Space Elevator Not Gonna Happen

Not the "we" that might include you.

You (singular) are talking about a tether hoist, which is a remarkably silly idea.

uses tethers in a way that is technically feasible. It can shift stuff up into higher orbits, once it's outside the atmosphere.

Neither of us is, but you have gone down the wrong rabbit-hole and haven't noticed, which isn't clever.

I apologize for not reading the entire thread, but a few interesting things if not already mentioned:

1. Space elevator science fiction reading should start with Arthur C. Clarke's "The Fountains of Paradise". He covers it pretty well (carbon fiber, space junk, etc.), but doesn't really deal with all of the major issues.

1. Since the upper "lobby" is in synchronous orbit, you can just push off from that and still be in synchronous orbit. But you can't just get off at a lower floor. You could be going far too slow, and would fall to earth.

2. It has always seemed to me that the cable would also be resposible for increasing the horizontal velocity of the elevator car as it goes from the surface of the earth to synchronous orbit. And vice versa coming back down. So the cable would bow out to the West on the way up, and to the East on the way down. It's not clear how this would be compensated for.

1. Another place where an elevator would be useful would be on Mars. And that has the advantage of not having material atmosphere to get in the way, or very much space junk already in lower orbit. And of course it wouldn't be nearly as long. However, there is one big piece of junk that would have to be dealt with, and that is Phobos, which is in a sub-synchronous orbit. (On your next trip to Mars, please note that Phobos rises in the West and sets in the East.) One thought for dealing with Phobos is to induce a wave oscillation in the cable, carefully timed so that the cable is out of the way when Phobos passes underneath. Another idea is to move Phobos to a higher orbit.

Clarke makes the point that if we are to escape the red giant phase of our sun, we will need the elevator to permit mass movemnent of people to our new home.

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Probably by a crawling counter-weight on the section of the cable above syn chronous orbit - it would crawl out a bit further to increase the tension o n the lower end of the cable, counter-acting any tendency to bow.

It would probably also be used to cancel out tidal forces as the moon passe d overhead, and damp any stretching vibrational resonances in the cable - i t does seem to be an essnetial part of any practicable system.

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Both would work.

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Probably more sensible to move the whole planet into a higher orbit - we've got a couple of billions years to do it, and launching most of the asteroi d belt at the earth to pass close enough to lift it into a higher orbit, wh ile directing the successive asteroids into the sun, should do the job.

Getting it wrong - as by putting an asteroid on a collision course rather i nto a grazing orbit - would be awkward, but it would be a survivable accide nt.

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Their system is for payloads of thousands of kilograms.

Mine is for 100 Lb parcels.

You seem to think I am following some previous dork's idea.

Which might justify the sort of capital investment that would be required.

Which wouldn't.

You've made it perfectly clear that you'd struck out into previously uncharted territory. Why you were bothering is less obvious.

I've been saying it won't "fly" for ages, but I'm guessing you some private definition of satellite.

you would be in an elliptical orbit, (like all falling objects), the orbit may, or may not, intersect the ground depending mostly on what floor you got off at.

yeah, timming the next load correctly could cancel some of that energy.

I think that's what Kim Stanley Robinson did in "Red Mars"

I've been saying it won't "fly" for ages, but I'm guessing you have some private definition of satellite.

A space elevator sitting on the equator might have been a good idea before 4.10.1957, but after that Sputnik 1 or in fact any other low orbit satellite with orbital inclination greater than 0 degrees would sooner or later cut the tether. Such satellite will cross the equator twice each orbit and hence risk hitting the tether.

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You do not get it. 10 100 Lb trips are easier than a single 1000 or

The idea is to get parcels to space without the overt booster energy requisite.

Jasen Betts wrote in news:q38gvo$j7m$2 @gonzo.alcatraz:

Floor?

This is stupid.

The device will be two stations. The source and the desitination.

There are no mid span stops ANYWHERE!

Or risk getting vapourised by the tether-protection hardware. A space elevator would be a very expensive item, and would have very thorough protection.

Sputnik 1 weighed 83.6 kgm, and stayed in orbit for three months before dropping back into the atmosphere and burning up. Probably not a real threat.

But 100 pound packages are too small to be all that useful - enlarging the ISS so that it has apace for an assembly shop don't seem to be a currently feasible option.

Cubestats are even smaller (2.9 pounds per 10cm cubical element)

and we've launched about 1000 so far, at a typical launch cost of $100,000 per device. Making the launch cost cheaper isn't going to enlarge the market enough to generate a flood of capital.

One of the local IEEE members did the K-band antenna for the Audacy Zero three-unit cubesat, so it's going to go into the NSW IEEE newsletter next month (which I happen to edit).

https://audacy.space/audacy-zero/

but it doesn't strike me that your scheme is going to address that market.

Bean-stalk style space elevators let you step off anywhere, up to roughly t wice the geostationary orbital height. Bola-style orbiting tethers are less flexible, but not that inflexible. DLUNU may have invented something that' s not only too small to be all that useful, but also too inflexible.

You are are acting that way, but here's hint, next time read the context.

The kinetic energy of Sputnik 1 was about half kiloton, Sputnik 2 & 3 several kilotons. Don't forget that the empty core segment of the R7 missile were initially about the same orbit as the satellite itself.but the empty booster decayed faster.

Sputnik 1 complete 1440 orbits or 2880 equatorial crossings. In principle a satellite orbit plane is locked relative to the stars, not relative to Earth. Now that the Earth orbits the sun the plane relative to Earth shifts 360 degrees un 365 days or about 1 degree (110 km) a day. With 16 orbits/day for Sputnik 1 the orbital pattern would shift 7 km/orbit in addition to 24 degrees/orbit due Earth rotation around the axis.

So even this short satellite lifetime, the satellite wound have passed just a few kilometers from the tether.

With thousands of orbiting satellites and other space debris, the distance would be much shorter and the likelihood of a crash would be much larger.

And the precautions against anything that looked might it get close enough to do any damage would be correspondingly more aggressive.

Anybody who spends what it would cost to set up a beanstalk space elevator would spend a bit more making sure that some space junk didn't devalue their asset before it had earned enough to it's cover the capital cost.