Re: [twuug] OT: NASA space program

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 07:57:12PM -0500, Ethan O'Toole wrote:

> > Not necessarily true.  A 1-inch steel cable can support huge amounts of
> > weight, and carbon fiber made with buckytubes is supposed to be hundreds
> > to thousands of times stronger.
> > It's a ribbon, not a cable, which probably helps.
> 
> Yea, the biggest issue I could see is the friction required by the drive
> system of the lift. Unless the cable was wrapped around a pulley set, it
> would seem to me like the elevator wouldn't be able to grip the smoove
> carbon nanofiber toobe.

I did a lot more reading since the topic came up.

Some people believe the minimal energy curve of the ribbon will make
things difficult, although you only have to worry about atmospheric drag
for a small part of the way.

Some people have said that the buckytubes will give a carbon fiber able to
handle only a few tons at a time, because the structure itself will be so
heavy, and will be supporting whatever force the satellite anchor imposes.

Oh, and with regard to geostationary orbit force plus that needed
to hold up the cable, one guy said that the Earth's rotation will
give enough energy.

Hey... we'll eventually end up slowing the Earth down too much... :)

> > Can you imagine a 62K mile cable snapping and coming back?
> 
> They said on their web page it would gently flutter down. Wouldn't harm
> anything. 

62K mile cable won't cause harm?

They said the same thing in the 50s about using nuclear weapons for
civil engineering... :)

> True, and then some pissed off aliens would come to Earth and destroy us
> for sending them trash. But I guess if we shot it at a planet we don't
> like, we might be okay.

Why not just send it into the Sun?

> I still say put a resturant at the top of one.
> 
> Not quite the Resturant at the end of the Universe but...

I don't know, wasn't Earth pretty well the ass-end of space?

That seems to be the opinion of a lot of the aliens in Farscape... :)

I still marvel at how hard an orbital elevator is, and how small a
project it is against some of the books I have read.

I think about Mirrorsun in "Souls in the Great Machine", the solar
ring-city in "Ringworld", and the Dyson's sphere in a couple of other
books.

The latter is one of the most fascinating ideas.  A civilization that
did that could not only hide, but have tremendous power at their disposal.


-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza____________________s h a n n o n@wido !SPAM maker.com


-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
* To unsubscribe from the TWUUG discussion list, either send e-mail to
-  twuug-request@twuug.org with the word "unsubscribe" by itself
-  in the body of the message or visit: 
-  http://www.twuug.org/lists/twuuglists.html