A colossal elevator to space could be going up sooner than you ever imagined

a reply to: LookingAtMars

Sounds great but what will stop debris, asteroids from smashing it to pieces?

a reply to: TruthxIsxInxThexMist

a reply to: LookingAtMars



Ummm...looking at the angular momentum diagram...wouldn't it be force cancelling to have up and down operate at the same time and rate...?

There's going to be one hell of allot of product being shipped down the gravity well...if that was balanced by up unloading then those deflectionary (I know...I know) forces should be cancelled out...perhaps a gravity assisted continuous elevator with electromagnetic car couplers with the down force of gravity powering the system with electrostatic assist...

The cars couple and decouple at top and bottom and drive/power away to a parking orbit/handling zone...while others are synced into the system top and bottom simultaneously...


Seems reasonable to me...







YouSir

originally posted by: PokeyJoe

originally posted by: notsure1


I am very envious of the people who are around 1000 years from now.

As long as we dont destroy ourselves or get destroyed it would be a great time to be alive.

There is a very serious, very determined group of people who say if you can survive the next 30 years you can live the next 1000...hang in there!

and also don't forget

We'll live forever........it is written somewhere idk

originally posted by: waftist
So 22,000 miles of cable! Crazy on the logistics! Some company will get a sweet contract no doubt. I can't understand if it(cable) will stay straight or be curved as the earth spins at 1000 mph, dragging it and whatever is at the end of it through space like a tether ball. So how long have they estimated optimum travel time for each payload to reach 22,000 miles? What are the speeds they are hoping for? At 100 mph that is around 10 days...not too bad I guess, if the trip comes with a meal or 10 and some reading material

The top of the space elevator is in geosynchronous orbit with the base. We do that with satellites and can keep them to within metres of their target coordinates. But the structure would have to support its own weight and handle the tension of dangling from the anchor in geostationary orbit.

We can get blimps tethered up to 10,000 meters. Weather balloons can go up to 120,000 meters (going by videos on Youtube). So in theory, you could have a chain of blimp balloons holding up 1 km to 10km segments of cable, all chained to each other. Then the remaining 180km has to be supported by the geostationary anchor.

There were some ideas of having two or three launch vehicles. One goes from the ground to the edge of space (elevator or hybrid jet engine/rocket engine). Another is in permanent geosynchronous orbit. The third launches from the second in an eccentric orbit and will intersect with the first to exchange a payload.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Lysergic

I think it's from a Niven story. But for the life of me I can't remember which one.

That was Ringworld - The ring world was a giant Dyson ring built around a star. Artificial day and night was created by having giant panels arranged between the star and the Ring world. Due to the different orbital rotation periods, every section of the Ringworld experience roughly 12 hours of day and night. Except until an asteroid hit one panel and caused a nano-cable to whip into the Ringworld and injuring one unlucky individual who tried to pick it up.

No one has mentioned about the atmosphere, how would the elevators line be affected through the atmospheres earth/space barrier.

Also for re-entry, i know there are heat shields but would something burn up or explode from basically trying to punch its way straight back through the atmosphere on the way back down to earth? Would it have to come back down very slowly? Aren't things supposed to come back in at an angle?

a reply to: LookingAtMars

As opposed to?

It will be a humongous engineering feat & will cost a crap load of money for the R&D never mind construction & ongoing maintenance. Crowd funding & an open-source implementation for the good of humanity ain't going to cut it.

A corporation/company is not going to build this, then tell other rival corporations/companies to hop on board at will & watch as they set up their own orbital infrastructure.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

I'm sorry but not possible cant even carry a 20 foot pole without it bending .

If it's all a matter of one misplaced atom then I wonder how cosmic and solar radiation would affect the cable structure.

originally posted by: Moohide
No one has mentioned about the atmosphere, how would the elevators line be affected through the atmospheres earth/space barrier.

Also for re-entry, i know there are heat shields but would something burn up or explode from basically trying to punch its way straight back through the atmosphere on the way back down to earth? Would it have to come back down very slowly? Aren't things supposed to come back in at an angle?

