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LiftPort Wants To Build Space Elevator On the Moon By 2020
Zothecula writes "When the late Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 went to the Moon, they did so sitting atop a rocket the size of a skyscraper that blasted out jets of smoke and flame as it hurtled skyward. For over half a century, that is how all astronauts have gone into space. It's all very dramatic, but it's also expensive. Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to take the elevator? That's the question that Michael Laine, CEO of LiftPort in Seattle, Washington, hopes to answer with the development of a transportation system that swaps space-rockets for space-ribbons. LiftPort ultimately wants to build a space elevator on Earth, but the company isn't planning on doing it in one go. Instead, Laine and his team are settling for a more modest goal – building an elevator on the Moon by 2020. This is much easier. For one thing, there’s no air on the Moon, so no icing problems. Also, the lower gravity means that no unobtainium is needed for the ribbon. Kevlar is strong enough for the job. And finally, there’s very little in the way of satellites or debris to contend with."
If it's for profit, how does it make money?
If it's not, is the point to prove it's possible and learn more about how to build one?
First post? Anyway, you can't "anchor" a space elevator to the moon from lunar orbit. It would have to stretch all the way to the Earth - or at least to a Lagrange point.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
The Earth has an atmosphere, so a space elevator needs to go up to get out of it. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere, so the you can just build a mass driver horizontally, along the ground, and launch stuff in a tangential trajectory.
That problem is that there is no way to create a lunar-centric orbit where the upper terminus of the ribbon hovers over a fixed position. So any tether can not be fixed to the ground. So lifting anything with that tether will involve something like a skyhook catch, except it will be at orbital velocities.
woudln't you need a body that rotates fast enough (at the equator) to keep the elevator line taught?
They're forgetting the single most important part of a space elevator: It needs to actually be useful.
What are we going to do with a space elevator on the moon? We don't go there for a very good reason: Its expensive as hell. Making the cheap and easy part a little cheaper an easier isn't going to change the fact that the entire rest of the trip is prohibitively expensive.
It's like your friend moving across town to be closer to you, but he lives in Seattle and you live in London.
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Wouldn't we need to get back to the Moon, establish some sort of colony there, and create the industry and infrastructure just to build such a thing in the first place? I can't see this all happening in the next 8 years.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Well I'm not so sure... It would make transport on and off the surface cheaper. This would in turn make it more economical to conduct mining operations on the the moon--which is presently our easiest to access source of Helium-3.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I can just see the cable breaking and some fool tries the stunt of jumping just before it hits. Given the gravity I wonder just how much force his head would have when it hit the ceiling? A study of that could be worthy of an ignoble award.
Can you hear me Major Tom,,, Here I am drifting in a tin can.
"make it more economical to conduct mining operations on the the moon"
OK, but I'm having difficulty imagining massive mining machines working their way along the tether. And how to begin the process from an orbiting craft. And then, once landed, how will these machines get the energy necessary for mining operations?
I'm obviously missing some essential information about why this might be practical.
...omphaloskepsis often...
google: ( ( lunar cycle / 2*pi)^2 * mass of the moon * gravitational constant )^(1/3) .. 1.12x the earth moon distance. Uhhh
That's 429,000km
\u262D = \u5350
My orbital mechanics sucks, but apparently smarter people have thought this through. It's not as intuitively simple as a tether between the Earth's equator and a geostationary satellite, but the physics does work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator
My issue is that this is yet another fancy space project that presupposes an earth to high-orbit launching capability we don't have, nobody is seriously working on, and would seem to require more financial support than anybody has the will to deliver.
If somebody can crack this nut, then we can start talking about lunar space elevators, missions to other planets, and other fun stuff. But until that happens, all these fancy proposals are just so much hot air.
License it from Oakley, and you can try it out.
Doesn;t seem suitable, but it has so many different properties and uses in eyeglasses, who knows? Might work.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Except that it's not economical: all current plans for fusion power intend to breed the required fuel isotopes from lithium, which is several orders of magnitude cheaper than mining anything from space.
So, that leaves what? Nothing. There is nothing on the Moon even remotely worth the multi-trillion-dollar expense. It's just rocks in a vacuum. We've got plenty of rocks here!
"settling for a more modest goal – building an elevator on the Moon"
Did someone just use the words "settle" and "building on the moon" in the same sentence? Who are these people?
