Posted on 09/10/2018 11:11:18 AM PDT by ETL
The push for a space elevator took a step forward this week when a team of researchers from Shizuoka University in Japan announced that they will launch an experiment to the International Space Station next week.
In the experiment, which will be the first of its kind in space, two ultrasmall cubic satellites, or "cubesats," will be released into space from the station. They will be connected by a steel cable, where a small container — acting like an elevator car — will move along the cable using its own motor. A camera attached to the satellites will record the movements of the container in space, according to the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi.
Each cubesat measures just under 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side. The cubesats will be connected by a 33-foot-long (10 meters) steel cable for the "elevator car" to move along, according to the report.
The materials for the experiment, which was developed by researchers at the Shizuoka University Faculty of Engineering, will launch to the space station Monday (Sept. 10) on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's next Kounotori cargo ship, H-IIB Vehicle No. 7. It is scheduled to launch from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan's Kagoshima prefecture at 6:32 p.m. EDT (2232 GMT) on Monday, though it will be early Tuesday morning (Sept. 11) local time at the launch site.
Engineers have been dreaming of a space elevator for decades.
In 2012, Tokyo-based Obayashi Corp. announced plans to build a space elevator by 2050. The concept has also caught the attention of Google X, Google's division for big ideas, in the past, as well as an X Prize competition. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a division of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., also announced last year that it plans to have an operational space-elevator system by 2045.
While experiments to extend a cable in space have been conducted before, the new Japanese experiment will be the first test to move a car-like container on a cable in space. If the experiment is successful, it could significantly boost interest in the space-elevator transportation system, a concept that many people still doubt is plausible.
Although the space-elevator concept was once thought to be the stuff of science fiction, some aerospace engineers believe the idea is essential to the future of space exploration as an alternative to building ever-larger rockets;in terms of payload, rocket power has more or less reached its limitations.
The cost of moving people and materials into Earth orbit would be dramatically reduced, thus enabling the construction of larger space stations and a lunar base, and even helping to serve as a starting point for a crewed Mars mission, space-elevator advocates have said.
"In theory, a space elevator is highly plausible," Yoji Ishikawa, leader of the new experiment's research team, told The Mainichi. "Space travel may become something popular in the future."
Obayashi Corp. estimates the total cost of a fully functional, first-generation space elevator to be 10 trillion yen (about $90 billion) — almost the same as that for the maglev train project connecting Tokyo and Osaka.
The Shizuoka University team's space-elevator experiment comes on the heels of the International Space Elevator Consortium's (ISEC) 2018 Space Elevator Conference in Seattle last month, where dedicated scientists, engineers and invited speakers gathered to discuss the latest developments, share new ideas and scrutinize new concepts for the novel space technology.
Asteroid needed first. We are 200 years away from the space elevator people.
I didn’t say it would work!! Lol!
Not making sense to me. How do cubsat cables that are only 33 feet long run 240,00 miles to the moon?
Runs on snozzberries.
Brain fart on my part. How does a 10 m cable stretch to the ISS?
Up scale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T02t_MBgYVU
Contest in Japan for cable cor for elevator. These have run fro several years. The Japanese are serious about a space elevator.
Hard part will be parking a sizable asteroid in earth orbit to anchor the top end of the elevator...
This was being experimented with 20+ years ago
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-02-26/news/mn-40319_1_space-shuttle-columbia
“In the experiment, two ultra-small cubic satellites, which were developed by Shizuoka University Faculty of Engineering, will be used.
Each satellite measures 10 centimeters each side, and a roughly 10-meter-long [30-33 feet-long] steel cable will be employed to connect the twin satellites.
The pair of satellites will be released from the International Space Station (ISS), and a container acting like an elevator car will be moved on a cable connecting the satellites using a motor. A camera attached to the satellites will record the movements of the container in space.
The small box that will be used as the miniature space elevator will only be six centimeters in length and three centimeters in both height and width. If the space elevator is able to achieve movement along the 10-meter cable that will be stretched between two cubic satellites, which cameras placed in these satellites will be able to track, there is a much greater possibility that it could succeed on a larger scale.”
It does not necessarily need to go all the way down to the surface of the earth in order to be useful.
Lets say we have a platform, just above the atmosphere so we don't have to worry about air friction. The platform is connected to a satellite in a much higher orbit, and as a result it is traveling at a much lower speed than it would need to, in order to stay in orbit.
Being able to get a spacecraft to that platform without having to achieve full orbital velocity would save a lot of fuel.
I thought that was unnecessary due to the mass of the elevator itself.
For reference, picture an axle spinning with a chain attached to it. It should be able to enter a stable stretched state.
In space, no one can hear you scream after listening to 12 hours of Muzak in the Space Elevator.
It will only work if the Cubesats are spinning around
the center point of the cable. It should be interesting
as the mass changes causing alternating sats to be the
center.
Lol!
How bout a “space yo-yo”??
Wait, the sat with the elevator should be the center as
the sats start to revolve having more mass, which will
shift as the elevator moves beyond the center of the cable.
would be interesting to observe.
Thanks.
Can't focus right now to understand this stuff. Busy doing other things. Will come back later or tomorrow.
“Being able to get a spacecraft to that platform without having to achieve full orbital velocity would save a lot of fuel.”
You’d save much more fuel just lifting a rocket to the upper atmosphere with a dirigible and then launching it from there, where you could avoid 90% of the atmospheric resistance, since that is where the really big fuel cost comes from. Even better, dirigible technology is old news, so we can almost certainly build something like that without developing much new technology, we just need to work out the engineering.
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