Slashdot Mirror
Obayashi To Build Space Elevator By 2050
mattr writes "Japan's Obayashi Corp. has announced plans to build a space elevator by 2050. They are famous for wrecking skylines with the over-sized bullet train station in Kyoto, the world's tallest self-supporting tower Tokyo Sky Tree and just recently, the beginnings of the Taipei Dome. It will take a week at 200 kph for your party of 30 to reach the 36,000-km-high terminal station, while the counterweight [swings along at] 96 km high, a quarter of the way to the Moon."
It would be easier to believe that "Japan's Obayashi Corp" are out of their mind if we would have a link to this on their own web site.
It probably won't hurt your corporate image too much to bolster some idealism every once in a while.
I was the real korpiq until I woke up clowned.
It's bad enough sharing a lift with 5 or 6 people for 30 seconds, let alone sharing one with 30 people for a week.
I wish them luck and hope the technology is ready before I'm too old to ride the thing.
Forecast for this thread. 56% never gonna happen. 10% certain it will happen. 18% about how impossible it is. and the rest finding a way to blame MS for the failure.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
1. The fact that we don't have the necessary structural materials yet to actually make a space elevator.
2. Neither Japan nor any Japanese company has the financial solvency to undertake such an effort
2. No no wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit. Christ I can barely make it to the 15th floor without some jackass farting. A whole week. Don't think so.
Every so often some company in need of cashflow creates some nonsensical grandiose concept in the hopes of securing ignorant investor funding (See Moller flying cars). And such companies usually have spent the bulk of the cash on P.R. - hence the slashdot article.
It's bullshit. It's always bullshit.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
WTF does that last sentence even mean?
The fact that we don't have the necessary structural materials yet to actually make a space elevator.
And we'll continue not having them until someone pays to build a space elevator and does the needed research. By 2050 it's not impossible to think materials will be around to make this feasible.
Neither Japan nor any Japanese company has the financial solvency to undertake such an effort
Possibly, hard to say. They put up some really large buildings. They could get a huge loan.
No one wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit.
I would happily pay 20k to go to said stationary station for a few days. Even if it took a week to get there in cramped quarters.
By then there may be a number of cheaper options to visit pace though, Virgin Galactic is making a go at it. I really only want to go up if I can spend a day or two though, so mere flights up and down do not interest me much...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
submitter has it wrong. tfa states that it's ONE OF the tallest, with a meagre 600-odd meters.
I was under the impression that we didn't have materials with the tension strength to build a space elevator?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
This was actually last episode of Gundam.
How about demonstrating the viability of the space elevator concept by building the first one at a lunar base? Ideally the orbital 'anchor' could be placed a Lagrange point LR1, although escaping the gravity of the moon could be achieved at much lower altitude. Well, this probably won't work since I can't quite come up with a car analogy or express this idea in terms of human hair widths, libraries of congress, etc.
I think all low and mid altitude satellites would be at risk of colliding with it.
even when technology is mature enough to manufacture a carbon nanotube cable of this magnitude, how can it be set into the required position? An outline that is confirmed to work once it is built is nice, but I have seen no plan how to actually install it... How does one get started to place the first part of the cable?
if you think "that guy" who ate the burrito is bad..
just wait until you find out that there is only 1 song played over ... and over..
36.000 km is 1/10 of the distance to the moon on a good day...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
Make cable go all way to moon. Moon's rotation can help elevator pull weight up.
If something go wrong and elevator cable break, only consequence is moon swinging long cable around smashing enemy spacecraft or rogue meteor so help protect Earth from enemy.
You do not have to go to 36000 km height to have a space experience. The international Space Station orbits at 300 km height and provides us with fantastic pictures. The authors mention the 36000 km height because geostationary satellites are at that height. And, apparently, something big like the terminal staion must be at that height to hold the elevator cable in place.
I only now realize it says 96km. :/
Earth moon distance is 392937km. ChatHaunt said it best: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2685249&cid=39121887
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Whilst geosynchronous orbit is achieved at about 36,000 Kms, the atmosphere ends at roughly 120kms. Using some kind of rail to continue to elevate the payload will be hideously inefficient outside the atmosphere.
