Space Elevator Not Gonna Happen

Didn't watch the youtube presentation - life's too short - but any practical space elevator is going to depend on long carbon nanotubes. Nothing else we know of has the tensile strength, and they don't seem to be commercially available yet.

No one ever puts pencil to paper on these stupid ideas. Disgusting!

The channel belongs to Grady Hillhouse, a CE PE, and he explains very simply how no other material could possibly work. Talk about hanging by a thread! I wouldn't trust it.

I believe the profession calls the kind of people who dream up that kind of nonsense, archistars.

I didn't watch either, but space elevators are monstrously fun ideas.

George H.

People like to knock the idea because it isn't currently practical. But how many things were conceived before they were practical only to become commonplace after an enabling technology was invented?

The list includes the video phone, RADAR, earbuds, the electronic tablet, the Internet, credit cards and even the moon landings if you recall Jules Verne.

Excuse me while I hail a Johnny Cab!

Rick C.

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Until someone put them into practice, when they become prophets.

Willy Ley's book, "Engineers' Dreams: Great projects that could come true", published by Viking Press in 1959, had a bunch of these projects.

Curiously, Google and Wikipedia don't seem to know about it, but Google does list a bunch of copies of the book which one could buy.

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

If we make one, it will be a simple, small payload (maybe 100kg) dumbwaiter on a string (carbon fiber strand) for continuous task events wher the end result is delivery of a large amount of materials. It will simply require that it get parsed up into small parcels. So nothing big. We can still fire rockets for that stuff.

What we should do is perfect the in orbit logistics so that 'package handlers' can gather the dumbwaiter parcels and group them up for delivery to the ISS or such.

You're confusing engineering feasibility and survivability in the real world. The technology of the lift mechanism is irrelevant. You don't have to do ANY analysis to determine that it will never work. Strong wind Airplane terrorist engineering stupidity earthquake

Even if you could build it, there are too many evil people for it to survive. We can't even protect twin towers close to earth in protected airspace

Take your credit card example. People use them because the vendor guarantees they won't lose personally for any of the many ways things can go wrong. There are MANY cards. Like insurance, the small fees charged cover the small percentage of failures and the world goes on.

When you have ONE thing that's hugely expensive and impossible to protect from harm, intentional or otherwise, the "insurance" model doesn't hold up.

Space elevator is a technologist's wet dream.

ractical space elevator is going to depend on long carbon nanotubes. Nothin g else we know of has the tensile strength, and they don't seem to be comme rcially available yet.

simply how no other material could possibly work. Talk about hanging by a thread! I wouldn't trust it.

t how many things were conceived before they were practical only to become commonplace after an enabling technology was invented?

t, the Internet, credit cards and even the moon landings if you recall Jule s Verne.

Yes, many things are not well thought out. You analysis is one of them. T he twin towers is one of many potential targets, so yes, they were hard to protect from attack by air which we had failed to consider adequately. But the analogy is not very good. The space elevator won't be located in New York or Washington or any other major city. It will be located in a relati vely remote area where it can be easily cordoned off not allowing ships or airplanes to come anywhere near.

I think the lower 7 miles of the space elevator will be relatively easy to protect. It's the upper 22,000 miles that won't be so easy. Fortunately t he likelihood of anything impacting it is relatively small... unless anothe r country with space capability decides to attack it. But then we have not hing to protect any of our satellites in space either.

BTW, you can get insurance for singular events as well as large pools.

Rick C.

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This is one case where the basic concept is understood, but we are still missing the required materials. Long, cheap carbon nanotubes - or anything else with similar properties - would be very useful for lots of purposes. So there is plenty of research going on in trying to make them. We don't need to done anything about space elevators for now - we just need to keep them in mind for the day that such materials become available.

On thing that I believe many people forget about space elevators is the challenge of the lengths. It needs to be 36,000 km long (ignoring any curves). At standard high-speed elevator speeds of 10 m/s, that is 40 days of travel time. Who wants to listen to elevator music for 6 weeks?

Even though I'm sure speeds would be higher, and much of it would be getting off at earlier stops like low earth orbit, it's still more of a freight solution than a people solution.

Still, there is a lot of freight that one could want to transport up there, if there were a cheap method.

Has it been demonstrated that their properties would be sufficient?

I don't think so - only estimated, but I believe it looks good. There have been a few short cables made, typically held up by balloons. And there are lots of challenges of design and engineering to make it all work once the basic materials are available.

Of course, there are all sorts of non-technical challenges too - like the economics of it, even if cheap and long nanotubes are developed.

OK, I know little about geostationary orbits, but I assume that the tether in orbit has to be DIRECTLY above the anchor point on the ground near the equator. So, exactly which third-world, war-torn, corrupt country would you pick to host your secure location?

Ya think? But then we have nothing to protect any of our satellites in space either. Yeahbut, we have a lot of them. You can't get 'em all at once. Sounds like you could take out a space elevator with a hand grenade on a drone. Anything that can fracture the cable results in a total loss... and a huge amount of debris in the most coveted orbit.

I find it amusing the way people rationalize such things... As an insurance agent, would you rather write a policy that covers the possibility that aunt Harriet's VISA card got hacked for $2000 out of a $20B credit card company? Or a policy that would replace a $20B space elevator with a bullseye on it that could be reduced to rubble by a tiny mishap, intentional or not? Would you expect the premiums to be the same?

One thing I haven't seen discussed is how would you install the thing? Big truck rolls up to the site with 22,000 miles of nano-whatever. You bolt one end of the cable to a big chunk of concrete. Now what?

Technology advances in small steps. Getting to the moon was not our first flight. You can't test the technology with 10% of a space elevator. It's all or nothing.

The ability to manufacture 22,000 miles of infinitely strong, infinitely light cable is WAY down on the list of problems to be solved.

Mike wrote in news:q30gh7$7a6$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

You wouldn't know, because you use stupid layman terms like "technologist".

You are about as far from having engineering knowledge as a freshly splatted bird turd.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news:0913519c-0a86-45fc-99d9- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

There are not ANY attacks of assets in space yet.

Any entity that does is going to be in some serious deep kimshee.

A "space elevator" is not a building or Earth based structure.

It is a basket on a string with a fishing reel (winch) at the top end.

It will all come down to the weight of that strand. The geostationary lift platform will be difficult to fix in orbit as well. So lots of fuel will get spent whenever the strand is deployed and a lift is in progress.

Mike wrote in news:q318mj$rj4$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Fuck insurance. The ascent engine on the LEM had no testing, much less insurance.

Pay over $1000 in 'insurance' just to climb a radio tower to replace the 'bulb' in the beacon at the top.

The most overpriced, undertaxed industry in America, right next to lawyers and the medical 'community'.

Insurer greed and implemented control is the ruination of America's economy and freedoms.

Mike wrote in news:q318mj$rj4$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Dippy dope!

It gets deployed from the stationary platform set up in space!

And what makes you think that it needs a 22k mile orbit?