Where are the billions of dollars this is going to take? How the hell are they going to prototype it?
Do they realize that 2020 isn't some lofty far off time these days? That's a bit more than 7 years.
If NASA, Russia, or China (or Elon Musk) said they were going to try this, I'd be excited. But this shit is not going to happen like this, lets just be honest.
Reservationist: Oh, I can reserve you a flight coming back from Chicago at 5:55. Does that help? Richard: Hi, I'm Earth. Have we met? Reservationist: I don't think so.
Step 1: Build space elevator on the moon.
Step 2: ??
Step 3: ???
Step 4: ????
Step 5: PROFIT!!!
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The reason that the elevator can work without unobtainium is that its EASY to get off the moon. The delta-v required is withing the range of all sorts of technologies (rockets - don't even need H2, could probably use O2 or N2 exhaust), mass drivers, etc.
This project would be insanely expensive - need to get the elevator (still a multi-thousand km structure) to the moon, set up etc.
Insane to think it could be done in 8 years.
Once you've done all that, there just isn't that much you really want from the moon. He3 is a somewhat better fusion fuel than D-T, but we are still at least several decades and several 10s of billions of dollars (probably MUCH more) away from fusion.
So, that leaves what? Nothing. There is nothing on the Moon even remotely worth the multi-trillion-dollar expense. It's just rocks in a vacuum. We've got plenty of rocks here!
Using lunar material for construction projects in space is MUCH easier than getting any significant quantities from the deep well Earth is in.
Example projects:
* ridiculously large & light zero-g free-floating solar arrays with uninterrupted sunlight
* space habitats & manufacturing plants
* spaceships
It would be much cheaper to get stuff from the Moon to the ISS than from Earth. If it became feasible to extract water from the Moon that could be enough to justify it.
You put LiftPort on the front page and forget their KickStarter campaign?
It started on the 23.08, and in 5 days it's raised $27.514 of the 8000 goal.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elevator-science-climb-to-the-sky-a-tethered
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
He-3 is preferable for a fusion fuel since it's aneutronic--no radiation to deal. It comes that way from the moon, the path to producing it on earth does everything but avoid radiation.
Even the "aneutronic" fusion reactions have side-reactions that produce neutrons. While a lower neutron flux helps with materials engineering from a longevity standpoint, it still makes the reactor wall materials radioactive. That's the real problem, and He-3 doesn't fix it.
He-3 is useful as an advanced fuel in rocket propulsion
a) Requires technology that is currently at the wishful-thinking stage of development.
b) Rockets don't require aneutronic fusion, because fusion engines would be most useful in deep space, where radiation is not a problem.
c) He-3 fusion isn't entirely aneutronic anyway.
d) He-3 fusion is harder than D-T fusion.
Power can be produced in space and beamed down to earth
Has nothing to do with the Moon, or an orbital tether.
There is no realistic source of power that either exists only on the Moon, or would be cheaper to produce on the Moon.
Many of those rocks we have down here on Earth resulted from really big rocks from space slamming into us. Might be good idea if we have technology, infrastructure and humanity already in space before we're in need of it.
A tether on the Moon won't help you solve this problem. If this comes up, robotic space-probe technology will be all we need, and we have that already. Stop watching Hollywood sci-fi where brave men have to go deal with the problem in a giant space ship. The real solution will likely be as simple as coating one side of the incoming object with soot.
Putting multi-trillions of dollars into the vacuum is preferable to craters into the middle-eastern sand. The same jobs are created but at the end of the day at you have something far more impressive to show for it and far fewer lives expended.
[citation needed]
Things aren't that simple in the real world. As cold and sad as it is, the lives of brown people in a distant desert just aren't worth much to anybody in the United States, unlike the oil they live on top of. By some calculation it was worth it to invade. Thanks to various mistakes, the cost ended up spiralling out of control, but even so the wars are probably a better investment than going to the Moon.
He-3 is worthless, because it doesn't achieve aneutronic fusion, just slightly-less-neutronic fusion. So then, what's left on the Moon that's worth a multi-trillion investment?
Seriously, name one thing that's on the moon that you think is worth trillions of dollars, keeping in mind that its surface is entirely covered in rocks.
