space elevator

What are you on this morning?? I need a coffee.

 

One of my office mates in graduate school went on to worrk on this with a grant from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. You can read many details of how the space elevator might be implemented at:
http://www.isr.us/SEHome.asp?m=1

 

It won't work. There's no way to keep a cat in line. The best way to deal with a cat is just to realize that he owns the house.

 

I find it interesting that they admit the material for this "ribbon" has not yet been developed, but they then talk with great confidence about its physical characteristics.

They also dismiss the problem of collision with space junk and existing satellites, by asserting "we are very good at avoidance," when of course they are speaking of a system that does not yet exist. Since mistakes always happen (i.e. Murphy's Law) what we really want is a calculation of how often collisions will occur. Note that even airliners, which are much more maneuverable, collide occasionally.

A legitimate research project would speak of the problems that must be solved before the project can become a reality. This one, by contrast, asserts that there are no problems other than inventing the "ribbon," and suggests that this problem is trivial.

I am not convinced.

 

Well, they've already made the first steps towards a transporter, ala Star Trek.

Australian teleport breakthrough

 

Oops, sorry I guess I zoned out on my own weirdness that morning. I'm also one of those disgusting cheerful "morning people" who are wide awake and frisky by 5:30am.

 

I was afraid you'd say something like that!

 

Nonsense. I think the writer of this article has been smoking something stronger than pot. First he mischaracterizes the experiment, and then he draws an unwarranted and preposterous conclusion about what it bodes for the future.

 

This company is working on it and are planning to have it up by 2018.
liftport

They recently ran a test with a mile length of nanotube supported by weather balloons.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=827

 

It seems to me that you wouldn't have the counter weight itself in geosynchronous orbit. You wouldn't want a slack cable being held up by the geosynchronous orbit of the satellite. The weight of the cable itself or the weight of anything you tried to pull up the cable would pull the satellite out of geosynchronous orbit.

What you would need instead is for the cable itself to be holding the satellite in orbit. You would want a satellite that would fly off into space if it was not being held back by the cable. Kind of like swinging a weight on a string over your head.

The earth is spinning, so a satellite tied to the earth's surface could perhaps be made to act like a weight on a string that you swing around over your head. It would be tricky getting it going, because you would have to get the satellite going at approximately the right speed and then attach it to the cable, but once you did, you make the satellite maintain position by reeling the cable in and letting it out. If you reel in some cable, the satellite speeds up. If you let out some cable, the satellite slows down.

With proper balancing of the speed of the earth with the weight of the satellite and the length of the cable, it seems to me that it would theoretically work.

 

This whole thing is theoretically possible, but it has yet to be proven feasible. A satellite further out than geosync is further than 23,000 miles. That's 23,000 miles of cable, a single cable. They still haven't worked out the power issue, even in theory.

Also, I need a reason to go into outer space...

Nate

 

:lol:

 

Planning to have it up, or planning to con some gullible investors out of their money?