The ring-launch system could be built slowly over the period of decades, since the component rings would not need to be lifted AND HELD in posistion like a space elevator's cable.
Huh? Make the elevator ribbon long enough and you don't have to "hold" it in position with anything - its own mass extending out into space will counterbalance it.
He claimed to have a PhD. He didn't and he still doesn't. Why should anybody pay attention to a word this clown writes? He's no more qualified than many of the people posting here on/.
Actually, there are probably plenty of people here I'd trust over Cringely. I'm sure most of them aren't lying about their credentials.
The ISS is completely useless. At present, the skeleton crew aboard the ISS spend most of their time keeping the station running - an increasingly difficult task, as more and more systems aboard degrade or fail outright.
It is essentially the world's only permanent microgravity laboratory.
Pity the astronauts aboard don't have time to conduct any experiments. Of course, with astronauts bouncing around onboard the ISS is hardly an ideal microgravity lab. An independent, unmanned satellite would make for a better experimental platform, one that wouldn't consume billions of dollars a year worth of resupply and crew rotation flights. Shuttle flights to the ISS alone are projected to cost in excess of $1 billion a pop, assuming the Shuttle ever returns to flight. You could fly dozens of unmanned microgravity labs for the cost of completing the construction and providing the resupply and maintenance of the ISS.
Of course, even if you discover something interesting in microgravity, there's no evidence that knowledge would be the least bit useful. Again, dumping billions into researching microgravity seems like a ridiculous investment, given how much it currently costs to get anything into a microgravity environment. It's not like we're going to be building factories in orbit anytime soon with any existing launch technology. NASA would better serve US taxpayers by conducting fundamental research into launch technologies that could dramatically lower the cost of access to space.
Therefore, it would be possible to study the effects of low gravity on plants or small animals without requiring an expensive trip to the moon or mars.
For the cost of completing the construction of the ISS and supplying it over the next decade with men, supplies and equipment, you could launch plants or small animals to the moon or Mars and study the effects of low gravity on them on-site. Frankly, the microgravity environment will be the least of our problems on any moon or Mars mission. The biggest obstacle to any manned moon or Mars mission remains the outrageous cost of launching men, equipment and supplies into space. NASA's #1 priority should be to overcome that obstacle, first.
I can only think of two Shuttle disasters, Challenger and Columbia. That gives the shuttle a success rate of 97.7%. That doesn't sound all that dangerous to me...
It's a pretty awful track record compared to Soyuz - hundreds of launches and no fatalities since the '70s. And Soyuz can get six astronauts into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the Suttles, even taking into consideration the fact you'd have to launch two Soyuz capsules to do it.
The Shuttles are just about the highest-priced payload launchers on the planet right now, and not even the most reliable. As manned launchers they're overkill - you don't need to send up the people with heavy payloads. The Columbia disaster gave us an opportunity to kill this white elephant and switch to more reliable, less expensive alternatives.
Instead, NASA is soldiering on with the flying crematorium, while blowing additional taxpayer cash on lame PR staring a B-actor from a failed incarnation of Star Trek. Pathetic. Appropriate, but pathetic.
The Space Elevator is in fact such a case: think about the absolute nightmare a cable cut would be. I mean, all that has to happen is a plane goes the wrong way, or a meteor happens through the wrong area, or bad weather, or lightning, or god knows what. That cable is going to be seriously heavy - half a ton per mile, maybe more, even designed to be as light as possible - and it's flexible so it won't get brittle, and it's, well, long. So it starts falling to earth, right?
So, you've got a highway coming down, in bands, around the Earth eight times. Right through the middles of cities. Over the ocean. Into parks, monuments, farmland. Cutting cities in half. Killing tens of millions.
The guys and gals working on this have already thought of and solved this problem. The 'cable' would be a ribbon. It's 5 - 12cm wide and a few mm thick. Think videotape, only much lighter. It isn't crashing to earth. It's fluttering down like tickertape. Most of it would burn up in the upper atmosphere, due to its high speed of reentry. The portions in the lower atmosphere would fall gently out of the sky like the tail of a kite. Send out some Japanese schoolgirls armed with diamond-coated scissors to scoop the tape up, clip it, and dump it into baggies.
The elevator cars themselves could be equipped with ablative shielding on their undersides and parachutes, allowing them to function as re-entry vehicles in the event of cable failure.
Where do these magic numbers come from? We don't have the material, so we don't know the weight or the manufacturing costs.
I didn't say "manufacturing" costs - I said launch costs. The manufacturing costs could be much, much higher - but then, we spend close to a billion dollars prepping and fueling each Space Shuttle for launch. Clearly, the money is there even if the elevator ultimately takes in excess of $40 billion to manufacture, given the kind of access it gives you to both earth orbit as well as interplanetary targets. We've wasted a similar amount trying to build single stage to orbit space planes to replace the Shuttles, and have nothing to show yet for our troubles.
As for the weight, we have a pretty good idea of what the weight would be, since we have a pretty good idea of how strong carbon nanotubes are, and how many of them you'd need per centimeter of cable to hold the whole shebang together. This page, from 2003, discusses one proposal regarding how the elevator might be deployed.
I don't think anyone who has replied to my post has really considered that a very long piece of string is very heavy, and that the initial "ribbon" may have to be a few metres in diameter, making it very heavy - we won't know until we have a real material to plug into the very rough concept designs.
Why don't you try reading up one the subject, instead of raising ludicrous objections that have already been addressed by researchers working in the field? The initial ribbon won't have to be anywhere near a few meters in diameter. Try 11cm at its widest. It's also just a few microns thick. We know the physical properties of carbon nanotubes. We can already make carbon nanotube fibers, but they're only a few cm long at the moment. However, there's absolutely no reason to assume we'll be unable to make them longer in the future - in just the past couple of years we've doubled the length of carbon nanotube fiber we're capable of producing. We're unlocking the secrets of working with carbon nanotubes far more rapidly than we progressed at figuring out how to work with once exotic metals like aluminum. That's one reason why author Arthur C. Clarke now thinks we'll see a space elevator built in the 1st half of this century, not centuries from now as he earlier postulated.
If it's unlikely, a grand scheme, numbers are being made up, timescales are unrealisticly short and no reputable space agency is involved, then it could be a scam.