The mining machines wouldn't necessarily need to be: massive, transported via the tether, and/or come down fully assembled. Not everything has to start out on massive scales. For instance consider the state of global shipping back in the 18th century then compare that to the early 21st. Or farming in the 18th vs. 21st. Normally things start out small and gradually build out as technology and resources develop. Staging things is simply an engineering problem which if Curiosity is any indicator we seem to be getting pretty good at. Even during the Apollo missions we were dropping some pretty serious hardware down onto the moon. Powering these machines can come from any number of technologies from mundane to exotic. We already have well proven solar and RTG technologies, there are a few rather interesting possibilities using in-situ resources as well. For instance using the newly discovered water with the aluminum in the regolith to produce hydrogen for fuel. The Aluminum Hydroxide byproduct has its own interesting uses. The obvious one is of course simply using the mined He-3 for fusion power (whenever we get that one figured out).
Few grand adventures into human frontiers are ever "practical" initially and that unfortunately prevents people from seeing what humanity's pioneers and explorers see. In the 1800's no one got what Charles Babbage saw. During the first half of the 1900's very few saw what Konrad Zuse saw. Today no one can miss it and everyone demands it. People too often are quick to see problems as "too hard", too near-sighted to see possibilities, too self-centered to appreciate the benefits to others. You might not get to holiday on Utopia Planitia, or sail the methane seas of Titan but wouldn't it be awesome to initiate the projects now that make that a reality for your progeny? Both incomprehensible business opportunities and human delights await us on this next frontier. What are we waiting for?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Forming those rocks into a stepping stone.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
So, wouldn't the elevator tether keep circling around until the moon was yanked directly into the earth? Excuse me for ignoring physics and stupid things like that.
Have you considered the idea of a "prototype"? Just because it isn't the most needed place to set up an elevator doesn't make it useless. There are plenty more resources on the moon than simply He-3 for fusion as well and none of it needs to be hauled back down earth's gravity well to be useful. The manufacturing potential from the materials found on the moon--aluminum, silicon, magnesium, iron, and titanium to name a few--is huge. Why waste enormous sums of money launching your space-bound infrastructure out of earth's gravity well when it can be made on and launched from the moon? Launch circuit boards from earth, launch space frames from the moon.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Reaction mass.
If we're going to send more probes / spaceships out into the universe, collecting reaction mass from the moon would be more energy efficient than lifting it from the earth. Even if we can't use that mass directly as an energy source.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I think you've missed bertok's point.
He3 is a waste product from D-D fusion. And D-D and D-T fusion are much easier than He-3 fusion. So if we ever achieve commercial He3 fusion, we'll have already had D-D fusion for decades. And since He3 fusion requires higher temperatures/pressures (ie, better confinement), the same technology would make D-D and D-T fusion more efficient/compact. Which means that even as He3 fusion displaces D-D/D-T for big power-stations, they'll move into entirely new markets (such as mobile power plants. Ships/etc.) And the process repeats, each time you improve He3, you improve D-D/D-T fusion even more.
But it's more than that. If we have fusion, it would be massively useful in space. So if we have the infrastructure on the moon necessary to mine the extremely trace amounts of He3 from the regolith, we'd have a lot of fusion power plants on the moon. And He3 is a waste product of D-D fusion...
So even after Earth bans D-D fusion, it would be cheaper and easier to do anything else in space and just export the He3 waste from their own fusion plants, than to mine He3 from the regolith.
He3 just isn't a reason for going to the moon. (And I say this as a space fanboi.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
- Real estate covered in solar flux = energy
- Temperature differences = energy
- A shallow gravity well = easy to ship things out
- Low gravity may = easier life for those weak due to medical conditions = retirement
- Dark side = potential astronomy sites
- As closest planetary body from which vacuum based engineering such as asteroid mining and space habitats could be tested and based.
- Close enough that robotic operations can be monitored and directed in real time
- Far enough that it is a good place for dangerous things like reactors, super particle accelerators and self-assembling nanolife construction bots.
So let's see, how fast does a spaceship go after blasting off with a rocket? And how long does it take to get to the moon? Okay, now let's compare that to the speed of something traveling along an elevator wire. If it's pulled by the wire, the most powerful metal alloys in the world still wouldn't hold up to a reasonable speed. Then there's friction so let's say it's mag-lev, except not really lev since it's going straight up. That'd get maybe 100MPH if they're lucky since a bullet train can go like 200 on the ground going perpendicular to gravity. So I hope they enjoy their 6 month long journey to the moon on that elevator.
