Space Elevator

[Acidbaron]

Just because it is on paper, doesn't mean it will be respected. It would be political suicide for the party in power. I can imagine the headlines "The government murdered Americans", "Plane with innocent passengers shot down by the military". I can also imagine the word "terrorist" being mentioned only once or twice.

Right so now instead of following protocols on paper you wish to speculate in favor of your argument sake it won't ever happen.

[dextersmith]

Why should it be the first target?

Becouse it'll be the first of its kind, a huge leap for science/humanity, and symbol of our hope, future, ambition, and collective work of modern people. Its destruction would be soul crushing. Oppress the world by "keeping us grounded".

[minteK917]

doesn't matter anyway.

We don't have the material science to build mega-projects yet. Maybe in the next 100 years but right now our materials we have access to just are not up to the tasks.

Actually surprisingly there is work on reinforced spider silk as been mentioned. We can reproduce that, structure reinforced this way could be magnitude more sturdy then anything we ever build. Its funny when you think about it but for many things science fiction had wrong, especially alloys we could use in the future or computer engineering. The more we discover, the more likely it is that our technology will be based on bio mechanism.

We do have materials up to the task, we just need more research into mass producing them.

[dextersmith]

India, pfft. I'm talking about countries where the government gives a shit about the public opinion.

Why concern themselves with someone else's elevator when they don't even have toilets and still have terrible living conditions?

[Orlong]

Huuuuge waste of freakin money

[dextersmith]

The important thing is that "love in an elevator" has to play on a constant loop for the two days it takes to reach orbit.

Thought it was a week? *Neglect to build washrooms!* Mwahahahahahahaha!

[unbound]

Might want to read Red Mars. Reasonably accurate approach to building a space elevator as well as a pretty accurate effect of what happens when somebody manages to break it.

[Deleted]

the idea is lovely, the practicalities are way way beyond us, if its ever possible at all.

[Yvaelle]

Earth is a rather large and heavy home for a starting location. If we had started out on a small moon, the ability to build a space elevator would have been much easier - and we should definitely master space elevator tech for those future scenarios. For escaping Earth, a massive railgun might be the better route (as someone already hinted).

The materials science to pull something out of orbit if we were even just on Mars instead of Earth is already well within our current material capability - or if we were on a Galilean moon colony, it would be almost trivial: so when we colonize Mars, an early-to-medium priority should be a space elevator on Mars: both for moving goods up and down from orbit - rather than sending landing ships through the atmosphere every trip. You would probably want something like a Railgun to an Earth orbital base (or a moon base), an interplanetary ferry from Earth to Mars (or anywhere else in our solar system) that doesn't need to be designed to enter or leave atmosphere (no thermal plating, etc), and then a space elevator to lower us down to the colonies. That would be much more efficient than developing a big ship that can exit Earth atmosphere, fly to Mars, land on Mars, and then exit Martian atmosphere and return.

The big advantages of a railgun are:
Ground-based - much less exposure for terrorists, much less risk of accidents, if you blow it up you block the track until its repaired, but you dont drop a gargantuan wire on us all

Energy generated on ground - you can absorb energy off the grid (of course, it would require Massive power) and you fire it once you have sufficient power in the capacitors, one of the challenges of a space elevator is getting power up to the lifter, a railgun doesn't have that problem since it can make use of our far better ground-based energy sources, where mass-to-thrust ratios aren't an issue, and you dont have to raise the lift via solar panel or anything slow and silly.

Technology - space elevators have big technology challenges, most renowned being the material used for the cable, but preventing the cable from oscillating is a challenge, building an anchor is a challenge, building a satellite is a challenge: all things we haven't done before. We know how to build railguns, and they scale up to virtually any size. Of course there are still challenges with trying to make a railgun survivable for humans, but that's probably easier to do (build it longer, have it accelerate slower but toward a max speed, or something).

[lizon]

If I remember correctly a Space Elevator isn't very viable for Earth due to our gravity well. It is much more suitable for Low G planetoids such as Mars or Luna. If you want to launch something into space cheaply use a rail gun.

[glo]

Anchor point would need to be something stupid like 50 miles in circumference, not feasible.

[lizon]

Anchor point would need to be something stupid like 50 miles in circumference, not feasible.

The Anchor point isn't a problem. There are hundreds of asteroids we can knock into position for the job. The problems are distance, speed of the rail cars, tensile strength to account for cable osculations, and ensuring anything passing through the Van Allan belts isn't sterilized.

Objectively speaking if you can make a rail car go fast enough up a 26,000 mile long cable into orbit then you also have the technology to build a 100 mile long rail gun to get those same rail cars into orbit for a fraction of the time and cost of a space elevator.

[Phaere]

The Anchor point isn't a problem. There are hundreds of asteroids we can knock into position for the job. The problems are distance, speed of the rail cars, tensile strength to account for cable osculations, and ensuring anything passing through the Van Allan belts isn't sterilized.

Objectively speaking if you can make a rail car go fast enough up a 26,000 mile long cable into orbit then you also have the technology to build a 100 mile long rail gun to get those same rail cars into orbit for a fraction of the time and cost of a space elevator.