This has squat to do with any "scheme". Space elevators have been postulated for the better part of a century now, but until researchers stumbled across carbon nanotubes there was no known material you could use to construct one. The physical properties of carbon nanotubes meet those demanding strength requirements. Now all we need to do is figure out how to manufacture lengthy ribbons out of the stuff, a task that's far less daunting than it might at first appear. For example, we have scads of experience manufacturing massive lengths of magnetic tape, and some of those processes are bound to be applied to the manufacture and handling of carbon nanotube ribbons. It'll still be a massive engineering challenge, and there's no guarantee it'll be cheap, but right now a space elevator looks like a more practical use of research and development dollars than any other launch system proposal out there, in part because the potential payoff is so great. Even if we fail to develop a material that could be used to build a ribbon cable out of, carbon nanotube based materials will likely revolutionize manufacturing in the same way the development of plastics did in the 20th century. We'll get our money's worth out of this research one way or another.
You have to haul the parts for the space elevator into space of course, and it is only ever going to be practical if you are going to be doing even bigger projects - think of how big it is going to be and what the mass is going to be even if we use something with the strength to weight ratio of carbon nanotubes. It's just the wet dream of accountants that never had to take science classes in high school but picked up the tower of Bable story at Sunday school.
Well, I'm an atheist, so the "Tower of Babel" holds no allure for me. So much for that strawman. As for the "parts" of the space elevator, the only part you need to haul into space is the initial run of cable or ribbon and a machine to feed it out. Nanotube ribbon cables have been proposed which could be launched into space on existing boosters in a single shot. Don't know how much the mechanism that feeds the cable out in both directions would have to weigh, but I don't think it would be outrageous to assume it could also be hoisted into orbit via our largest boosters. Again, in a single shot. So we're talking maybe $300 million to launch the starter cable into orbit and deploy it. That's far less than we've wasted on the International Space Scrapyard - $150 billion or so, to date.
Do people really think the thing is just going to be self supporting during contruction, like a big building - think of how difficult that would be. Current proposals are to drop a cable from above - so you have to haul a lot of material up.
By nature the cable would be "self supporting" - one end is extended toward earth while the other extends out into space, balancing the mass of the cable. Once the initial segment reaches the ground, climbers could be attached to lay additional layers onto the cable, providing it with the strength it would need to haul larger payloads and survive impacts from orbital debris.
If you are going to build an electromagnetic lift mechanism it's going to be seriously shorter and cheaper to build a mass driver around the entire equator - even with low acceleration you could get things up to serious velocities before launch after a few loops.
You're going to build a powered mass driver around the equator? Including over (or under) the water? And that somehow is going to be cheaper than a thin little ribbon? Sure. Right. Whatever. It would be like trying to build a bullet train that wraps around the planet. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, if not the trillions, with enormous maintenance costs.
As for the "drydock" approach - the idea is you get as much as you can from places where you don't have to fight gravity - you use your incredibly expensive Buck Rogers 10kg rock cutter to chop up asteroids to save millions of kilograms in fuel in shipping construction materials.
And how, exactly, do you get the machinery into orbit to make use of all of these materials? At thousands of dollars a pound, hoisting entire factories into orbit isn't terribly practical using chemical rockets. We're currently having trouble building and supplying a space station that does absolutely NOTHING. In contrast, a space elevator would allow you to fling payloads as large as you like as far out as Saturn without using a drop of fuel to get them there (though you may need it to stop them on arrival). Elevators deployed elsewhere would allow you to harvest resources and fling them back toward the earth for use in orbit here, or they could be hauled back down for use on the surface. And elevators would allow you to haul up as much payload as you'd like, making the construction and supply of factories, solar power satellites and permanent habitats far more practical. New habitats and construction facilities can then be constructed in segments and flung to wherever in the solar system they're required.
If we are going to spend money on this we should take care it doesn't just go to confidence tricksters
You will not be able to build space elevators on other planets unless you have vehicles which can go to those planets, lift enough material into orbit to build the tether and keep you alive for the time it takes to do it.
Ummm, why would you haul the cable to the surface of another planet and then lift it back into orbit ????
You'd take a cable out to the moon or planet (say Mars), and simply drop it to the surface from orbit.
You really need to come up with some objections that aren't backed by such obviously flawed reasoning.
You're missing the point. To get the mass required to build a space elevator, we'll need to get substantial mass into orbit. To get that mass into orbit, you'll need better lifters than we have today.
And you're making a couple of seriously unfounded assumptions. You're assuming that 1) you have to lift the entire mass of the first cable into orbit in one shot and that 2) the entire mass of the 1st cable will be greater than the capacity of our heaviest lifters. In practice, neither may prove true. We may be able to build cables out of splices of ribbon-like material, in which case separate payloads can be launched into orbit, and the cable constructed from a central point extending outward in both directions, keeping it in balance as it grows out into space and down toward the earth's surface.
We may also be able to build a single long lightweight starter ribbon which can be extended directly to the surface of the earth from orbit. Climbers could then be attached to lay down additional layers on the cable, building it up until it's strong enough to hoist larger payloads into orbit.
In order for a space elevator to be useful, we'll need craft which are much more effective at travelling through space than we have today.
Well, those will certainly be easier to develop once access to space costs dollars a pound instead of thousands of dollars a pound. We'll be able to haul up heavy items like nuclear reactors and lead shielding, not to mention all the food, air and water any astronauts might need.
But the real usefulness of a space elevator isn't just the ability to travel anywhere in the solar system - it's the ability it gives us to harness the almost limitless resources available in space. A space elevator would make it possible to build massive orbital solar power stations that beam electricity back to earth via microwaves. Ultimately, we could even move much of our industry offworld, powered by limitless solar energy and supplied with raw materials like metals from the asteroid belt and volatiles from the Oort cloud and other sources in the outer reaches of the solar system.
In order to visit another gravity well (planet), we need vehicles with the capacity to leave that gravity well. A space elevator may make it cheaper to get out of this one. It won't help you at your destination.
You really haven't thought this thing through, have you? A space elevator makes it possible to haul enormous quantities of supplies into orbit - water, metal, food, air, rocket fuel - along with pre-manufactured components. It'll be far easier to build a spaceship that's actually capable of reaching a distant target like Europa or Titan once we have a space elevator than it would be to do so without one. Because without a space elevator it would cost you billions or hundreds of billions just to launch the components and supplies for such a vessel. With a space elevator, those launch costs all go away, allowing you to build massive craft capable of traveling anywhere in the solar system (or even beyond) for a fraction of what they'd cost today.
Build a space elevator at the destination - say Europa or Mars - and you don't even need to take along enough fuel to land. Just enough to get you into orbit at the end of the cable will do nicely.
