SPACE ELEVATOR THREAD

It's just a modern version of all the wacky ideas people used to have about the future. By the time we're actually capable of doing it, it will seem quaint and silly and there will be some better way which we haven't thought of yet

This is technically not good idea.

did you even read the paper?

This is technically an ambiguous post.

>we just need to find a way to scale up

Did you read it?

>we'll never build cars
>the Materials needed are just too hard to develop
>No common person will have electricity
>It's just too hard to make
>We'll never send intercontinental telegraphs
>those cables are just too impractical to build
that's not a feasible, argument, you need to find a justifiable reason why it's not possible to mass produce them

>It's impossible to mass produce them in the future, because we have trouble making them right now

Space Elevators are probably going to be a meme for the foreseeable future. Closest we could build would be a rotating skyhook. In the early 2000s Boeing did the math and found that we could build one with existing materials if someone put up the money. (iirc Dyneema was strong enough although there were some heat concerns for the lower most section. Launch was half a dozen Delta IV heavies) The most challenging part would have been the hypersonic aircraft to get a payload up to where the skyhook could snag it. That said while you could build one, I don't think you'd be able to turn it into an economical system.

I'm so sick to shit of reading brainlet popsci bullshit.

*thread hidden*

yeah I did. I think you might have missed the part about the specific strength being 6070 km, which is above the specific strength necessary to build a space elevator.

Has the Colossal Carbon Tubes received bazillions in R&D funding yet?

What if we make a big cylinder out of leather or whatever the fuck, anything airtight.
Then we tie chords to the exterior of the cylinder that uses tension to keep the cylinder erect
Then we use like a pump to pump air out of the interior making it a void. (To remove air friction which eats up a lot of energy)
Then we put a spaceship on a platform at the bottom of the cylinder. Then we detonate a very small nuclear weapon in a cement structure beneath the cylinder to create the force necessary for take off.
Then the pressure should propel the platform enough to take it to space.
How retarded would this be?

The discovery happened around the time of the graphene boom so most of the carbon people ignored it. It's pretty much forgotten.

>Chinese "research"

I'm not riding those fucking things into orbit. They're probably made of repainted cardboard.

>leather
lol

Good luck getting the walls high enough. And repairing leaks, and damage from the nuclear explosions. Why use the bomb at all? Why not just a mass driver or a regular old rocket?

Plus, it'd only be useful for achieving escape velocity. To get into orbit you need to perform a turn in order to get the necessary horizontal velocity.

This is the kind of thinking that kills progress

this model would only work if the earth was round though...

It's not feasible on Earth, simply because even though you could feasibly built the tether, as soon as you try to move something up it will break from the new forces exerted on it.

:D

It's the perfect meme to divert attention and funding from actually doing anything. It's the wait until antigravity for space travel.

So you're saying we need to meme it into existence; gotcha.

>km
>strength
Check your units bruv

>help how do i divide by 9.81m/s^2

Mate strength is measured in kpa and psi

>Space elevator
No.

No matter which angle you lok at this thing, it won't ever work.
At least not on Earth.

use balloons to lift the elevator up to L.E.O.

>be Elon musk
>build one of these
>say it’s luxury sky cruise
>sell tickets starting at $1000
>sky boat pays for itself in one trip

I don’t see how it’s silly if it’s marketed right.

EVERYBODY!!!!!
PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF MOOT PLEASE TUNE DOWN THE BRAINLET INTENSITY AND DO 5MINS OF GOOGLE SEARCHING

First of:
>Do we currently have the tech to build a space elevator?
NO, nowhere near

>Will we have the required tech in the foreseeable future?
Well, It's gonna be a looong time before we can produce such high quality and quantity of any material
(carbon nanotubes seem promising but it's gonna take either a BIG breakthrough or just a lot of time considering the current amount of funding in this field)

>But still. Would large through space launch infrastructure be very useful?
YES EXTREMELY
(resource scarcity, energy scarcity, space exploration, and more benefits of systems I'll describe later)
BUT
for all of these to work we'd need CHEAP and LARGE THROUGHPUT space access

>Do we need a meme-elevator for that?
NO

>what u gonna use Muskie's rocket to lift gigatonns into orbit? hurr durr
rockets are completely impractical for such large scale economical use

BUT THERE ARE FAR BETTER ALTERNATIVES THAN EITHER ROCKETS OR A SPACE ELEVATOR!!!
(even though fucking pop-sci or basically nobody else talks about them)
act the weight of the tethers

we could either have some sort of launch loop with a rotating skyhook added later
(even if asteroid mining isn't profitable with current tech, we could still grab some for science and as a skyhook counterweight)
OR
ORBITAL RING
it's a bit long to explain, so here are the papers:
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-I.pdf
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-II.pdf
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-III.pdf

But i'll still try to explain simply
it's basically a "space elevator" hanging down from two mass-streams(lines of individual steel balls, particle beams, or just simple steel wire)
the mass streams are in orbit, just sped up a bit, this causes them to "want to push up"
and this would counter the weight of the "mini elevator"

>so why the fuck is this better than a space -elevator ?