There's more advantages to a Orbital elevator than simple being able to send stuff into space quickly and cheaply. With an elevator / orbital ring set up you could bolt tons of massive solar panels onto it and generate nearly infinite solar energy to send back down to earth. Solar panels in space can generate 60+ % more energy than ones of earth, and by the time something like this would be able to be built there would be even more advanced panels than today.

[Yvaelle]

The other factor in favour of a space elevator is operating cost. Once it's up and running the cost to move stuff up/down is time, it runs itself virtually for free. By contrast, an orbital railgun carrying a payload of tons would have a colossal energy cost everytime it is fired. That energy cost would be trivial compared to today's chemical rocket methods, but it's still something to consider in this comparison.

Railguns are worthwhile on Earth in part because we will probably have enormous energy by then, and because space elevators are such a challenge due to Earth's heavy gravity well. On smaller planets and moons though, space elevators would make way more sense - not just because they could be done with existing tech, but because they would probably be much cheaper to build, and infinitely cheaper to maintain - than a railgun on Mars (as comparison).

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I don't mind but I will NOT use it. I REFUSE!

[Mosotti]

There won't be any space elevator, because it's impossible to build one.

[lizon]

A couple of things worth considering.

1. Any power generation on the elevator will only benefit the local area around where the elevator is. The problem with power generation has always been getting that power from point A to point B. In that respect you can't rely on the elevator to supplement global power generation. It's benefits will be very local, limited to a radius of only a few hundred kilometers around the anchor point on the surface. Anything beyond that limit won't be worth considering. So you could maybe power a small city but that's about it.

2. The elevator isn't as "free" as one would believe. For one you need to stop thinking of it as an elevator like you have in a building with counterweights and think of it more like a vertical train. The cargo will be placed upon large rails that will need to be powered and launched from the ground. Going down is the easy part. Going up will require an assisted boost of either an electromagnetic launch or rockets to help push it up then using maglevs to try and propel it upwards. Even then you will be consuming a huge amount of energy. The amount of energy required will most likely be about the same for both with the only difference being that the elevator may be able to offset it's energy consumption. You could argue that with the rise of Fusion power in the next few decades concerns about energy consumption may be a thing of the past making rail guns a more appealing option.

Overall for Earth they just aren't all that viable. For Mars or Luna though it is much more appealing. The elevators will consume much less power, will be much shorter, and have fewer risks involved.

It is worth nothing that the only real limit to rail guns is the superconducting materials required for the launch rails. Most power will be placed into keeping those rails cool enough to assist with the launch. As better superconductors are invented for higher temperatures the energy costs drops dramatically.

[Rhine101]

And it will probably for that reason be the most guarded place on the planet.

See, common sense says yes. But history has shown that places you think would have uber leet security (the presidents home) can be infiltrated by one random guy. Like airports, and nuclear plants.

I fully suspect that if this is built in teh US, there will be a budget cut that rolls back security at some point.

[Yvaelle]

2. The elevator isn't as "free" as one would believe. For one you need to stop thinking of it as an elevator like you have in a building with counterweights and think of it more like a vertical train. The cargo will be placed upon large rails that will need to be powered and launched from the ground. Going down is the easy part. Going up will require an assisted boost of either an electromagnetic launch or rockets to help push it up then using maglevs to try and propel it upwards. Even then you will be consuming a huge amount of energy. The amount of energy required will most likely be about the same for both with the only difference being that the elevator may be able to offset it's energy consumption. You could argue that with the rise of Fusion power in the next few decades concerns about energy consumption may be a thing of the past making rail guns a more appealing option.

When we talk about space elevators being virtually free, it's using proposed solar climbers to overcome the problem of powering the lifter without an engine onboard - the downside is that the climb-time can end up being quite long, but it beats having to power out of the atmosphere using a chemical payload or onboard nuclear reactor: either of which would eat up a lot of the maximal weight of the lifter (as it also applies stress on the cable).

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See, common sense says yes. But history has shown that places you think would have uber leet security (the presidents home) can be infiltrated by one random guy. Like airports, and nuclear plants.

I fully suspect that if this is built in teh US, there will be a budget cut that rolls back security at some point.

To be fair, the whole point of the White House lawn is to create a No Man's Land around the residence in what is otherwise one of the larger cities in the US. It's a grass moat, it's easy to jump over the fence - it's a lot harder to then cross the open area (where almost all intruders are stopped), and then find a way to breach the residence and get to the POTUS bedroom (and any public documents suggesting the location of the POTUS bedroom is almost certainly a honeypot).

The Secret Service aren't there to stop people walking on the grass, the grass is there to alert the Secret Service that someone has stopped walking on the public sidewalk around the white house, and started walking on the off limits area between the public space and the castle.

[Wells]

It's cool but it'll be every terrorist's first target.

There's a good chance it'll be built on the ocean, so security wouldn't be that hard.

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If I remember correctly a Space Elevator isn't very viable for Earth due to our gravity well. It is much more suitable for Low G planetoids such as Mars or Luna. If you want to launch something into space cheaply use a rail gun.

Its certainly easier in lower gravity. Its entirely possible once there are sufficient advancements in material sciences though.

Its not technology that'll be the issue, its how economically feasible it'll be.