Furthermore, using the term 'elevator' is clearly an attempt to dumb-down the technology (kind of like called a Philosopher's Stone a 'Magic Stone').
Don't have a citation, but I believe that even using carbon nanotubes, the tether cable needs to be about 10 metres thick. This would mean that the project would require some 36 x 10 ^ 8 cubic metres of carbon nanotubes. Idaho Space Materials makes about 50gms per hour - at a cost measured in hundres of $ per gram.
I don't know that this is all practically do-able yet.
If we're ever to permanently escape the cradle of humanity, this is the way to do it. I'm just disappointed that they're setting their target date 28 years in the future!
There will be nay-sayers, of course -- "It can't be done" "It will be too expensive" etc... but I believe that once we actually get down to accomplishing this, it will turn out to be both easier and cheaper than we expect. And, of course, once we have ONE elevator, putting up new ones will be much quicker & cheaper than putting up the first one.
Then I can finally move to L5!! ("Home on Lagrange" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_Lagrange_(The_L5_Song))
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Look, ultimately you can't know if a technology is a good idea without actually building the tech, full scale, and spending the time and money to create revised versions to fix the major problems.
After you do that, some technologies are still a dog, no matter how you try to hide it. Nuclear power is an instance of that : sure it works, but the risk of catastrophe overshadows everything, and means that if you try to build and run a reactor everything costs too much because of the dangers. In the long run, nuclear is not feasible because other technologies will keep getting cheaper.
I feel a space elevator is a dog for a similar fundamental reason : there's one 36,000 km high structure.
Any serious failure to a manufacturing defect along 36,000 km of cable, and you lose every last dime invested in the project. (not to mention the falling cable might cause some nasty problems). If someone ever wants to attack a space elevator, it's a perfect terrorism target. One homemade cruise missile (in 2050, I suspect making a cruise missile won't be much harder than RC airplanes are today. Heck, some garage tinkerers already have done similar projects) and the ENTIRE elevator falls.
Not to mention laser fire, railgun fire, bad weather, etc etc. There's a lot of things and it only has to fail at one point.
Furthermore, you have to complete the elevator project before it is worth anything. Invest all that money to FINISH the cable, you can't get incremental results. And this multi-billion dollar structure (realistically probably hundreds of billions) has a rather limited cargo capacity : one load of passengers a week is NOT a rapid movement to space.
So, no. It's an idea that has somehow gained traction, but it is most likely a non-starter.
I propose a much simpler idea : rather than use lasers on the ground to transmit power to the elevator climber car, scale up those laser arrays a few orders of magnitude to the point that they can vaporize propellant off the bottom of the spacecraft. Pulse the beams right, and planar shockwaves will be created, giving net thrust without any kind of nozzle.
Advantages :
1. Ablative Laser propulsion doesn't require anything in the spacecraft in the way of aerospace hardware but a small instrument package to report attitude and accelerations back to the ground. Gyroscopes for stabilization would be nice, but not essential.
2. If a laser module on the ground fails or wears out, the launch continues..10 or 50% redundancy is entirely feasible.
3. You can do one launch every few minutes, assuming you use LED diode pumped fiber optic lasers, and have sufficient cooling capacity to remove the waste heat and sufficient power generation. That could be a metric ton or so to orbit every 15 minutes, 24/7, 7 days a week.
4. You do 1000 or 10,000 unmanned cargo launches before you send the first man up in a spacecraft identical to the one used for cargo (well, with life support inside, but identical flight hardware). This kind of sampling size allows you to honestly evaluate the safety of the system. In the event of a problem, you turn the beam off instantly and deploy parachutes. (such as beam heating of the side walls or something). No rocket to explode.
5. Each spacecraft will be extremely cheap, just a block of an inert solid bolted to the bottom, and a small instrument package (an iphone has all the circuitry needed, although of course you would use more sensitive accelerometers) and a radio. Obviously, some kind of orbital maneuvering system is also needed, but you can get to orbit without it.
