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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."
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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."
Who else would be at the forefront of inflatable technologies?
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...
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
Well, the idea came naturally to me when I started to respond to the prior poster about the column needing to be very wide as the atmosphere got less dense. And then I got to thinking about how marshmallows get their lightness, and I thought maybe it would be applicable to the problem at hand.
And then I realized I hadn't had dinner yet, and that I'd better call my wife on my way home and ask her to start the charcoal for the grill. And then I started thinking about s'moresr,because it's summer, and I'll be grilling over charcoal tonight, and I just couldn't help myself.
Sometimes the muse takes over and we just sit, trancelike, while the genius flows from our fingertips to the keyboard. I don't think that really was me typing, nor was it my idea... it was like some force greater than man itself took ahold of me -- just used me as a conduit for brilliance. Kind of like Noah's ark, I guess... it is not my place to question why. It is only my place to build it, as directed by what can only be the divine inspiration of He of the Tangled Forkful, the FSM.
But seriously, if you think that was thought up ahead of time, and I'd been waiting to use... don;t you think it'd be a little more polished?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In case my daughter is reading this, you know Daddy's a kidder, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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