Posted on 06/25/2004 2:21:35 PM PDT by Junior
WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) wants to return to the moon and put a man on Mars. But scientist Bradley C. Edwards has an idea that's really out of this world: an elevator that climbs 62,000 miles into space.
Edwards thinks an initial version could be operating in 15 years, a year earlier than Bush's 2020 timetable for a return to the moon. He pegs the cost at $10 billion, a pittance compared with other space endeavors.
"It's not new physics nothing new has to be discovered, nothing new has to be invented from scratch," he says. "If there are delays in budget or delays in whatever, it could stretch, but 15 years is a realistic estimate for when we could have one up."
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.
"A lot of people at NASA are excited about the idea," said Robert Casanova, director of the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts in Atlanta.
Edwards believes a space elevator offers a cheaper, safer form of space travel that eventually could be used to carry explorers to the planets.
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.
The cable would be attached to a platform on the equator, off the Pacific coast of South America where winds are calm, weather is good and commercial airplane flights are few. The platform would be mobile so the cable could be moved to get out of the path of orbiting satellites.
David Brin, a science-fiction writer who formerly taught physics at San Diego State University, believes the concept is solid but doubts such an elevator could be operating by 2019.
"I have no doubt that our great-grandchildren will routinely use space elevators," he said. "But it will take another generation to gather the technologies needed."
Edwards' institute is holding a third annual conference on space elevators in Washington starting Monday. A keynote speaker at the three-day meeting will be John Mankins, NASA's manager of human and robotics technology. Organizers say it will discuss technical challenges and solutions and the economic feasibility of the elevator proposal.
The space elevator is not a new idea. A Russian scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, envisioned it a century ago. And Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Foundations of Paradise," published in 1979, talks of a space elevator 24,000 miles high, and permanent colonies on the moon, Mercury and Mars.
The difference now, Edwards said, is "we have a material that we can use to actually build it."
He envisions launching sections of cable into space on rockets. A "climber" his version of an elevator car would then be attached to the cable and used to add more lengths of cable until eventually it stretches down to the Earth. A counterweight would be attached to the end in space.
Edwards likens the design to "spinning a ball on a string around your head." The string is the cable and the ball on the end is a counterweight. The Earth's rotation would keep the cable taut.
The elevator would be powered by photo cells that convert light into electricity. A laser attached to the platform could be aimed at the elevator to deliver the light, Edwards said.
Edwards said he probably needs about two more years of development on the carbon nanotubes to obtain the strength needed. After that, he believes work on the project can begin.
"The major obstacle is probably just politics or funding and those two are the same thing," he said. "The technical, I don't think that's really an issue anymore."
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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