Build competent vehicles first. Without them, the elevator is a path to nowhere. With them it's redundant.
By "competent" vehicles, do you mean nuclear rockets that take off from the surface of the earth? Matter-antimatter rockets? Because those are about the only technologies on the drawing board that would get you close to the price per kilogram of putting payloads into orbit that a space elevator can achieve. And I'm guessing you're gonna have a hard time convincing folks to go for either radiation-spewing proposal, at least not for launches conducted from the surface of the earth. Heaven forbid one of those babies goes down in a populated area. Ouch!
The elevator concept is a dead end path.
The only thing I see reaching a dead end here are your objections. They're silly, and have already been overcome by a host of researchers and scientists.
Well, you could always build the station with enough fuel and supplies onboard to return the crew to earth even if the cable breaks. You could also haul spare cables into orbit and keep them in reserve, to drop back down should the main cable be severed. That way you could replace the space elevator fairly quickly if the ribbon should snap for some reason.
Well, if you build the cable long enough, you don't have to fasten it to anything - the weight of the cable itself will keep it balanced. Practically, it's probably cheaper to haul up counterweights on the cable. They'll keep it in position. You'd logically build a station at the end of the cable anyhow - it's the obvious jumping off point for travel elsewhere in earth orbit and elsewhere in the solar system. That's where all the goodies come up from earth, along with the people. The station would function as a counterweight.
If you build the cable long enough, payloads could be flung off from the end with sufficient velocity to reach escape velocity and travel anywhere in the solar system without using any fuel (except maybe to stop themselves).
The benefits are small. The energy needed to shift a payload from the bottom to the top remains the same with or without the structure. The amount of money and energy spent on building the structure needs to be recovered in improved efficiency, and that seems unlikely.
Actually, it takes a lot less energy to haul something up on a space elevator than it does to haul it up via a rocket. That's because a space elevator doesn't need to haul its fuel up with it - power could be beamed to the elevator via a laser or maser, or the elevator could use solar panels or even a small onboard nuclear reactor to generate electrical power. Unlike a rocket, a space elevator doesn't need to generate tremendous thrust over the course of a few minutes. It just needs a steady source of power to allow it to gradually climb the cable or ribbon into orbit. A space elevator also wouldn't be fighting atmospheric resistance, as rockets do when they attempt to punch through the atmosphere at the supersonic velocities required to reach orbit.
While it will certainly take quite a bit of power to get a space elevator into orbit, that power can be supplied gradually as the elevator makes its climb. It doesn't need to be stored onboard in the form of expensive, explosive cryogenic fuel that's difficult to control and contain. And of course, unlike rockets, the climbers running up and down the ribbon of a space elevator can easily be reused over and over and over again, as opposed to most rockets, which are disposable and very costly to build. (The Space Shuttle is supposedly "reusable", but as we've seen it takes hundreds of millions of dollars every flight to prep each Shuttle for launch - disposable rockets have so far proven cheaper to operate than "reusable' launchers.)
When it comes to this whole Space Elevator business, the relevant question in my opinion is "would we WANT to make something like that?" To me, it's a novelty idea and nothing more. If people want to get serious about space travel, we need to invest more into the building of in-orbit construction yards (IMHO).
The biggest obstacle to space travel is the cost of escaping the earth's gravity well. Space elevators offer a possible solution to this problem, assuming you can develop the materials to build a stable and reliable cable or ribbon. Building a huge construction platform in orbit is utterly worthless if it still costs thousands of dollars a pound to haul raw materials up to that platform, as it does today with chemical rockets. You'll have gained absolutely nothing. Space travel will still every bit as prohibitively expensive as it is right now.
In contrast, the cost of hauling materials up a space elevator involves the amortized cost of the elevator itself, plus whatever electrical energy it takes to run the mechanism that pulls the platform into orbit. Over time, the cost could drop to a few dollars per pound, making it cheaper to haul material into orbit than it is to fly it across the continental United States. That would truly open up space travel to the masses, and enable us to construct gigantic structures in orbit, plus haul up the fuel or reaction mass to move those structures anywhere in the solar system. That would include places like the asteroid belt and the Oort cloud, where there are resources we could harvest that would enable either additional construction in space, or that could be hauled back to earth and down to the surface via the space elevator for terrestrial use.
Once we get the infrastructure in space to produce the vehicles, we'll find that occasional trips to the "Drydock" from Earth to supply it with raw materials will be far more practical than some 21,700+ mile long elevator reaching into the sky.
Building an infrastructure buys you nothing if you can't supply it with raw materials. If we continue to rely upon chemical rockets for access to space, it will never become inexpensive enough to support the kind of construction and development you're advocating. It would cost trillions to build and supply a space drydock capable of building even modest craft. We've already spent close to $150 billion just constructing the International Space Scrapyard, and it doesn't even build anything - it just sits there. Supplying the tiny crew with food, air, water and fuel costs hundreds of millions a year. If you think a space elevator is impractical, that's nothing compared with trying to build anything substantial in space using chemical rockets to haul up the materials and components from the surface of the earth.
>Jeez, try to imagine the havoc if the cable comes loose >from its orbital anchor. Thousands of miles of pure splat!
That's why you don't build it as a cable. You build it as a ribbon, with lots of surface area. If the ribbon snaps, portions high up in the atmosphere will burn up upon reentry. The portions of the cable that don't burn will flutter to the ground - think tickertape parades.
It comes down to economics, and nuclear hasn't even made it onto the list of possibilities after fifty years of expensive steam.
Shhhhh . . . Stop it! You're making too much sense! You'll confuse the nukeheads.
Nuclear power is a dead-end technology. The plants are outrageously expensive to construct, and the cost of their construction will only rise as the petroleum begins to run out. Which would be now, since OPEC just announced they *can't* increase capacity much beyond current levels. That's a big problem, since demand (particularly from China and India) is skyrocketing. We've reached peak oil, the point at which the annual supply of oil being pumped into the market reaches its all time high. Demand however will only continue to increase. That's going to lead to some pretty shocking oil prices over the next few years, and will drive up the cost of everything else (including other energy sources and the manufacture of new power plants).