Disadvantages :
1. Reflected beams from the lasers might cause problems for observers on the ground. Might have to create a large exclusion zone around the launch site, with air travel forbidden in a large radius. Not a big deal, tons of places in the Arizona desert. Still, with so many people involved, it seems likely a few people would be blinded if the lasers used were visible light.
2. It would r
. . . is located here. It includes a bit more about the proposed construction, starting date, and other interesting bits.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Nope, this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1EG-MKy4so
Where ever they build the land-based part, I'd not go within 96km of that location.
When/if the cable falls, it won't be good.
It'll be a small matter of downloading the plans from an interweb and running the 3D printer overnight. A long weekend at most.
As for the financial aspects, bitcoin will solve all that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Great destination! The view never changes! Sun rises and sets once per day; just like home!
Their they're doing there hair.
I'll be in my early 70's, hopefully still alive...
Really? With the train station in Kyoto? Seriously? I've been there, both in the train station and in the surrounding area. It's big, but it's not exactly skyline wrecking unless you happen to live in an apartment which directly faces it. There are plenty of other buildings nearby which are close to the same height and once you get about two blocks away, you can't even see it from the street. If you don't believe me, here's a picture from above which shows the surrounding area. Plenty of other 8+ story buildings in the area. Here's a view from the top of the hotel in the train station. What skyline is it that they're destroying exactly?
Kyoto is a lovely city. It has myriad beautiful temples and gardens and the nearby country-side is lovely. People flock to it to see the cherry trees when they are in bloom. But none of these things are very tall. Most of the famous temples aren't even visible when you're half a block away from them, nevermind part of the skyline. It does not now have an impressive skyline and if it ever did, it must have been centuries ago, and although the train station big enough to be clearly visible for a couple of blocks around, it's not exactly a sky-scraper. Honestly, its width and shininess stand out as much as its height. So, if the person writing the article thinks that the Kyoto train station (which has far more non-shinkansen platforms than shinkansen platforms) is too big or too shiny, then fine, but saying that it wrecks the skyline is just dumb.
The elevator has 150 people trapped in it, and your ship gets a distress call. You go to the rescue, and five Klingon ships appear from nowhere and start firing proton missiles at you. What do you do?
Without substantial advancements in material research, this cannot happen. No current or upcoming material exists that can withstand the extreme shear forces that would be exerted on a space elevator.
Space elevators are currently the realm of science fiction, and will likely remain so even in 2050. If we had the technology and materials to build it right now, a 2050 completion would still be unlikely. And we have neither the tech nor the materials.
My understanding is that it will have to be the equator, which gives them a choice of Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Sao Tome & Principe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia and Kiribati. Or maybe they're going to build an artificial island and port, I would imagine that's child's play compared to the elevator itself.
Imagine the fire escape. How long will it take to walk up/down in a space suit?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I read your blog "The Problem with Motion". Your problem is that there is no problem. And that, yes sir, you are a fruitcake and a crackpot.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I applaud them for exploring the possibilities. The only thing I would question is whether carbon nanotubes are strong enough? No one has been able to make them in quantity but my understanding was that even if you made it out of complete strands of carbon nanotubes... that is if you had monomolecular strands of the stuff stretching from geo sync orbit to the ground it wouldn't be strong enough to take the stress. I have in no way done the calculations on that and have no links to back up that statement. But I was given to understand that in past discussions.
Anyone want to confirm or deny that? Twenty times stronger then steel sounds strong until you realize they're talking about a cable far a lot longer then 20 times longer then what you'd ever consider making out of steel. As such, while 20 times is great... it's probably at least a thousand times too weak.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I agree with you. Nobody would want to be in an ordinary elevator for a week. I don't think anyone can be crammed into an ordinary elevator with 10 people in 2 m2, without food, drinks, seats/beds, for a week. Also, the lack of toilets in an ordinary elevator would be rather disturbing after a few hours.
So, this machine will hopefully be a little different than a regular elevator. Also, I hope it has a panorama window.
In 2050, I'll be in my mid 70s. Or probably dead. What the fuck will I care?
if you don't hold your breath.
Anyone know the stock ticker? With management like that it seems like an excellent short target.
Deleted
When Arthur C Clarke came up with this idea he had to (fictionally) shift Ceylon (as it then was) to the Equator. Last time I looked, Japan was nowhere near the Equator.