Yeah, I don't see the point. The moon has a lower escape velocity and no atmosphere. Lunar material can be put in orbit with a catapult. (Just make sure the free luna movement doesn't take it over.
They had rocks in Spain too. After they conquered a new world, they had a lot more rocks. Shiny, pretty rocks.
How about using that elevator to dispose of toxic waste in space.
Sounds good. Let's start with Congress...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Forming those rocks into a stepping stone.
To what? More rocks?
1. Rare Earth elements.
2. (Potentially) Clean water
3. Raw materials that are in limited supply on earth, e.g. Copper
All three are available here, at 1/1000th of the cost, right now. Rare earth metals aren't that rare, water is everywhere and at most needs desalination, and copper is both easy to obtain and easy to recycle.
You would have to propose non-physical magic technology to enable any of those things to be shipped from the Moon to the Earth cheaper.
Assumes too much about future technology which doesn't even exist yet.
For example, ion drives are the best developed for deep-space exploration, and require only relatively small quantities of exotic substances such as mercury or xenon. Lifting a few tons of either into orbit is not a problem, and way cheaper than lifting an entire refinery all the way to the Moon!
- Real estate covered in solar flux = energy
We have solar flux and real estate here, at 1/1000th the cost.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
- Temperature differences = energy
There are no significant temperature differences that can be exploited, and no cooling water or air either. You're thinking of the temperature swing between the day and night side.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
- A shallow gravity well = easy to ship things out
So what? There's nothing there worth shipping anywhere. It's just rocks.
- Low gravity may = easier life for those weak due to medical conditions = retirement
Doubtful. All evidence collected so far indicates that it would make things worse, not to mention the huge risk of living on the Moon and the drop in the quality of life. There's no parks and stuff outside to take a stroll in on a nice sunny day!
- Dark side = potential astronomy sites
Idiotic beyond belief. It's no darker than anywhere else -- it's just a name for crying out loud. Space telescopes are placed into orbit or Lagrange points for a reason: no vibration, no gravity, minimal temperature variations, and 24/7 seeing. The Moon has none of those things.
- As closest planetary body from which vacuum based engineering such as asteroid mining and space habitats could be tested and based.
You can do vacuum based engineering in Earth orbit, which is far more convenient. Not that this has been shown to be useful in any way, because we can produce vacuums down here on the surface just fine. What we can't produce is microgravity, which Earth orbit has, but the Moon does not.
- Close enough that robotic operations can be monitored and directed in real time
Just because it's practical to do things there doesn't actually provide a reason to be there. Not to mention that the 3 second round-trip delay makes "real time" a bit of a stretch.
- Far enough that it is a good place for dangerous things like reactors, super particle accelerators and self-assembling nanolife construction bots.
Nuclear reactors have killed fewer people in their entire history than coal mining has this year alone. Particle accelerators aren't dangerous at all. Nanolife is wishful thinking.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
Got any ideas that belong in reality instead of fantasy?
I can see how bitcoins fit into this, I can see how kickstarter fits in too. Nibiru, obviously. Raspberry Pi... I need more to work with here.
You know, I've really got to wonder what your arguments might have been back in 1492...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Seriously, name one thing that's on the moon that you think is worth trillions of dollars, keeping in mind that its surface is entirely covered in rocks.
Rocks in space.
Seriously, look at the price of titanium on earth - about $7 US per kg for commodity ferro titanium. Look at the price of titanium in low earth orbit - according to Wikipedia, it costs about $4300 US per kg using a Proton rocket (the cheapest non-subsidized launch method listed). There's quite a lot of titanium on the Moon, as well as aluminum, iron, and magnesium.
That's why we want to mine asteroids and the Moon - getting material out of the Moon's gravity well is a lot easier than getting it out of Earth's gravity well (and of course asteroids generally don't have an appreciable gravity well).
If we want a space station that's more than just a few tin cans glued together and can protect its inhabitants from radiation, we need building materials. We can get many of those materials from the Moon. We'd have to learn how to process and smelt them there first, of course, but you have to start somewhere.