Worse, even if we could somehow build cheap nuclear power plants, there's still the little problem of getting enough fuel to run them. Most of the world's supply of uranium is stashed in South Africa if memory serves. Not the most stable country. Worse, we need it to run our existing nuclear plants. If we go and build a bunch of new plants, the cost of the stuff will skyrocket. Finally, we need someplace to store all of the nuclear waste, for something like 10,000 years. That part's proving difficult - and extraordinarily expensive - to manage just for the existing population of plants. But nobody factors those costs into the cost of an already outrageously expensive nuke plant. Finally, it only takes one accident or terrorist incident with a nuke plant or its waste to cost the economy potentially tens of billions of dollars.
Factor all those costs and uncertainties into the price of a nuclear power plant and suddenly they don't look like such a great option. Wind is probably more cost effective already, with far fewer downsides, and the technology still isn't fully developed.
>Dude, how does the ISS not teach us about keeping >astronauts' muscles from atrophying.
Because the astronauts are still coming back from the ISS with atrophied when they spend an extended amount of time up there. That's the kind of time in zero-g that astronauts would have to endure if we tried to get to Mars using conventional rockets. So the ISS is teaching us what we already knew - that humans can't spend prolonged periods of time in zero-g and still function well immediately after returning to an environment with gravity.
We haven't learned squat about dealing with that issue aboard the ISS, and we've wasted well in excess of $100 billion to learn NOTHING. $100 billion dumped into engine research would largely get you AROUND the problem in the first place, by getting your astronauts to Mars fast enough that prolonged exposure to zero-g would no longer be an issue.
If our ancestors were this stupid, they'd still be standing on a shore somewhere trying to figure out how to swim across the ocean instead of spending some time and effort building boats.
>If you send astronauts on a one year trip to another >planet what are you going to have them do when they >get there? Die on the surface.
The solution isn't hard to figure out - build faster ships. If Columbus had tried to make it to the New World in a rowboat, he wouldn't have gotten here either, even if Queen Isabella had spent the 15th century equivalent of $100 billion developing a floating rowboat research platform off the Spanish coast.
>We've spent more than a $100 billion trying to make >fusion man. Much more. And guess what? We still >havn't done it!
Whoops, meant to say fission, not fusion. We made prototype fission rockets back in the '60s. Actually test-fired them and everything. $100 billion would go a long way toward improving them and building new prototypes.
>Betting the farm on better propulsion systems is stupid.
No, spending money on developing anything BUT a better propulsion system is stupid. If we ever want practical access to space, we're going to have to develop better, faster, cheaper propulsion systems. Boldly floating where everyone has already floated before - in low Earth orbit - accomplishes zilch.
>Besides, say we did make a new propulsion system that >could get us to Mars in a week without crushing the >astronauts to death.. great, now how long will it takes >us to get to Jupiter?
Depends. If the thing can carry enough fuel (or rather, reaction mass), a couple of weeks more than that. But I'm not aware of any fission rockets quite that speedy. And accelerating at just a comfy 1g, you'd reach lightspeed in about a year (not counting for relativistic effects, obviously). Clearly, you only need to reach a tiny fraction of the speed of light to get to Mars pretty quickly.
We already have the ability to build nuclear fission rockets which could easily cut the trip time to Mars down to under 4 months, maybe less if combined with techniques like aerocapture. We already know how to live in space for a year at a time. The only real challenges we haven't faced are the radiation environment and generating artificial gravity to keep astronauts' muscles from atrophying on the way. Floating in low Earth orbit teaches us squat about either problem. The ISS is a $100 billion plus waste of taxpayer money. It's crap like the ISS and the Shuttles that's preventing us from actually accomplishing something in space.
Actually, we do. Nuclear fusion rockets, for starters. $100 billion would probably build quite a few of them. Ion engines would be another alternative for a Mars probe. Research involving the use of tethers and other alternative propulsion technologies also comes to mind.
Or, we can continue to burn hundreds of billions parked in Earth orbit learning jack about practical means to reach other parts of the solar system outside of low Earth orbit.
Why are we wasting our time trying to figure out how to "live longer" in zero g? Spend the money on better propulsion technology, so we can get astronauts to Mars in under a month. Then we don't have to worry about long-duration living in a hard radiation environment.
We've sunk over $100 billion into the ISS so far. $100 billion would fund a LOT of propulsion research.
Until you can debunk their numbers, or even contradict them consistently, you're not adding to anything but the noise around this issue.
CWT "debunked" their own numbers. They thought they were going to get oil for around $40-$50 a barrel. Now it looks closer to $80. That's twice the price they were aiming for - not great. They apparently based their original estimates on the assumption that they'd get all this ag waste for free. Not gonna happen in the real world, and as the price of oil increases, the value of that "waste" to agribusiness is only going to escalate.
You complained about how CWT's process would suffer when "the natural gas begins to run out", but the "natural gas" that powers the CWT process comes from the waste they convert.
CWT will suffer when gas begins to run out. If they're consuming much (most?) of the gas their process produces, they aren't going to be in a position to contribute much (any?) to the substantial LNG deficit we're going to be running in a few years. That deficit will send the price of electricity skyrocketing - making all that "waste" they were going to use as fuel even more expensive to obtain.
You seem to be making the same mistake the CWT did of looking at their process in isolation, instead of looking at what's going to happen to the market as the price of oil and electricity escalates.
The weirdest contradiction is where you say NYC won't be redirecting its sewage to CWT-style conversion, or paying to dispose of it, because "[t]hey'll probably end up burning it for fuel".
How is that a contradiction? Is this process as efficient at producing electricity as burning the waste? Doesn't appear to be, from what I read. As the cost of electricity skyrockets, efficiency will become king. Even if this process *is* more efficient than simply burning the waste, the demand for electricity will likely drive what oil it does produce into the electrical generation market. It won't do a thing to help satisfy demand for petrochemical products elsewhere (in cars, in fertilizer, in plastics), or cut our reliance on oil imports. At best, it'll help keep the lights on.
I think it's great people are trying to develop processes like these, but there seems to be an unrealistic attitude surrounding their potential for success. These technologies may ultimately prove worthwhile, but they aren't going to come close to supplying our civilization with the kind of cheap energy oil currently provides. And that's quickly going to become a huge, huge problem, as we've built our entire civilization around cheap hydrocarbons.
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The ring-launch system could be built slowly over the period of decades, since the component rings would not need to be lifted AND HELD in posistion like a space elevator's cable.
Huh? Make the elevator ribbon long enough and you don't have to "hold" it in position with anything - its own mass extending out into space will counterbalance it.
He claimed to have a PhD. He didn't and he still doesn't. Why should anybody pay attention to a word this clown writes? He's no more qualified than many of the people posting here on /.
