>fly with a helium balloon to 50km altitude
>have a 150km cable hanging down from a space station that can carry payloads of hook payload to the cable
>pull up
>use mechanism to build stronger cable and bigger space station
>can now transport payloads >1 ton safely and cheaply to space
Why isn't that being done?
This not being done is further proof spaceflight is a hoax and the earth is flat. Wake up sheeple.
>150km cable
Now calculate weight of this thing and how much force it will make on the ground.
What if the world was flat, and now it's only round because we believe it is?
Because that was what you were taught since you were 5 years old before you could think critically.
A cable with a 30mm section weight around a ton by kilometer.
If a ballon can lift 150 ton and the cable support the weight maybe.
For a cable that is supposed to only carry 100kg? Not that heavy. Don't know how thick exactly it would need to be, but let's assume 5cm diameter of carbon fibre. That would make it 225 tons heavy. So you would need a counter weight similar to that in the space station. The ISS is 440 tons, so it should be more than enough as a counter weight. Just install a motor there, let a cable hang down, and you already have a space elevator.
Because the ISS passes the balloon at about 5 miles/second.
The cable and whatever it's carrying have to be accelerated to match the station's speed.
Even if the "jerk" doesn't snap something, the momentum gained by the load is momentum lost by the space station.
If you don't want the station to fall out of orbit, it has be to re-accelerated. Which means supplying it with rocket fuel.
Which means there's no advantage (and the disadvantage of having to boost the mass of the cable.)
Short answer, it doesn't work.
The mass carried relative to the mass of the cable + space station is marginal (>500 tons vs 100kg). Rocket fuel and momentum lost is not significant. It certainly could do hundreds of lifts before it needs to reaccelarate.
Handing over the payload is tricky, but certainly not impossible to solve.
Going up to orbital altitude is easy.
Gaining the "sideways" velocity to stay in orbit is difficult.
You realize that a orbital elevator relies on the Coriolis force to accelerate the payload?
The energy comes from the rotation of the Earth.
But it only works when the counterweight is at (or above) synchronous orbit. A looooong cable is required.
There are other proposals (rotavators, launch loops) for tossing stuff into orbit cheaply, but this one is a non-starter.
Gerard Bull was the only man to ever understand the only true way to exit the atmosphere. Cannons. Big fucking cannons. Project HARP. Project BABYLON.
>have a 150km cable hanging down from a space station
So you basically attach an anchor to your station. It will deorbit immediately, since air resistance at 50km when moving at orbital speed is the same as flying supersonic at sea level.
Suppose the payload is 100 kg and the cable is ten tonnes. (Wildly optimistic) I'll even lump the payload in with the weight of the cable and say we're lifting an even 10 tonnes.
The 500 tonne station now masses 510 tonnes. So it's now traveling 500/510 * 4.76 miles/sec = 4.66 miles/second, a loss of a tenth of a mile/sec.
That drops the perigee to .925 of the original orbital radius.
If it's initial altitude is 254 miles and the radius of the Earth is 3959 miles, the new perigee is at 3898 miles.
Note that this is BELOW the surface of the Earth.
For the sake of lifting 100 kg, you've crashed the ISS.
Even if the cable weighed NOTHING, lifting 10 tonnes would bring everything down. (Less than 10 tonnes actually, but I'm not going to waste my time figuring how much would drag the station into appreciable atmosphere.)
Orbital mechanics is not solved by "what feels right"!
Why not attach the cable to the moon instead? Assuming a strong enough cable. What would the forces look like along the rope?
In this example, the bottom parts of the cable would burn up pretty quickly.
You would want to be in a geostationary orbit to avoid that. Those sadly start much, much higher (35.000km roughly). So instead of 150km cable, you would need 35.000km cable. At this point, those 50km from the surface of the earth to the end of the stratosphere are not that significant anyways, so you might prefer to build it to the ground directly. you could skip the helium baloon part then.
The problem with this is obviously the 35.000km cable.
Probably you could also make it work in an orbit of 10.000km or so, but that doesn't really matter, because everything longer than a few hundred km is completely impossible for us today.
The cable wouldn't have to hang down indefinetely into the mesosphere. You would only roll it out if needed, and roll it back up afterwards. This way you could avoid drag and and heating of the material.
This calculation doesn't make any sense. Obviously the ISS would be upgraded first so that it would still be in a stable orbit with 250 tons of cables as an extra weight. Adding 100kg of mass to it at a time will not change its orbit by a lot.
I don't care if it doesn't make sense to you. Neither does the universe.
Physics works whether you believe in it or not.
It doesn't matter whether mass is added one atom at a time or in 100 tonne chunks.
Momentum is conserved and the end result is the same.
The loss of velocity is proportional to the fraction of mass added. The only "upgrade" possible is to increase the mass of the station. THERE IS NO LOOPHOLE!!!
We can dump as much mass on the Moon as we like without noticeably changing its velocity because an extra billion tons is a relative drop in the bucket.
Have you EVER taken even high school physics?
You're just embarrassing yourself.
>For a cable that is supposed to only carry 100kg? Not that heavy.
>only carry 100kg
...
...
>That would make it 225 tons heavy.
Looks like you've discovered the problem for yourself.
What happens when the moon goes down?
Lol.
>lets keep throwing the ISS a fraction of it's orbit until it burns up in the atmosphere
>have a 150km cable hanging down from a space station that can carry payloads of
Hey, quit using the 250 tons number. Its wrong. See If you want to know how heavy the cable really has to be, determine how thick it needs to be to hold itself up too.
>what is orbit
Attach it at one of the poles.
Might as well eliminate the Earth's axial tilt while we're at it. No more of this Daylight Savings nonsense.
Back in the 50's Werner vonBraun gave a popular talk about his plans for a "wheel" type space station in a two-hour orbit. That would be 1683 km above the surface of the Earth.
Little old lady came up to him afterwards, thanked him for the enjoyable lecture, but did have one question. "How do you know there IS an orbit at that altitude?"
did you forget your 225 ton cable that has to go along?
>pull up
>pulling 100km of cable
lmao
The cable would need to be tens of thousands of miles long, it's impossible.
>where are you going to put the 150 km cable
>how are you going to deal with thousands of kilos more dragging your space station down
>what the fuck do you expect to happen when your cable is hanging down from the station? do you really think it's just going to be straight and turn as a clock handle along with the station?
this shit is retarded just like every other shit, next
>150km cable
Who cares what it is. No matter what you use, the cable will not be able to hold its own weight.
Imagine the size of the structure needed to even hold onto the cable up there on the ISS. lol That alone would weigh more than the entire ISS.
>Rocket fuel and momentum lost is not significant.
lol
your math its wrong. You need a cable that is long enough to reach geostationary orbit, so that the cable wont return to earth, which means it has to be around 35,786 KM long.
Why don't we send something in a lower geostationary orbit, like 1km up then we'd only need 1km of cable?
Orbital period depends on the radius of the orbit. Kepler's Third Law.
There is no "geostationary orbit" a km up.
A geostationary equatorial orbit (GEO) is a circular geosynchronous orbit in the plane of the Earth's equator with a radius of approximately 42,164 km (26,199 mi) (measured from the center of the Earth). A satellite in such an orbit is at an altitude of approximately 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above mean sea level.
Are you trolling, haven't taken physics yet, or a Russian working for the "Make America Stupid" campaign?
those are called buildings. and as you can see, they need more than one cable to be kept up