Cause we can "orbit" the mass streams at basically any altitude outside the atmosphere even at very "low" altitudes, only abut a few hundred km
they'd only have to endure basically 0 stress meaning they could be made of almost any cheap, bulk, magnetizable material we have (steel wire)
and hanging down a tether from that height is well withing our current reach with materials like kevlar or zylon

TL;DR
don't be brainlet, google shit before posting, do some science if the board is called science at least, and consider more obscure but more realistic and achievable options

It's SPECIFIC strength which is indeed measured as length. It's also known as breaking length, the max length at which a tether with constant cross section will break under its own weight
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength
Orbital rings haven't been demonstrated to be stable for the cases we can actually build in the near term.

god fucking dammit
is checking fucking wikipedia in 5secs too much effort?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength

>Another way to describe specific strength is breaking length, also known as self support length: the maximum length of a vertical column of the material (assuming a fixed cross-section) that could suspend its own weight when supported only at the top. For this measurement, the definition of weight is the force of gravity at the Earth's surface (standard gravity, 9.80665 m/s2) applying to the entire length of the material, not diminishing with height.

mate, assumed even a brainlet could understand the concept of strength directly relating to length and gravitational force but I guess this board is called Veeky Forums for nothing

(and yes as your distance increases from earth's center of mass, the gravitational force will decrease, but i hope and assume that was included in the original calculations)

lul, skyhooks.
No question asked about how you get that piece of shit into orbit, and how you get it to rotate.
Let me tell you: a few billion launches of Falcon Heavy won't cut it.
Then, there's the problem of friction in the upper atmosphere, and the slowdown of the system induced by each payload.
Guess what, you'd need to send more fuel to the hook, and it fucking cancels vs conventional rockets. Not because it's rotating slower, but because it's fucking degrading its orbit, and threatens to crash all over third world countries on the equator.
Whoever came up with this idea is retarded beyond belief. It takes a certain amount of energy to take something into orbit.
Doesn't matter what mean you use.

Space fountain is superior to be desu familia

So we'd have to integrate the acceleration as a decreasing function along the length of rod right?

No, breaking length with constant cross section assumes a constant gravitational field
>> he doesn't know about electrodynamic tethers
With electrodynamic tethers, you can reboost the tether without expending any propellant.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether
Goddamn brainlets

Yeah, that looks legit, and proven.
Only thin is, how do you know the magnetic field will be enough to keep you billion tons thingy into orbit?
I mean, it's kinda strong, but it's not that strong either.
I mean it diverts protons from the Sun, but it never had to take on actual billion tons of matter on top of it.
I'm sure there are figures out there about how much mass the magnetic field diverts on average, but I would bet it's not in the usable range for your experiment.

please read my post first. thx

But as I stated:
initially you'd have to only rely on some sort of launch loop
Then either grab an asteroid or start lunar industry (you'd do both anyways later)
and use that big chunk of rock as weight

And yes, of course it takes a certain amount of energy to get something into orbit, no way around that
but what most people can't seem to grasp is that that amount of energy is incredibly tiny compared to what a rocket expends
it's about efficiency

and he have far more efficient engines (with specific impulse in the thousands and maybe even >10000s)
but they just simply are too slow
they use the energy they have very efficiently, but do so very slowly
they just simply can't lift a fraction of their weight in surface gravity,

but in space, you have all the time in the world (or outside it)
you could use ion thrusters, VASIMR engines or electrodynamic tethers as stated

uhmmmm

you mean magsails????
cause those divert particles

Electro tethers just use earths mag field?

and you know the mass doesn't matter?
only the friction matters, meaning only the frontal area and air density matter?????!?!?

and with regards to
>and how you get it to rotate
>do flywheels exist?

absolutely goofy idea. An orbiting skyhook is a much less pie in the sky idea, and even that is pretty pie in the sky. Taxis based in space using fuel produced in space catching suborbital craft and boosting them to orbit is likely the future of relatively cheap launch technology, although it'll only be used for things that can't be produced in space.

>invoking VASIMIR
>mass doesn't matter.

Are you from NASA? Because that's pretty much the VASIMIR team for you.

>commoner hears about """"round earth theory"""", circa 1491 AD

Interesting...

>It takes a certain amount of energy to take something into orbit.
None of these structures are going to exist before we have space industry, they'll be constructed in orbit from materials mined and processed in space.

Technically, you are trying to put centre off mass of rotating object out of where it is.

Soon

you just took a bunch of ambitious yet possible ideas and expressed in the most retarded way possible

NEVER EVER
NEVER EVER
NEVER EVER
you're gonna be stuck on Earth forever, your grandchildren will starve to death, rich peoples great grand children will starve to death, humanity is done, kiddo. *Sheathes katana and walks into the sunset*

>places a few pounds of thermite on ur space elevator cable and detonates it
psshhh, nothing personnel, kiddo....

>your grandchildren will starve to death
Hahahah, jokes on you, I'm never going to have the opportunity to have children!

>after six shoavillion dollars invested the orbital elevator has finally been completed after decades of hard work
>go watch the first launch
>some old rocket is shoved onto the platform (no money for new ones left)
>4 nights two of which sleepless due fever from the mosquitoes, the dramatic awe inspiring sight of the platform finally passes 100km mark
>time to pack the bags and go home, will check the news in few weeks when its over
>suddenly weird rumble
>turn around
>cable split in two coming down fast

launch loop?

Some stupid question.
If we can adjust the elevator height and we time it just right, can we tug and adjust earth orbit?

Fuck the (impossible) space elevator. Skyhook is where its at.

>cable split in two coming down fast

Proven impossible. The cable would need to be so light that it would drift gently down wherever the breeze blew it, almost like a piece of cobweb...

You would probably end up with massive traffic delays caused by the cable falling accross several major arterial highways.

Well sir it seems that I may know of a solution to your post on cheap and affordable space travel I know of that their is an upcoming technology that when is fully advanced to its upmost potential might be able to make "cheap and affordable space travel possible" take note of space travel for I'm not gonna say anything regarding getting the space craft out of earths gravitational pull and into space I am solely taking about this new technology that can achieve thrust with no propellant and drumroll please this new technology is called the EM Drive Electromagent Driveif you want to learn more about this just search up em drive on google but in a summary this em drive uses quantum effect to get to where it need to go and is a very new tech I just wanted to post this and mention em drive and where the techs potential might go in the near future in about 2 decades how far do you think this Em drive might take us