Actually, there are probably plenty of people here I'd trust over Cringely. I'm sure most of them aren't lying about their credentials.
Why would Rupert Murdoch think of paying $3billion for a mostly free online service like Skype?
I dunno, but a better question might be, why would
It's for gaming - you're only using one hand, anyway.
/. readers engage in involves the use of only one had as well.
Curiously enough, the other pastime most
The ISS is most definitely not useless.
The ISS is completely useless. At present, the skeleton crew aboard the ISS spend most of their time keeping the station running - an increasingly difficult task, as more and more systems aboard degrade or fail outright.
It is essentially the world's only permanent microgravity laboratory.
Pity the astronauts aboard don't have time to conduct any experiments. Of course, with astronauts bouncing around onboard the ISS is hardly an ideal microgravity lab. An independent, unmanned satellite would make for a better experimental platform, one that wouldn't consume billions of dollars a year worth of resupply and crew rotation flights. Shuttle flights to the ISS alone are projected to cost in excess of $1 billion a pop, assuming the Shuttle ever returns to flight. You could fly dozens of unmanned microgravity labs for the cost of completing the construction and providing the resupply and maintenance of the ISS.
Of course, even if you discover something interesting in microgravity, there's no evidence that knowledge would be the least bit useful. Again, dumping billions into researching microgravity seems like a ridiculous investment, given how much it currently costs to get anything into a microgravity environment. It's not like we're going to be building factories in orbit anytime soon with any existing launch technology. NASA would better serve US taxpayers by conducting fundamental research into launch technologies that could dramatically lower the cost of access to space.
Therefore, it would be possible to study the effects of low gravity on plants or small animals without requiring an expensive trip to the moon or mars.
For the cost of completing the construction of the ISS and supplying it over the next decade with men, supplies and equipment, you could launch plants or small animals to the moon or Mars and study the effects of low gravity on them on-site. Frankly, the microgravity environment will be the least of our problems on any moon or Mars mission. The biggest obstacle to any manned moon or Mars mission remains the outrageous cost of launching men, equipment and supplies into space. NASA's #1 priority should be to overcome that obstacle, first.
What happens when microsoft do make the best tool for the job?
Hell freezes over.
I can only think of two Shuttle disasters, Challenger and Columbia. That gives the shuttle a success rate of 97.7%. That doesn't sound all that dangerous to me...
It's a pretty awful track record compared to Soyuz - hundreds of launches and no fatalities since the '70s. And Soyuz can get six astronauts into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the Suttles, even taking into consideration the fact you'd have to launch two Soyuz capsules to do it.
The Shuttles are just about the highest-priced payload launchers on the planet right now, and not even the most reliable. As manned launchers they're overkill - you don't need to send up the people with heavy payloads. The Columbia disaster gave us an opportunity to kill this white elephant and switch to more reliable, less expensive alternatives.
Instead, NASA is soldiering on with the flying crematorium, while blowing additional taxpayer cash on lame PR staring a B-actor from a failed incarnation of Star Trek. Pathetic. Appropriate, but pathetic.
The Space Elevator is in fact such a case: think about the absolute nightmare a cable cut would be. I mean, all that has to happen is a plane goes the wrong way, or a meteor happens through the wrong area, or bad weather, or lightning, or god knows what. That cable is going to be seriously heavy - half a ton per mile, maybe more, even designed to be as light as possible - and it's flexible so it won't get brittle, and it's, well, long. So it starts falling to earth, right?
So, you've got a highway coming down, in bands, around the Earth eight times. Right through the middles of cities. Over the ocean. Into parks, monuments, farmland. Cutting cities in half. Killing tens of millions.
The guys and gals working on this have already thought of and solved this problem. The 'cable' would be a ribbon. It's 5 - 12cm wide and a few mm thick. Think videotape, only much lighter. It isn't crashing to earth. It's fluttering down like tickertape. Most of it would burn up in the upper atmosphere, due to its high speed of reentry. The portions in the lower atmosphere would fall gently out of the sky like the tail of a kite. Send out some Japanese schoolgirls armed with diamond-coated scissors to scoop the tape up, clip it, and dump it into baggies.
The elevator cars themselves could be equipped with ablative shielding on their undersides and parachutes, allowing them to function as re-entry vehicles in the event of cable failure.
Problem solved.
Where do these magic numbers come from? We don't have the material, so we don't know the weight or the manufacturing costs.
I didn't say "manufacturing" costs - I said launch costs. The manufacturing costs could be much, much higher - but then, we spend close to a billion dollars prepping and fueling each Space Shuttle for launch. Clearly, the money is there even if the elevator ultimately takes in excess of $40 billion to manufacture, given the kind of access it gives you to both earth orbit as well as interplanetary targets. We've wasted a similar amount trying to build single stage to orbit space planes to replace the Shuttles, and have nothing to show yet for our troubles.
As for the weight, we have a pretty good idea of what the weight would be, since we have a pretty good idea of how strong carbon nanotubes are, and how many of them you'd need per centimeter of cable to hold the whole shebang together. This page, from 2003, discusses one proposal regarding how the elevator might be deployed.
I don't think anyone who has replied to my post has really considered that a very long piece of string is very heavy, and that the initial "ribbon" may have to be a few metres in diameter, making it very heavy - we won't know until we have a real material to plug into the very rough concept designs.
Why don't you try reading up one the subject, instead of raising ludicrous objections that have already been addressed by researchers working in the field? The initial ribbon won't have to be anywhere near a few meters in diameter. Try 11cm at its widest. It's also just a few microns thick. We know the physical properties of carbon nanotubes. We can already make carbon nanotube fibers, but they're only a few cm long at the moment. However, there's absolutely no reason to assume we'll be unable to make them longer in the future - in just the past couple of years we've doubled the length of carbon nanotube fiber we're capable of producing. We're unlocking the secrets of working with carbon nanotubes far more rapidly than we progressed at figuring out how to work with once exotic metals like aluminum. That's one reason why author Arthur C. Clarke now thinks we'll see a space elevator built in the 1st half of this century, not centuries from now as he earlier postulated.
If it's unlikely, a grand scheme, numbers are being made up, timescales are unrealisticly short and no reputable space agency is involved, then it could be a scam.