Also I wonder what effect a huge counterbalance 1/4 the way out to the moon would have on the stability of our orbit? It would shift the centre of mass of our system and over time that would have an effect that might become chaotic depending on interaction with the Moon itself.
Perhaps we would have to build two of them on opposite sides of the earth and run them synchonously.
A single ground-tethered cable is implausible for reasons already argued to death. However, there is no reason to tether to the ground. If your lower terminus is 100km up from the ground,
The shortened cable considerably reduces the material strength requirement. A terminus 100km up in the sky is still a job to get to, giving the Virgin Galactics of the world something useful to do. To get further out, the simplest thing to do would be have another skyhook. It would have a lower orbital period so you would need some kind of shuttle scheduled around the time of closest approach.
As regards that asinine remark about ruining skylines, I must point out that the Eiffel Tower was widely regarded as a skyline-spoiling eyesore when it was built. I absolutely guarantee that if the Japs actually managed to build a ground tethered skyhook, inside a decade it would be a listed wonder of the modern world and an icon of techological mastery.
Vandalism, terrorist or not, and theft are probably the biggest issues. Carbon fibre hasn't taken over for the cables of suspension footbridges for just that reason.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No quotation marks needed. The problems in designing very strong materials have been known since WW2. The challenge can be expressed very simply: the more the strength depends on having a complete covalent structure (in CNTs the bonds have some ionic characteristic owing to the p-hybridisation but the same logic applies) , the greater the weakening effect of even a single fault. If a cosmic ray unzips a few bonds, the stresses will concentrate on the bonds on either side, and the split is likely to propagate. In strong metals we fix this with alloying components, very crudely like the gravel in concrete, which stop those dislocations from extending right through the material, but equally adding alloy components reduces the ultimately obtainable strength from a perfect structure. It is a tradeoff, as usual.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They were planning to build a ladder to heaven!
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9705/25/japan.space/
Only 8 years to go. Well, they wasted the first 11 so far, but I'm sure it's totally legit.
So how do you say "Space Nutter" in Japanese?
maybe 200km/hr in the atmosphere ...
but that is only necessary for a half hour - once your past "the skys the limit" as far as speed goes
Now that's what I call black-sky thinking...or thinking inside the box!
214 comments and no one's mentioned Arthur C. Clarke yet?!
Someone on Slashdot must have read Fountains of Paradise, surely...
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
Current Carbon nanotube technology is still far from what's needed for a space elevator and (IMO) the field would benefit from a dramatic infusion of cash. It's not clear from this article whether they are planning to support such research, but (again, IMO) if they are not, then this is just idle day-dreaming.
There would be at least an order of magnitude increase in fiber length, and many orders of magnitude increases in fiber production rates, before a carbon nanotube space elevator would become a viable prospect. This is for a terrestrial elevator, a Lunar elevator could be built with existing fiber technology.
I don't want to sound like that guy that thinks science fiction is real, but the terrorists from the "Zone of the Enders" anime were trying to blow up the space elevator in order to destroy the world.
If anyone were to blow up the elevator, it'd certainly cause massive damage to the surrounding area.
I'm also pretty sure one of the MegaMan X games had a similar plot.
This is just another example of sales people, making a bunch of promises without talking to the Engineers. That is like the cause of all the follies this company is responsible for.
All the biggest and most successful companies on Earth are run by engineers. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon. to name a few.
I read it too. A lot of hand waving, insults flinging, stating the obvious which stems from quite old common science (speed of light as the only speed, 3d universe as lattice or membrane traveling along fourth dimension axis at speed of light - that all is easily derived from Einstein's Special Relativity; discreteness of space and motion - Planck; empty space as sea of particles - Dirac) and finally instead of great revelation ... deep, deafening silence!
Oh, and not to mention wet dreams of snatching "free" energy from the jaws of Second Law of Thermodynamics to live like a king, that was ... so sad and moving to read, it made me sigh. Apparently and historically documented, there is one born every day, from the early days of science till today, with non-diminishing frequency.
