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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 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.
Well, here's a list of some of their previous projects.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
WTF does that last sentence even mean?
Wow. A week in an elevator. Here's hoping you're not in the elevator with "that guy". You know the one. Who eats about a ton of burrito's or whatever causes his usual gastric disturbances.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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
Ah yes, the Shitsumi dam. That's near the Notami fault, isn't it?
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..
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
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.
To get from Vladivostok to Moscow on the train you would need 9 days. It used to take a couple of weeks or more. One train carriage carry approximately 30 people and the either share cabins with 3 other travellers or the whole carriage is one big cabin. People used to travel this way all the time before flying started to be an option. I suppose with our iPads etc the journey will be even less difficult
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."
No no wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit.
Cargo doesn't care. One of the main attractions of a space elevator is that you can lift very heavy loads into space very cheaply and at little risk.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
We do not in fact have the materials. No matter how much money you spend you cannot get even a foot of +6GPa strength cable. Not only have we not ever made such a material, but we don't know how yet either. It is a R&D project. It is also not a given that it is even possible.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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!
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."
The climber has to have food, toilets, sleeping facilities if you are going to take a week to get to GSO, so it's going to have to be more like a mini-hotel (or at least a mini-space station) than an elevator car.
Like a 'mini hotel'? You've never travelled across Russia by train. Those trains have toilets, sure. Sleeping facilities, sure. Dining cars, sure. But 'mini-hotel'? No. It'd be very cool if the 'space elevator' had coal-fired samovars in every carriage though!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.