This has squat to do with any "scheme". Space elevators have been postulated for the better part of a century now, but until researchers stumbled across carbon nanotubes there was no known material you could use to construct one. The physical properties of carbon nanotubes meet those demanding strength requirements. Now all we need to do is figure out how to manufacture lengthy ribbons out of the stuff, a task that's far less daunting than it might at first appear. For example, we have scads of experience manufacturing massive lengths of magnetic tape, and some of those processes are bound to be applied to the manufacture and handling of carbon nanotube ribbons. It'll still be a massive engineering challenge, and there's no guarantee it'll be cheap, but right now a space elevator looks like a more practical use of research and development dollars than any other launch system proposal out there, in part because the potential payoff is so great. Even if we fail to develop a material that could be used to build a ribbon cable out of, carbon nanotube based materials will likely revolutionize manufacturing in the same way the development of plastics did in the 20th century. We'll get our money's worth out of this research one way or another.
You have to haul the parts for the space elevator into space of course, and it is only ever going to be practical if you are going to be doing even bigger projects - think of how big it is going to be and what the mass is going to be even if we use something with the strength to weight ratio of carbon nanotubes. It's just the wet dream of accountants that never had to take science classes in high school but picked up the tower of Bable story at Sunday school.
Well, I'm an atheist, so the "Tower of Babel" holds no allure for me. So much for that strawman. As for the "parts" of the space elevator, the only part you need to haul into space is the initial run of cable or ribbon and a machine to feed it out. Nanotube ribbon cables have been proposed which could be launched into space on existing boosters in a single shot. Don't know how much the mechanism that feeds the cable out in both directions would have to weigh, but I don't think it would be outrageous to assume it could also be hoisted into orbit via our largest boosters. Again, in a single shot. So we're talking maybe $300 million to launch the starter cable into orbit and deploy it. That's far less than we've wasted on the International Space Scrapyard - $150 billion or so, to date.
Do people really think the thing is just going to be self supporting during contruction, like a big building - think of how difficult that would be. Current proposals are to drop a cable from above - so you have to haul a lot of material up.
By nature the cable would be "self supporting" - one end is extended toward earth while the other extends out into space, balancing the mass of the cable. Once the initial segment reaches the ground, climbers could be attached to lay additional layers onto the cable, providing it with the strength it would need to haul larger payloads and survive impacts from orbital debris.
If you are going to build an electromagnetic lift mechanism it's going to be seriously shorter and cheaper to build a mass driver around the entire equator - even with low acceleration you could get things up to serious velocities before launch after a few loops.
You're going to build a powered mass driver around the equator? Including over (or under) the water? And that somehow is going to be cheaper than a thin little ribbon? Sure. Right. Whatever. It would be like trying to build a bullet train that wraps around the planet. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, if not the trillions, with enormous maintenance costs.
As for the "drydock" approach - the idea is you get as much as you can from places where you don't have to fight gravity - you use your incredibly expensive Buck Rogers 10kg rock cutter to chop up asteroids to save millions of kilograms in fuel in shipping construction materials.
And how, exactly, do you get the machinery into orbit to make use of all of these materials? At thousands of dollars a pound, hoisting entire factories into orbit isn't terribly practical using chemical rockets. We're currently having trouble building and supplying a space station that does absolutely NOTHING. In contrast, a space elevator would allow you to fling payloads as large as you like as far out as Saturn without using a drop of fuel to get them there (though you may need it to stop them on arrival). Elevators deployed elsewhere would allow you to harvest resources and fling them back toward the earth for use in orbit here, or they could be hauled back down for use on the surface. And elevators would allow you to haul up as much payload as you'd like, making the construction and supply of factories, solar power satellites and permanent habitats far more practical. New habitats and construction facilities can then be constructed in segments and flung to wherever in the solar system they're required.
If we are going to spend money on this we should take care it doesn't just go to confidence tricksters
Huh?
You will not be able to build space elevators on other planets unless you have vehicles which can go to those planets, lift enough material into orbit to build the tether and keep you alive for the time it takes to do it.
Ummm, why would you haul the cable to the surface of another planet and then lift it back into orbit ????
You'd take a cable out to the moon or planet (say Mars), and simply drop it to the surface from orbit.
You really need to come up with some objections that aren't backed by such obviously flawed reasoning.
You're missing the point. To get the mass required to build a space elevator, we'll need to get substantial mass into orbit. To get that mass into orbit, you'll need better lifters than we have today.
And you're making a couple of seriously unfounded assumptions. You're assuming that 1) you have to lift the entire mass of the first cable into orbit in one shot and that 2) the entire mass of the 1st cable will be greater than the capacity of our heaviest lifters. In practice, neither may prove true. We may be able to build cables out of splices of ribbon-like material, in which case separate payloads can be launched into orbit, and the cable constructed from a central point extending outward in both directions, keeping it in balance as it grows out into space and down toward the earth's surface.
We may also be able to build a single long lightweight starter ribbon which can be extended directly to the surface of the earth from orbit. Climbers could then be attached to lay down additional layers on the cable, building it up until it's strong enough to hoist larger payloads into orbit.
In order for a space elevator to be useful, we'll need craft which are much more effective at travelling through space than we have today.
Well, those will certainly be easier to develop once access to space costs dollars a pound instead of thousands of dollars a pound. We'll be able to haul up heavy items like nuclear reactors and lead shielding, not to mention all the food, air and water any astronauts might need.
But the real usefulness of a space elevator isn't just the ability to travel anywhere in the solar system - it's the ability it gives us to harness the almost limitless resources available in space. A space elevator would make it possible to build massive orbital solar power stations that beam electricity back to earth via microwaves. Ultimately, we could even move much of our industry offworld, powered by limitless solar energy and supplied with raw materials like metals from the asteroid belt and volatiles from the Oort cloud and other sources in the outer reaches of the solar system.
In order to visit another gravity well (planet), we need vehicles with the capacity to leave that gravity well. A space elevator may make it cheaper to get out of this one. It won't help you at your destination.
You really haven't thought this thing through, have you? A space elevator makes it possible to haul enormous quantities of supplies into orbit - water, metal, food, air, rocket fuel - along with pre-manufactured components. It'll be far easier to build a spaceship that's actually capable of reaching a distant target like Europa or Titan once we have a space elevator than it would be to do so without one. Because without a space elevator it would cost you billions or hundreds of billions just to launch the components and supplies for such a vessel. With a space elevator, those launch costs all go away, allowing you to build massive craft capable of traveling anywhere in the solar system (or even beyond) for a fraction of what they'd cost today.
Build a space elevator at the destination - say Europa or Mars - and you don't even need to take along enough fuel to land. Just enough to get you into orbit at the end of the cable will do nicely.