Your impatience betrayed you. You should had stayed in grad school and learned more, asked more questions and clarifications before you decided to thump your chest and "better" the Physics.
Yeah. Not so funny if you're the one in the elevator. And let's hope they don't play that cheery elevator music for a week, or they'll discover a bunch of suicide victims when the doors open.
It is sad to see that the U.S. has lost vision and become a nation of empty-headed belttlers. Certainly building a space elevator is a non-trivial task, but there is no scientific reason to dismiss it as impossible. Carbon nanotubes are theoretically strong enough to support a tether-style space elevator. And space elevators would make space travel economically feasible and open up the solar system to commercial exploitation and human occupation.
I would prefer if the entrepreneurial vision and spirit to build a space elevator came from the U.S. But, when you get down to it, that is simply selfish pride. If the Japanese, Chinese, Brazilians, Emirati or even Russians (it was their idea to begin with) are to do it, more power to them. It is going to get done eventually.
http://www.luxusumzug.at/
I don't think a space elevator will be feasible from a safety standpoint until the space junk problem is fixed.
I wanna ride the space elevator with Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, and my pants full of hot grits.
Searching for Magic bean is another option
An important parameter for a space elevator is the "free breaking length" - the length of constant width cable that can support its own weight under 1 g (remember, for any real elevator, the actual force of (gravity + rotation) declines rapidly as you ascend).
A terrestrial space elevator needs a material with a free breaking length of 4,960 kilometers. The free breaking length of steel is about 30 km, nanotubes are expected to have breaking lengths of ~ 5000 km.
Any real elevator cable will be tapered (i.e., the width will increase with altitude), but (very roughly) the amount of the taper (in area) is e^(4960/free breaking length). So, for steel, you need a taper of ~ e^160, so a steel space elevator would have to be thicker than the entire galaxy by the time it reaches geostationary altitude, which is of course ridiculous. To have a chance to make a real elevator, you need a free breaking length of at least 1000 km, which no one has exhibited so far, but which nanotubes can probably provide.
Pegasus was the right idea, we just need a bigger runway and a bigger jet purpose built for lifting the rocket.
I hardly trust NORMAL elevators. Wake me up when they have space stairs.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
As long as it's got internet, it's got to have a better view than your mom's basement. Better enjoy that view too, because once you get to the moon, you're just in another basement -- just on another planet.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Will we end up with a 96,000 mile super-strong elevator cable effectively wrapping itself around the planet 4 times?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...think about it, a week-long loop of a Dixieland Jazz ringtone version of The Girl From Ipanema?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Just wanted to add: even if the cable might have to be 10 meters thick at its thickest, it does not have to be equally thick everywhere.
Designing large scale projects using nanotubes is like designing anti-matter rockets. Yes, we know how to make them in small quantity, but the cost to do so on a uesful scale is astronomical. As in more than all the value of all the money in the world x 100.
That is why they couldn't project a budget - they are assuming new technology will make it cheap enough to do. Big assumption.
Better idea is to do a SPACE FOUNTAIN instead of an elevator.
We can do that today, using existing technology, with no new tech.
At heart, it is a giant cyclotron particle accelerator, that shoots the particles straight up. A magnet at the top station turns the particles around and recovers them. As we power it up, the station lifts up, and we slowly build a vacuum tube around the particle path.
We can build this giant tube using existing materials, that we already know how to make in quantity. The tube itself can not support itself - without the magnetic field generated by particles shooting out of the cyclotron. But the magnetic field is pretty strong and strengthens the tube. Think of it like a Star Trek force shield - and people will be yelling out percentile strengths.
More importantly, those same particles can in fact be used to power the elevator going up and/or apply the break on the way down.
Best to do it someplace already high up - the Tibetan plateau would be ideal, assuming china could stop treating Tibet like a whipping dog. It's almost 15,000 ft above sea level, which is
Guys, we really need to start ganging up on Japan. They're finishing the space elevator soon. Once they launch their Alpha Centauri colony, they'll win!
My userid is prime!
" more likely, burn up in the atmosphere"
The atmosphere isn't a magic burn up place. At the speeds they will be falling, there won't be any signigicant 'burn up'. Meterao are travelling thousands of miles an hour. It will be STATIONARY*, unlike satellites, space stations, and space shuuttles that revolve around the earth at a high rate of speed.
