Posted on 09/03/2009 7:38:23 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Is it time for us to get serious about building a "Space Elevator?"
On August 13, approximately 280 people gathered at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond Washington for a "Space Elevator Overview" public lecture, with 60 attendees continuing on to be part of the four day long Fifth International Space Elevator Conference sponsored by Microsoft and JPL Foundation. Delegates flew in from Japan, Armenia and other far-off locations.
A proposal for a space elevator was first published by Yuri Artsunov in the USSR in 1960. At that time, the west knew little about Artsunov's work, and the idea was re-invented independently by Jerome Pearson in the USA in 1975.
Essentially, the idea is to build a tether tens of thousands of kilometers long, and suspend it vertically upwards form the surface of the Earth to far beyond Geosynchronous orbit. If properly counterbalanced, the tether would be stable, and motorized "climbers" could pull themselves up the tether to geosynchronous orbit. Theoretically, a 1 kilogram payload could thus be injected into orbit for about $2 worth of electricity, quite a bargain when compared to the approximate $20,000 cost of a conventional rocket.The dramatic cost reduction would open the space frontier to an explosion of space industry, commerce and tourism. "There will be places in the space elevator for everybody," said conference chairman Dr. Bryan Laubscher.
The conference brought together a wide cross section of experts and members of the lay public to learn and exchange ideas and a strong NASA presence attested to the growing influence of the concept. Seeking innovative solutions to NASA's technical challenges through prize competitions open to the citizen inventor, the space agency is holding two "Challenge competitions," and a competitor rose to the challenge in one of the categories at the conference itself.
(Excerpt) Read more at hplusmagazine.com ...
It will be way more than $2 per kilogram. There will be costs to get the tether built and erected and maintained. The elctricity may be the cheapest part of it. There will be tons of overhead nobody has calculated yet.
/johnny
“The Fountains of Paradise” by Arthur C. Clarke is a novel about space elevators (he’s the science fiction author who “invented” comsats in geosync, the “Clarke Belt”).
Also Charles Sheffield wrote a space elevator novel, “The Web Between The Worlds”.
The slang term is “beanstalk” for obvious reasons.
We are very close to having materials strong enough, and as for a terror target, if you blew up the base, the whole thing would drift out, not down.
Yeah, it could be $8K per kilo!
If you go all the way to the end, though, beyond geosync, and let go, the slingshot effect is pretty strong. Out at the end, a hundred kilo package to Mars or the Moon becomes much cheaper than a launch from Earth surface.
A beanstalk on the Moon, now....
The Greenies would never allow such a thing. If you run a mass out 30,000 miles and let it go, you steal from Earth’s rotational energy, and don’t get it back unless you attach an equal mass of, say, refined asteroidal heavy metals (iridium, platinum) and wind it back down to the surface.
Just like the space shuttle is a “re-usable spaceplane.”
Hmmm .. a BIG lightning rod!
Hey Microsoft, quit dickin around with stuff like this and make some software that doesn’t blow up. Justa suggestion...
Robbing Mother Gaia of her precious angular momentum!
Enough of that and it’s the End Of Days!!!!
If we can convince the libs that “angular momentum is conservative” they may go for a beanstalk. They probably were never taught, or didn’t pay attention, to physics.
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