ELEVATOR TO THE MOON!!!

adam

Well, not quite. Interesting enough though

http://www.elevator2010.org/site/index.html

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Taking a cue from the X-prize, NASA has set aside $400,000 over the next two years for competitions to encourage the development of a Space Elevator -- the combination of a light-powered robotic climber and a thin 62,000 mile long tether. The Space Elevator would be able to lift payloads directly from Earth to orbit in space.

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-55lbs seems like a light capacity.
-What about when it came back in to the atomsphere? Wouldn't everything burst in to flames? I guess thats part of the contest.....

Asherr

things burst into flames from the friction of hitting the atmosphere. space shuttles, meteroites and other things like that are moving hundreds of miles an hour. a space elevation would be moving that fast.

adam

I thought I stopped running confused.exe ages ago. Argh!

Ha, sorry what?

snemmy

he means that under current conditions our shuttles and other celestial objects are coming very fast at the Earth. when they hit the atmosphere there is a build up of friction making things burst into flames.

now as asherr is trying to say, we will be able to control the speed of the objects returning to the Earth. so we can just slow stuff down enough so that when bringing it back and there would not be a lot of friction and keep it from getting hot..

TomDunne

The tricky bit about doing a space elevator is developing some sort of cheap and easily mass-produced carbon nanofibers capable of withstanding the enormous stress of being a centrifugal tether. Also, whomever tries building one is going to have to do so with the agreement of an equatorial nation - it won't work quite right if you try building it in Iowa, because it's not on a plane in line (or nearly in line) with the Earth's rotation. The X-Prize was a nifty idea because it was feasible, and no significant new technological or geopolitical obstacles got in the way. A space elevator... well, $400,000 isn't going to put a dent in the bill for that project.

adam

The prize for the space flight wasn't enough to pay their bills either. There's more to winning than just the de niro =]

aesir

I read a sci fi book YEARS ago where they made an elevator to the moon or something in space with a diamond filament cable. It could even carry people and such as I recall. Sounded like a really cool idea, but Im completely amazed that they're actually gonna try and pull this off in real life. I cant wait to see what happens

and Adam, Im sorry but that little nagging voice inside me is making me type this, but its dinero not the angry actor.

Slayerjerman

The elevator idea is total nonsense. Just the shear volume of material to make the tether is crazy.

just need non-combusion based sources of fuel, that'd solve alot of the space-travel issues right there i think.

Asherr

they had orbital cities in StarWars Shadows of the Empire that were connected to Coruscant by elevators.

Rick Stirling

It's been mooted about for many years now - the theory is that one you get it there, you get almost free travel. When one thing goes up, something else comes down. This means that the weight of the object coming down pulls the other upwards.

Now, I know that you would need to have a heavier thing coming down rather than up, but even when it is lighter yu still have gravity doing a chunk of the work.

still, if they are successful, we won't be able to send morons out looking for skyhooks any more.

JKMakowka

http://www.spaceelevator.com/
http://www.liftport.com/
http://www.liftport.com/faq.php

Exspecially the last link is interesting, because it clears up a lot of common missunderstandings.

If they really do this, it will change the world. And yes I think it is very possible with a timeframe of lets say 50 years from now.

Oh and not trying to sound like a smartass (which I probably still will), but it isn't actually the friction of the atmosphere that heats up a reentering spacecraft (well it does but just a little bit), but the build-up of a huge pressure in front of the ship (and if you took basic physics you should know that compressing a gas rises the temperature of it).

P.S.: Fun side note, I recently researched (well that is probably the wrong word, but I took interest in... as a biotech student) the use of artificial spider silk as the material for a space elevator instead of carbon nanotubes. The fun fact is, that the strongest spidersilk know to man is just a little bit too weak to do it

Slayerjerman

cant we just build a ladder to heaven instead? ROFLMAO.

I got one half-way finished in my backyard made of popsickle sticks and legos.

arshlevon

my girlfriend is acutally getting her PhD at UCLA in inorganic chemistry and i asked her about it since nanotech is her meat and potatoes and has been published in several science journals for her reaserch there and at georgia tech.. they actually had a talk about it and came to the conclution that its pretty impossible and just crazy.. she didnt think they would ever be able to make the carbon nano fibers long enough .. the fibers would slide past each other.. it's a neat idea.. but crazy.. and this comes from someone who receives millions of dollars from funding from nasa to develop nano devices.

TomDunne

And 50 years ago, the idea of a man walking on the moon was the stuff of science fiction.

MoP

Cue "faked moon landing" conspiracy theories...

I like the idea of a space elevator!

Justin Meisse

how about a space escalator?

qubism

say never never...

Mark Dygert

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she didnt think they would ever be able to make the carbon nano fibers long enough .. the fibers would slide past each other.. it's a neat idea.. but crazy..

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Unless I missunderstand what you are saying, I am pretty sure the idea is not to make one long piece of cable, but break it up into millions of tiny sections. Do it in sections much like railroad tracks. Railroad tracks are not one long solid piece of metal streching from east coast to west.

rooster

sorry for the total nerdy nitpicking comment but its the only physics thing I know so I'm going to cart it out :P

<nerd>im pretty sure the force of gravity and other forces that are being restrained towards a center like a ball being swung on a piece of string are centripetal force rather than centrifugal. Centrifugal is where the force is being stopped from moving away by something surrounding it (like a centrifuge).</nerd>

at least I think thats what my physics teacher said all those years ago.

TomDunne

Haha - you're right, you nerd On a planetary scale, when the rotation point generates its own acceleration (gravity) counter to centrifugal force, you have a centripetal force system. Actually, I guess it's the other way around, as centrifugal 'force' is the opposite reaction of centripetal force, and that's all about Newton's third law, etc. A space elevator tether would have to be at it's largest/strongest in the center, where the opposing forces are at their greatest - gravity pulling towards the center and angular momental pulling away.

hawken

dunlike change

you can't do a lot of things in this world but if you want you can torture animals, clone babies, build nuclear bombs, drill holes into the core of the earth & attach towers to the moon. nice.

scientists are gonna blowup this planet long before pollution gets a chance.

rooster

but still no hellgate
when are these scientists gonna get their act together!