The strength of the material required to do a space elevator means it's going to have unpredictable results and have a huge negative impact to the rest of the world.
"some would go into Earth orbit"
Thus moving willy nilly risking satellites, and even the future of spavce travel...then fall to the earth.
"and a good chunk would be thrown out into interplanetary space.
WHAT? you fail at orbital mechanics.
"countermeasures"
Ah, nice.. countermeasures.. such as...?
The most common retort is packing it with explosives....but what people like you fail to take into account is that explosives wont reduce the mass. Do you have a different solution?
You need to spend less time at the movies, and more time in a classroom.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
commenting that don't show even the most basic understanding of physics, much less orbital mechanics, is astounding.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For Taliban, Americans, and other terrorists.
On all levels of sanity this is a wonderful example of WRONG for all reasons.
Obayashi should have studied Clarke's sci-fi book because their design is WRONG.
The current critical density altitudes of the debris belt are 900 to 1000 km and ~15000 km (see Wikipedia). Obayashi's failed design will be like a baseball bat in an automatic batting cage.
Another point, who is to run this thing, TEPCO? the Nippon Government? or SONY? The Clown Squads in Nippon can't run anything! They are THE laughing stock of the world (choose any catagory: science, technology, engineering, medicine, law, governance, healthcare ....).
Got to hand it to the Nipponese; when they make a joke of themselves they really know how to do it right.
Everyone stop laughing right now and they'll only go 12 years past their initial projection.
Clarke was a genius about these things.
This Obayashi elevator will be like Kobayashi, the lawyer. And we all know how real that was.
There are so many problems and impracticalities with a space elevator that I believe we are better off looking at other technologies such as a Launch Loop. It has some serious issues of its own, but not the number or scale that the Space Elevator has. Nonetheless, I wish Obayashi success.
With the first space elevator in place, it is relatively straightforward to use it to build the second elevator next to it.
In fact, once the first elevator is built, and thanks to the economy of scale already done on it (96'000km of theter), why stop at a 2nd elevator? a 3rd would be even cheaper as the industry of cable-production gets perfected.
Before 2100 Earth could be surrounded by some kind of orbital ring. A ring lookoing like a spiked bycicle wheel: with lots of tethers going down to eath and up to 96km. Formely used as anchoring and counter weight. But once you got the whole ring, the ring itself should be mostly orbitally stable. The inner theters will mostly be used as numerous access way to the ring, the outher theters as numerous launch point to send stuff beyond the gravity well.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Obayashi to enter bankruptcy by 2050"
the last time we made a structure that tall it collapsed and everyone ended up speaking different languages. i mean...what?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
This story sounds suspiciously like the tale of the first transatlantic cable for telegraphy. They fabricated this huge copper thing, covered with gutta-percha, and sank it. The first attempt snapped. The second attempt worked, but since they were using DC current and like 10,000 volts of power, the cable disintegrated after a few minutes of transmissions. The third attempt waited for about 20 years, then was made practical by AC current. Read Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet.
Wow, an entire week? You could literally lose weight while you sleep!
Wow. A week in an elevator.
Yeah, that didn't sound right to me either, and the article doesn't mention the reason why it needs to be 36,000 km. International Space Station is only 200-250 miles, or 320-400 km, so 36,000 km would zoom right past it. Why does it need to be 36,000 km?
Also the earth's radius is only 6,400 km, so 36,000 km is HUGE. It would be waaaaaay out into space. Closest easily visualized equivalent would be similar to a lolipop, with earth being the candy part and the elevator being the stick. That's ridiculous to the point of absurd, are we sure this is correct? Anything over 500 km really wouldn't make much sense.
Could they have meant 360 km? That would put it at the ISS which makes a whole lot more sense.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
What the average number of suicides will be per trip?
But sometimes I wonder if the continental railroad would have ever been built or the moon landing happened if it were left to /. pundits. No level of technology ever seems sufficient, for anything.
