Arthur C. Clarke Stands By His Belief in Life on MarsClarke spoke last night, June 6, via phone from his home in Sri Lanka as key speaker in the Wernher von Braun Memorial Lecture series held here at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Pouring over images on his home computer taken by the now-orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Clarke said that there are signs of vegetation evident in the photos. Clarke repeated several times that he was serious about his observations, pointing out that he sees something akin to Banyan trees in some MGS photos.
by Leonard David
7 June 2001
I never did buy into the space elevator stuff. It's not possible to make a single molecule that long, so by necessity it will have to have a binder between them to transfer the load from one fiber to the other, as fiberglass resin does in Carbon Fiber composites. That's going to make the thing dramatically heavier.
And how did they ever think they'd handle the space junk issue? It's one thing to have the single point in space where a spacecraft is and be relatively sure that no other big point will hit it. But a line 10s of thousands of miles long going way past geosync, passing right through the Clarke belt with it's expended boosters and dead spacecraft would be hit constantly.
Without a plan to significantly clean up space below 30k miles or so, how could a space elevator ever be a serious idea.