked your dead great grandmother while sucking your dead great grandfather's balls!
I didn't bother reading the summary... but I gather it is just some guy who's bragging that his "inflatable tower" can reach all the way up into outer space.
I am anarch of all I survey.
http://www.launchloop.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop detail the Lofstrom Launch Loop. Lofstrom, an IC designer and FreeGeek.org volunteer in metro Portland, Oregon, has a system which requires no unobtainium and could be built today, without any 'suitable mountain top' with only COTS (Cheap Off The Shelf) components.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
From the article: "And should something go wrong with the tower, failure of a few modules would not cause the whole structure to collapse." Titanic anyone? Plan for all modules to fail at once.
I am thinking of a tower of about 20 - 30 meters (100 feet) from empty plastic bottles. I am trying to use a thin rope to fix bottles together. But I cannot find a solution to make such a tower rigid enough.
I need this tower to make photos of buildings from above. Commercial photo towers are expensive and bulky. But plastic bottles are compact and easily transportable.
I feel that it can be done as these bottles are enough strong and rigid. The question is how to fix them together to make a tower?
It is a modest task in comparison with 20 km tower, but it would be extremely practical open source invention as these bottles are available in abundance. Maybe if we can invent a 30 meters tower, we can then invent 30 kilometer open source tower.
Bah. Don't bother us with your fetish for inflatable toys ;-)
This should be pretty cheap to do. They just have to contract with Al Harrington's Wacky, Waving, Inflatable, Arm-Flaying, Tube Man Emporium and Warehouse. He's often overstocked with Wacky, Waving, Inflatable, Arm-Flaying, Tube Men, and he's willing to pass the savings on to YOU!
You can attract customers to your business, make a splash at your next presentation, keep grandma company, protect your crops, confuse your neighbors! African American? Hail a cab, testify in church or just raise the roof! Whatever your wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man needs, come on down to Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man Emporium and Warehouse, route two in Weekapaug!
I can't see why it shouldn't work for outer space too.
fantasy.
If the tower were 'attached' to the earth it would fall over and crush people.
I find it fascinating that people who are shilling for venture money from
brain-dead banks come up with brain dead ideas and they get the venture money.
What a stupid idea.
The thing wouldn't be a 'tower' but a balloon.
Finally, science has given me a condom.
It's too bad it's only 1/5 scale...
Should segments come adrift, they could do huge damage to property. Who would insure such a venture?
Getting a helium miner to Jupiter and getting it back to earth would be rather prohibitively expensive.