Again, not that there isn't validity to what you're saying. But it may not be as bleak as you see it. The distance, design, etc. may need tweaking, but there may yet be use to this approach.
I don't claim to know what may come to be in the next four decades and I would thank you to stop assuming you do.
I'm holding out for instantaneous teleportation!
So long as our world doesn't have an atmosphere of highly combustible gases... oh wait.
A lot of the comments are focused around the "spending a week in the elevator" bit. What if the thing's not built for people? A cheap means of moving even as "small" a weight as the equivalent of 30 people (~4500lbs) would be fantastic, and pave the way for launching cheap spacecraft.
Aerospace engineer who has worked on orbital tether design speaking here.
A cable with a tip velocity of 30% of orbital speed is feasible with existing materials. Since the center of the cable is at orbital velocity by definition, the tip is then at 70% of orbital velocity at the bottom of it's rotation. A vehicle coming from the ground then needs half the kinetic energy as a full ground-to-orbit one does (Kinetic energy goes as 0.5 times velocity squared). That makes single stage launch vehicles very feasible. If the tip is at 1 gravity, then the cable radius is 516 km, and the center would be at an altitude of 750 km or thereabouts, so it does not see too much drag at the low point. Half a rotation later (12 minutes) at top of the rotation, you can let go, and now be going at 130% of orbit velocity, which is nearly GEO transfer or escape. Escape is 141% of orbit velocity.
If you wanted to get to zero g, then it's a 516 km ride, which beats the fuck out of a stationary elevator. The elevator will be heavy relative to the vehicles coming up and down, but you need onboard propulsion to make up for traffic differences. Anything going up tends to lower the elevator orbit, anything going down tends to raise it. Whatever is left over you need to make up, preferably with an efficient electric thruster. Arrival means landing on a platform that is at one gee. With modern GPS and laser navigation, that should be fairly easy. Make the platform hundreds of meters wide if you need a bigger target. Missed landings just means the vehicle heads back down sooner than it was supposed to. It should not present a safety problem.
Building something like this is a bootstrapping task. Start with a small rotating station, and extend cables from it. Keep adding sections of cable one at a time. Get your cable from near earth asteroids which have carbon, so you don't have to launch the whole thing from Earth. As the thing grows, the velocity to reach it from the ground goes down, so the payload a vehicle can carry goes up.
Oh, I forgot to mention, if you ride up the cable somewhere between the tip and the center, and time when you let go, you can inject into any transfer orbit you want. Also the Moon is a lot smaller than Earth, so a rotating cable in Lunar orbit can reach all the way to zero velocity. That makes getting up and down from the Moon very easy.
So now you've got the context and you can stop thinking or pretending that I've just jumped on one of your comments from nowhere.
Now do I have to mention the sub-orbital thing again or can you see or remember the previous comment?
See the Space Elevator Reference story for more information on this hyped story.
So can you compare the magnitude of this to a true space elevator, in terms of technology, need for unobtanium, difficulty, etc?
Last I heard there were to be 3 tether experiments from the shuttle, one with a 50km tether down and two with a 150km tether, once up and once down. Last I'd heard they had problems (electrostatic?) with the 50km down tether, and I got the impression that they abandoned the whole thing.
You talked of needing to adjust orbit... David Brin wrote a story called "Tank Farm Dynamo" that involved tethers. He had plenty of electricity from solar panels, and pushed current through conductors on the tethers to torque against the Earth's magnetic field. They were able to to station-keeping without "throwing away mass."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's cool the oversized Kyoto train station is actually great. The sky tree is a good start. I've been watching it grow for the last few years, love it. Somebody has to make the space elevator. I'll see if I can buy tickets when I'm at the opening preview for sky tree coming up soon.
Yeah I agree, but it’s possible as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky then Arthur C Clerk proposed the concept. I remember taking my 12 year daughter to London’s Science Museum to view the exhibition on Nano tech & Bucky Balls in the late 90s and there was the concept explaining it. Ben Cowell
PS I'm also sure I saw flying pigs around Battersea Power Station in the mid seventies Seventies, but maybe I was under the influence? Oh no it was not a dream!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd_pigs
r0ball,
I (and just about everybody else) got the joke.
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