Build competent vehicles first. Without them, the elevator is a path to nowhere. With them it's redundant.
By "competent" vehicles, do you mean nuclear rockets that take off from the surface of the earth? Matter-antimatter rockets? Because those are about the only technologies on the drawing board that would get you close to the price per kilogram of putting payloads into orbit that a space elevator can achieve. And I'm guessing you're gonna have a hard time convincing folks to go for either radiation-spewing proposal, at least not for launches conducted from the surface of the earth. Heaven forbid one of those babies goes down in a populated area. Ouch!
The elevator concept is a dead end path.
The only thing I see reaching a dead end here are your objections. They're silly, and have already been overcome by a host of researchers and scientists.
Well, you could always build the station with enough fuel and supplies onboard to return the crew to earth even if the cable breaks. You could also haul spare cables into orbit and keep them in reserve, to drop back down should the main cable be severed. That way you could replace the space elevator fairly quickly if the ribbon should snap for some reason.
>That reminds me... what's the top fastened to?
Well, if you build the cable long enough, you don't have to fasten it to anything - the weight of the cable itself will keep it balanced. Practically, it's probably cheaper to haul up counterweights on the cable. They'll keep it in position. You'd logically build a station at the end of the cable anyhow - it's the obvious jumping off point for travel elsewhere in earth orbit and elsewhere in the solar system. That's where all the goodies come up from earth, along with the people. The station would function as a counterweight.
If you build the cable long enough, payloads could be flung off from the end with sufficient velocity to reach escape velocity and travel anywhere in the solar system without using any fuel (except maybe to stop themselves).
The benefits are small. The energy needed to shift a payload from the bottom to the top remains the same with or without the structure. The amount of money and energy spent on building the structure needs to be recovered in improved efficiency, and that seems unlikely.
Actually, it takes a lot less energy to haul something up on a space elevator than it does to haul it up via a rocket. That's because a space elevator doesn't need to haul its fuel up with it - power could be beamed to the elevator via a laser or maser, or the elevator could use solar panels or even a small onboard nuclear reactor to generate electrical power. Unlike a rocket, a space elevator doesn't need to generate tremendous thrust over the course of a few minutes. It just needs a steady source of power to allow it to gradually climb the cable or ribbon into orbit. A space elevator also wouldn't be fighting atmospheric resistance, as rockets do when they attempt to punch through the atmosphere at the supersonic velocities required to reach orbit.
While it will certainly take quite a bit of power to get a space elevator into orbit, that power can be supplied gradually as the elevator makes its climb. It doesn't need to be stored onboard in the form of expensive, explosive cryogenic fuel that's difficult to control and contain. And of course, unlike rockets, the climbers running up and down the ribbon of a space elevator can easily be reused over and over and over again, as opposed to most rockets, which are disposable and very costly to build. (The Space Shuttle is supposedly "reusable", but as we've seen it takes hundreds of millions of dollars every flight to prep each Shuttle for launch - disposable rockets have so far proven cheaper to operate than "reusable' launchers.)
Even for Slashdot, your post is uninformed.
When it comes to this whole Space Elevator business, the relevant question in my opinion is "would we WANT to make something like that?" To me, it's a novelty idea and nothing more. If people want to get serious about space travel, we need to invest more into the building of in-orbit construction yards (IMHO).
The biggest obstacle to space travel is the cost of escaping the earth's gravity well. Space elevators offer a possible solution to this problem, assuming you can develop the materials to build a stable and reliable cable or ribbon. Building a huge construction platform in orbit is utterly worthless if it still costs thousands of dollars a pound to haul raw materials up to that platform, as it does today with chemical rockets. You'll have gained absolutely nothing. Space travel will still every bit as prohibitively expensive as it is right now.
In contrast, the cost of hauling materials up a space elevator involves the amortized cost of the elevator itself, plus whatever electrical energy it takes to run the mechanism that pulls the platform into orbit. Over time, the cost could drop to a few dollars per pound, making it cheaper to haul material into orbit than it is to fly it across the continental United States. That would truly open up space travel to the masses, and enable us to construct gigantic structures in orbit, plus haul up the fuel or reaction mass to move those structures anywhere in the solar system. That would include places like the asteroid belt and the Oort cloud, where there are resources we could harvest that would enable either additional construction in space, or that could be hauled back to earth and down to the surface via the space elevator for terrestrial use.
Once we get the infrastructure in space to produce the vehicles, we'll find that occasional trips to the "Drydock" from Earth to supply it with raw materials will be far more practical than some 21,700+ mile long elevator reaching into the sky.
Building an infrastructure buys you nothing if you can't supply it with raw materials. If we continue to rely upon chemical rockets for access to space, it will never become inexpensive enough to support the kind of construction and development you're advocating. It would cost trillions to build and supply a space drydock capable of building even modest craft. We've already spent close to $150 billion just constructing the International Space Scrapyard, and it doesn't even build anything - it just sits there. Supplying the tiny crew with food, air, water and fuel costs hundreds of millions a year. If you think a space elevator is impractical, that's nothing compared with trying to build anything substantial in space using chemical rockets to haul up the materials and components from the surface of the earth.
>Jeez, try to imagine the havoc if the cable comes loose
>from its orbital anchor. Thousands of miles of pure splat!
That's why you don't build it as a cable. You build it as a ribbon, with lots of surface area. If the ribbon snaps, portions high up in the atmosphere will burn up upon reentry. The portions of the cable that don't burn will flutter to the ground - think tickertape parades.
It comes down to economics, and nuclear hasn't even made it onto the list of possibilities after fifty years of expensive steam.
Shhhhh . . . Stop it! You're making too much sense! You'll confuse the nukeheads.
Nuclear power is a dead-end technology. The plants are outrageously expensive to construct, and the cost of their construction will only rise as the petroleum begins to run out. Which would be now, since OPEC just announced they *can't* increase capacity much beyond current levels. That's a big problem, since demand (particularly from China and India) is skyrocketing. We've reached peak oil, the point at which the annual supply of oil being pumped into the market reaches its all time high. Demand however will only continue to increase. That's going to lead to some pretty shocking oil prices over the next few years, and will drive up the cost of everything else (including other energy sources and the manufacture of new power plants).
