Is there any good reason why this wouldn't work?
I want to run for office in a decade on a pretty bland populist platform, and want the space elevator to set me apart.
Is there any good reason why this wouldn't work?
Evan Jenkins
Austin Turner
it works on paper. the build challenge is finding a light enough material with the strength needed.
carbon nanotube or graphmeme can do it. yet if you place one atom wrong, you lose significant strength. after so many wrong atoms the whole thing is useless.
you have to place it on the equator. South America is the only place stable and secure enough to put it. Africa and SEAsia, not so much. Pacific Islands are out because none are big enough.
Caleb Fisher
How much payoff is there if you can only run one climber at a time? And how much more efficient will the climber be than a traditional rocket?
Adam Rivera
>any good reason why this wouldn't work
Orbital debris will cut the cable.
A space elevator would be under enormous tension and would need to be almost atomically precise across its entire length in order to be strong enough. A fleck of paint or grain of sand moving at low Earth orbit speeds would hit with a relative velocity of nearly 7 kilometers per second, and cause significant damage to the cable. The damaged cable would not be able to handle the tension forces and therefore would snap.
The only options are to either overbuild the cable by a ridiculous amount, making it way thicker and heavier than necessary, and thus making it much more expensive and difficult to build, or you could attempt to track every piece of orbiting material larger than microscopic and use some kind of active defense system to vaporize the debris before it impacts the cable. Both are pretty bad options, but you can't go ignoring the problem and having your cable be cut after a few weeks or months of it being up, every time you put it up, if you're lucky.
Space elevators only really make any sense aroudn very small worlds with low gravity and a fast spin, needing only a short cable and not requiring ultra-strong materials (although we'd use them anyway just for the margin they provide, because space debris would still be a problem there as well).
Nolan Cruz
because if you run it for decades, the cost per pound is significantly reduced versus rockets.
you can also put things up when ever instead of waiting for a window.
Gavin Rogers
just put lasers on the cable and you can vaporise or deorbit space junk. in fact it can be a intended function of the elevator, to clear space of debris.
Cameron Ward
Efficiency depends mostly on how power is being generated on the climber, although fuel costs are such a small factor in the cost of launching a rocket that it makes it mostly irrelevant anyway. The theoretical cost savings of a space elevator come from the fact that no parts of it are thrown away during operation. Reusable rockets would be able to achieve almost as low a price point per kilogram payload as a space elevator, except reusable rockets don't require a massive initial investment and there is no single massive point of failure.
Ideally a space elevator would have something like a dozen cables and climbers all operating constantly. However even with multiple climbers the problem of trip times would be hard to solve; Imagine trying to make an elevator that can climb a cable against gravity for ~38,000 km, and trying to reduce that trip time to 48 hours. That'd require a vehicle climbing continuously at 792 km/h, just slightly over half the speed of sound, and slightly under the cruising speed of a jet airliner. Straight up. A more achievable top speed of around 200 km/h results in a trip time of around 8 days. A space elevator is probably not something a person would want to take a ride on.
Benjamin Bennett
>just put lasers on the cable
That adds mass per unit length of cable, it may not be possible to watch for debris that small, how do we power those lasers, etc etc. Not to mention designing the lasers so that a climber passing at 200+ km/h doesn't strike and destroy them.
Asher Sullivan
>Is there any good reason why this wouldn't work?
Because magic does not exist. It is a total pipe dream for Earth. You can do it on other celestial bodies with very low g, though it may or may not be worth doing on those.
Jacob Jenkins