Posted on 06/25/2004 2:21:35 PM PDT by Junior
1 - What a joke: "Edwards' elevator would climb on a cable made of nanotubes — tiny bundles of carbon atoms many times stronger than steel. The cable would be about three feet wide and thinner than a piece of paper, but capable of supporting a payload up to 13 tons. "
ROTFLMAO - a bit of quick calculations reveal that this cable would have to support about 9-10 million pounds, just to support itself, without any stress.
Not a chance this will be built even if the engineering problems are solved.
We would do much better to use the Moon as our jumping off point. Much smaller gravity well and plenty of material to build "stuff".
"Stairway to heaven"?
"Edwards is not just some guy with an idea. He's head of the space elevator project at the Institute for Scientific Research in Fairmont, W.Va. NASA (news - web sites) already has given it more than $500,000 to study the idea, and Congress has earmarked $2.5 million more."
why are we paying 2.5 million for this s**t?
Edwards is just some guy with a BS idea.
Remember -- the CM of the system is still at GEO, and it's subject to the same effects that require GEO satellites to need OOP orbit control. The OOP thrusters would be to counter the effects of things like sun-moon gravitation, Earth non-sphericity, the effects of wind on the lower cable and solar radiation on the upper cable, stuff like that.
Not to mention the fact of needing to damp out tension and translational oscillations (which was a big deal even for the 20 km Shuttle tethered satellite).
It's a very complicated problem.
I wish I was born after man learned how to fly above the oceans, and could travel between continents in but a single day!
Oh wait. I was. Never mind. I'm happy now.
If you could pull that off, you could just as easily have SSTO, so why bother with the elevator?
Should be a piece of cake. Just get a bunch of car bumpers from a junk yard and string them together.
You could use new ones, but that would increase the cost.
You're describing a rigid post, not a sinewy ribbon.
Reminds me of an interesting short story I read as a kid called "Neutron Star". :-)
Not if the base is away from the equator.
Because the ride up would still be free.
The size of the wad of dollars does astonish me. It would take only 1 or 2 engineering grad students to figure out what kinds of properties would be needed to make it feasible.
Actually the tether got stuck in the reel.
Well, I doubt that even a General Products hull would get this thing off the ground. :)
Yup!
Heck, I'm just a humble satellite guy who understands orbits and can do a bit of math....
It's pretty easy to tell that the guy's not telling the truth.
I always thought GP hulls were the coolest things.
I sure wanted one! :-)
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