I guess it would travel slow enough to not worry about reentry heat which is basically a side effect of crash into atmospheric compounds at high speed

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Alien Abduct

Just think of the terrorism possibilities!

20,000 miles of unobtainium. Falling ... really fast. Around the equator!


One...TRILLION...dollars.

Or else.

When I hear space elevators I always wonder what the plan would be for...I guess they would be considered meteorites?

originally posted by: stormcell

originally posted by: waftist
So 22,000 miles of cable! Crazy on the logistics! Some company will get a sweet contract no doubt. I can't understand if it(cable) will stay straight or be curved as the earth spins at 1000 mph, dragging it and whatever is at the end of it through space like a tether ball. So how long have they estimated optimum travel time for each payload to reach 22,000 miles? What are the speeds they are hoping for? At 100 mph that is around 10 days...not too bad I guess, if the trip comes with a meal or 10 and some reading material

The top of the space elevator is in geosynchronous orbit with the base. We do that with satellites and can keep them to within metres of their target coordinates. But the structure would have to support its own weight and handle the tension of dangling from the anchor in geostationary orbit.

We can get blimps tethered up to 10,000 meters. Weather balloons can go up to 120,000 meters (going by videos on Youtube). So in theory, you could have a chain of blimp balloons holding up 1 km to 10km segments of cable, all chained to each other. Then the remaining 180km has to be supported by the geostationary anchor.

There were some ideas of having two or three launch vehicles. One goes from the ground to the edge of space (elevator or hybrid jet engine/rocket engine). Another is in permanent geosynchronous orbit. The third launches from the second in an eccentric orbit and will intersect with the first to exchange a payload.

Thanks for the input, but isn't a satellite different because it is not tethered to the surface of a spinning object? 22,000 miles(over 35 million meters/35,000 Km) just seems...well I don't know, I guess I am just not able to see it, but obviously they have it all figured out, ha. I too am curious as a poster below mentioned, about atmospheric effects as the payload spans the spectrum, but again they must have accounted for this. I'll admit I haven't done much digging into this, so I will tonight so that I can get a better picture of the details. Nevertheless a cool progression for multiple purposes. When the payload breaks free from gravity(Kármán line'?), I guess it could accelerate significantly to make up the time for the rest of the distance.
I see this as the beginning of building a space station, which will enable us to begin engineering out there with less restrictions, at least with gravity. Of course then there is cold temps and cosmic radiation, but building things could be done on a different scale it seems. Anyway, I like the notion and hope to see it come to fruition.

originally posted by: LookingAtMars
a reply to: andy06shake
The moon is not really that far away.

Try getting there.

After looking at a few of the longest made objects like a Cable (580km/360miles), Cable Car system (27.2km/16.9miles), Tallest Elevator at the Mponeng Gold Mine (2.2km/1.36miles) i have my doubts on the length of what is possible and usable as a tether or line.

The Longest Tether released in space was from the Foton-M3 spacecraft (30km/18.6miles). Link

8 November 2007 On 25 September, students around the world watched with bated breath as their creation, the second Young Engineers Satellite (YES2) experiment, reached its dramatic conclusion. A day before the Foton-M3 spacecraft returned to Earth, a small re-entry capsule, named Fotino, was to be released from the end of a 30 km tether, the longest such structure ever to be deployed in space. However, no signal was ever received from Fotino and its fate has been uncertain ever since. First indications, based on real-time data processed by the YES2 flight computer and released by Russian mission controllers, suggested that the tether only unwound about 8.5 km before Fotino was cut free, but engineers wanted to know the full story of Fotino’s final hours. Now, after weeks of careful analysis, the YES2 team has informed the ESA Mission Review Board of its findings. “All of the data we now have available point to the fact that the tether unwound fully before the Fotino capsule was released,” said Roger Walker, YES2 project manager for ESA’s Education Office. “This means that the most challenging part of the mission was completed and that YES2 smashed the world record for the longest man-made object flown in space.”

This could make mining space debris much easier than it would be at the present time. I just wish all leaders of the world would look up instead of down.