Worse, even if we could somehow build cheap nuclear power plants, there's still the little problem of getting enough fuel to run them. Most of the world's supply of uranium is stashed in South Africa if memory serves. Not the most stable country. Worse, we need it to run our existing nuclear plants. If we go and build a bunch of new plants, the cost of the stuff will skyrocket. Finally, we need someplace to store all of the nuclear waste, for something like 10,000 years. That part's proving difficult - and extraordinarily expensive - to manage just for the existing population of plants. But nobody factors those costs into the cost of an already outrageously expensive nuke plant. Finally, it only takes one accident or terrorist incident with a nuke plant or its waste to cost the economy potentially tens of billions of dollars.
Factor all those costs and uncertainties into the price of a nuclear power plant and suddenly they don't look like such a great option. Wind is probably more cost effective already, with far fewer downsides, and the technology still isn't fully developed.
>Anyone who gets compared to Shatner has
>something to worry about.
And how:
http://www.khaaan.com/
Oooooo. Ooooooooo. Pain! I'm in paaaain!! I haven't laughed that hard in years. Even the URL is perfect! THANK YOU!
>Dude, how does the ISS not teach us about keeping
>astronauts' muscles from atrophying.
Because the astronauts are still coming back from the ISS with atrophied when they spend an extended amount of time up there. That's the kind of time in zero-g that astronauts would have to endure if we tried to get to Mars using conventional rockets. So the ISS is teaching us what we already knew - that humans can't spend prolonged periods of time in zero-g and still function well immediately after returning to an environment with gravity.
We haven't learned squat about dealing with that issue aboard the ISS, and we've wasted well in excess of $100 billion to learn NOTHING. $100 billion dumped into engine research would largely get you AROUND the problem in the first place, by getting your astronauts to Mars fast enough that prolonged exposure to zero-g would no longer be an issue.
If our ancestors were this stupid, they'd still be standing on a shore somewhere trying to figure out how to swim across the ocean instead of spending some time and effort building boats.
>If you send astronauts on a one year trip to another
>planet what are you going to have them do when they
>get there? Die on the surface.
The solution isn't hard to figure out - build faster ships. If Columbus had tried to make it to the New World in a rowboat, he wouldn't have gotten here either, even if Queen Isabella had spent the 15th century equivalent of $100 billion developing a floating rowboat research platform off the Spanish coast.
>We've spent more than a $100 billion trying to make
>fusion man. Much more. And guess what? We still
>havn't done it!
Whoops, meant to say fission, not fusion. We made prototype fission rockets back in the '60s. Actually test-fired them and everything. $100 billion would go a long way toward improving them and building new prototypes.
>Betting the farm on better propulsion systems is stupid.
No, spending money on developing anything BUT a better propulsion system is stupid. If we ever want practical access to space, we're going to have to develop better, faster, cheaper propulsion systems. Boldly floating where everyone has already floated before - in low Earth orbit - accomplishes zilch.
>Besides, say we did make a new propulsion system that
>could get us to Mars in a week without crushing the
>astronauts to death.. great, now how long will it takes
>us to get to Jupiter?
Depends. If the thing can carry enough fuel (or rather, reaction mass), a couple of weeks more than that. But I'm not aware of any fission rockets quite that speedy. And accelerating at just a comfy 1g, you'd reach lightspeed in about a year (not counting for relativistic effects, obviously). Clearly, you only need to reach a tiny fraction of the speed of light to get to Mars pretty quickly.
We already have the ability to build nuclear fission rockets which could easily cut the trip time to Mars down to under 4 months, maybe less if combined with techniques like aerocapture. We already know how to live in space for a year at a time. The only real challenges we haven't faced are the radiation environment and generating artificial gravity to keep astronauts' muscles from atrophying on the way. Floating in low Earth orbit teaches us squat about either problem. The ISS is a $100 billion plus waste of taxpayer money. It's crap like the ISS and the Shuttles that's preventing us from actually accomplishing something in space.
>We simply don't know how to make better rockets.
Actually, we do. Nuclear fusion rockets, for starters. $100 billion would probably build quite a few of them. Ion engines would be another alternative for a Mars probe. Research involving the use of tethers and other alternative propulsion technologies also comes to mind.
Or, we can continue to burn hundreds of billions parked in Earth orbit learning jack about practical means to reach other parts of the solar system outside of low Earth orbit.
Why are we wasting our time trying to figure out how to "live longer" in zero g? Spend the money on better propulsion technology, so we can get astronauts to Mars in under a month. Then we don't have to worry about long-duration living in a hard radiation environment.
We've sunk over $100 billion into the ISS so far. $100 billion would fund a LOT of propulsion research.
Until you can debunk their numbers, or even contradict them consistently, you're not adding to anything but the noise around this issue.
CWT "debunked" their own numbers. They thought they were going to get oil for around $40-$50 a barrel. Now it looks closer to $80. That's twice the price they were aiming for - not great. They apparently based their original estimates on the assumption that they'd get all this ag waste for free. Not gonna happen in the real world, and as the price of oil increases, the value of that "waste" to agribusiness is only going to escalate.
You complained about how CWT's process would suffer when "the natural gas begins to run out", but the "natural gas" that powers the CWT process comes from the waste they convert.
CWT will suffer when gas begins to run out. If they're consuming much (most?) of the gas their process produces, they aren't going to be in a position to contribute much (any?) to the substantial LNG deficit we're going to be running in a few years. That deficit will send the price of electricity skyrocketing - making all that "waste" they were going to use as fuel even more expensive to obtain.
You seem to be making the same mistake the CWT did of looking at their process in isolation, instead of looking at what's going to happen to the market as the price of oil and electricity escalates.
The weirdest contradiction is where you say NYC won't be redirecting its sewage to CWT-style conversion, or paying to dispose of it, because "[t]hey'll probably end up burning it for fuel".
How is that a contradiction? Is this process as efficient at producing electricity as burning the waste? Doesn't appear to be, from what I read. As the cost of electricity skyrockets, efficiency will become king. Even if this process *is* more efficient than simply burning the waste, the demand for electricity will likely drive what oil it does produce into the electrical generation market. It won't do a thing to help satisfy demand for petrochemical products elsewhere (in cars, in fertilizer, in plastics), or cut our reliance on oil imports. At best, it'll help keep the lights on.
I think it's great people are trying to develop processes like these, but there seems to be an unrealistic attitude surrounding their potential for success. These technologies may ultimately prove worthwhile, but they aren't going to come close to supplying our civilization with the kind of cheap energy oil currently provides. And that's quickly going to become a huge, huge problem, as we've built our entire civilization around cheap hydrocarbons.