He3? Well, maybe later. You don't build a gas station before the invention of combution engines. Water is more valuable, if it can be collected in any serious amount, which we still don't know.
That said, I have my doubts that anyone could put a space elevator on the moon in 8 years. It's just not going to happen. The design phase would take at least half that time.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Wouldn't it be easier to build a maglev accellerator?
So, that leaves what? Nothing. There is nothing on the Moon even remotely worth the multi-trillion-dollar expense. It's just rocks in a vacuum. We've got plenty of rocks here!
If you start thinking outside of the box, that everything we mine in the space must be hauled and used back on Earth, then you will find out that access to metals/water/fuel etc. outside of the Earth gravity well could be very desireable and economical for constructions of e.g. moon base, orbital dock and subsequent space ships for interplanetary travels etc.
Only 2 really big problems with that idea.
.1ppb) its a square 50km a side. For just one year just for the US, on the moon!
One, there is almost no He3 on the moon, sure the ratio compared to He4 is massive... but that is not the same thing as a decent amount of He3. Its about 50ppb or less, the average is more like 1ppb. You would use more energy mining it that you get from the He3. Note this more than 1000 times more dilute that commercial quantities of Uranium.
The second big problem is that He3 fusion is ~50 times harder to do than DT fusion which we can't do! So even if you get some He3, you can't burn it. If we can do He3 fusion we can also do plain old DD fusion and save the trip to the mine on the moon.
Lets run a number or 2. The US uses just a little more than 3900 TWh of electrical energy per year. That is 14x10^21 J. Quite a bit. 1 mole (3g) of He3 fused gives us 614GJ . Se we need 7622kg of He3 per year at 100% efficiency. Now is that 50ppb by weight or not? i don't know and i will assume by weight (this is more conservative). The average is closer to 1ppb but lets see what we get at 50ppb. Assuming 100% extraction (totally unrealistic) we need to mine 153x10^9 kg per year. At 1ppb its 50x that, or more like 7650x10^9 kg (7600 million tons)! The he3 is only in the top layer. At 1 meter deep, that is an area of 50x10^6 meters, or a square about 7km on each side. With closer to true average levels of 1ppb (some papers even claim as low as
We won't do it. We will just use DD fusion where the fuel is readily available from water right here...
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I call bullshit on this one. "Unobtainium"? Give me a break!
First, bridges to nowhere; now, elevators to nowhere !
Whenever I hear about these things all I can think of is the inevitable spectacular failures that will occur when something snaps that ribbon and 50-100 miles of ribbon start pouring out of the sky...
On the moon I guess you'd wind up with a massive pile (like that scene near the end of Twins when Schwarzenegger and Devito drop the chain on the bad guy)...
On earth, with wind, rotation, etc... you might have a massive ribbon falling over span of 10's of miles, landing on homes, schools, highways, people...
* ridiculously large & light zero-g free-floating solar arrays with uninterrupted sunlight
Which use that power to do what?
* space habitats & manufacturing plants
Which manufacture what, and send it where?
* spaceships
Which go where?
The big problem I see with space construction and habitation is bootstrapping: space construction makes sense once you have a big population in space, and space habitation makes sense once you have a lot of space construction to get done, but there's no fundamental point to all of it in the first place. It's like how the Space Shuttle was designed to get modules and people to the Space Station, which was designed to be serviced by the Space Shuttle, but the two of them together didn't actually have a reason to exist.
In the commercial world, this level of investment without ultimate return doesn't really happen. The big driver of space tech in the last 50 years has been military needs: the requirement to set cities we don't like on fire within 20 minutes, and then to take spy pictures of the other side's city-setting-on-fire facilities... and even going to the moon was a small clip-on hanging off the side of that whole military infrastructure. And yes, even Silicon Valley and the Internet were tiny byproducts of that huge flow of military money.
But it seems to have turned out that even having a manned base on the moon isn't even really that useful militarily, let alone paying its way commercially. It might yet happen, like Scott Base at Antarctica; but there aren't even penguins at Tranquility Base, so how many dead rocks are underfunded scientists and bored tourists going to pay to catalogue?
Teleoperated moon rovers I could see happening; they're relatively cheap and safe to launch. Fully manned presence? Hmm. Let me figure the health and class-action lawsuit insurance bills for that. Not seeing the upside yet.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC