Space Elevators Maybe Closer To Reality Than Imagined

Spacedaily ^ | 7/22/03 | Richard Perry

[Brett66]

If you're really interested in the answer, click here:

Chapter 1: A Space Elevator?

It's a long article, but it provides a lot of missing details.

[Tree of Liberty]

It is the only technically-feasible method for making the human race a 'spacefaring' civilization

That so?

[only1percent]

There are only short time horizons among the general contractors (the big aerospace companies) and only the generals have the capability to do any kind of serious space work.

In other words, the commercial aerospace industry, when working on its own dime, develops only to present market demands. It doesn't anticpate paradigm shifts, it acts on them when proven. Hence Boeing moving from the Sonic Cruiser (who knows if passengers and carriers want a much faster subsonic plane?) to the 7E7 (everyone knows that passengers care about the environment and carriers care about lower fuel costs).

The A380 is the reductio ad absurdem of this principal -- a plane which will be in its core operating years in the 2010s and 2020s, built in the 2000s, to solve a 1990s problem (slot-impacted Asian airports), with 1980s technology.

I'm much more optimistic about other aerospace innovations. Even 2 or 3 years after its publication, James Fallows' piece in the Atlantic on the coming revolution in general aviation (near-idiot-proof $400,000 twin-jet 4- and 6-seater planes with 2000nm ranges, with nearly every upper middle class family able to buy in on a fractional basis) is something people still talking about as being the place that will make everyone a lot of money if they can figure out how to get there.

[Experiment 6-2-6]

don't these things by definition HAVE TO BE on the Equator?

No, and I am now buying up as much land as I can on my island, which is the CLOSEST US Territory located nearest the Equator. I will soon be as rich as Bill Gates!

Ha Ha Ha!

[Arkie2]

Too many trees. You're not seeing the forest. Too bad.

[aruanan]

People passengers will never ride this. It's for freight only. Too slow, way too slow.

I'd ride it if it had a good view and nice accomodations on the way up. It could be a vertical hotel.

[boris]

"That so?"

"It is a long way from Star Trek, but teleportation - the disembodiment of an object in one location and its reconstruction in another - has been successfully carried out in a physics lab in Australia.

Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) made a beam of light disappear in one place and reappear in another a short distance away."

I call these 'stupid physicist tricks' which are ultimately sterile and serve no purpose other than to get the prof his 15 minutes of fame.

"We teleported a photon!"

"How do you know?"

"Well, it vanished over here and an identical one appeared over there!"

"Wow."

"Well, we did sort of have a spare photon available over there...but it's the same photon, for sure!"

"How do you know? Did you paint the first one blue or something?"

Idiotic.

--Boris

[boris]

"don't these things by definition HAVE TO BE on the Equator?"

No.

Yes, they do, and I'd like to see your proof that they do not.

--Boris

[boris]

"Because of Earth's rotation there is lower net 'gravity' at the equator than at the pole. Also, the equator is farther from the center than the pole, due to the shape of the Earth."

What a gormless answer from someone with your nick.

Now try again. Above which locii can geostationary satellites "hover"? I am looking for [hint] a certain line of latitude.

--Boris

[Straight Vermonter]

These were first produced in 1991 (the year before "Red Mars" was published), with 3cm ropes being produced by 1998.

Do you know much about the nanotube technology mentioned in teh article? My 10 minutes of research on the web says these ropes are at best a few millimeters long.

[Lazamataz]

Elevator cars take several days to make the journey, and are thirty stories high. But the main image from this incarnation is when the cable is brought down by revolutionary action. It twists around the planet at 21,000km per hour, with horrific consequences.

This is the most prominent problem with the Skyhook. It would make an irresistable terrorist target.

[Museum Twenty]

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Spatial_Guyanais

[dr_lew]

Higher is slower, as quantified by Kepler's Third Law. This can be derived very simply by balancing the gravitational centripetal force with the inertial centrifugal force.

However, you can place a tethered pair of satellites, one above and one below the geosynchronous altitude, so that together they form a single elongated geosynchronous satellite, and this tether can be arbitrarily long, with due adjustments in position. I think the configuration is stable because the vertical orientation minimizes the total energy of the tethered pair.

[jimkress]

Clearly, the scientific thinking on space elevators had broken down and a more rational appraisal of the technology was long overdue

NASA'a problem in a nutshell.

Bureaucrats are incapable of rational design. NASA is infested with them. Privatization of NASA and the termination of the bureaucrat hegemony is our only hope.

[edwin hubble]

Boris,

"What a gormless answer from someone with your nick."

Come on now, Boris. Please read my post #73 again.
I was responding to a question posed by Arkie2:
"Do elevators move slower and require more energy in Reykjavik than in Brazil? Just wondered. "

Answer: in a word, yes.


Now, If you have quite separate question about latitudes
and locations with respect to local conditions in the crust:

Clarke devotes a full chapter to this in Fountains of Paradise. After a lot of groundwork, he ends up with the elevator not on the equator but in Sri Lanka.
Many complex calculations involving resonance.

He finds the equatorial mountains (Africa, the Andes, etc) unstable in gravitational resonance. It's been some years since I've looked at it.

[reg45]

Only Monkey Cloud can speak for all humanity.

Are you referring to the SGOTUN?

[irv]

There ain't enough of it around to pay for this tower.

A good argument, but not the final word. Wealth grows. Twenty years from now, advances in technology and increases in total wealth may bring it within reach.

Forty years from now, it will definitely be within reach. Whether or not anyone will bother is another question.

[techcor]

No way. Never will happen.