OT: About Space Elevators

[dogscoff]

around the earth and cable cars running between all points like subways in a large city today.

So I could buy myself a £50 ticket and scoot up a cable off the coast of Australia at 9am. Then I could zing around the Earth on a super-fast space cable car and scoot back down another cable in the North Sea in time for lunch the same day. (except that it would be midnight... yeesh, jet lag would be horrendous.)

Then I could spend 19 hours and £200 trying to get from one end of Britain to the other by train...

[geoschmo]

The purpose of the ground link isn't to keep the ribbon taut. The ribbon doesn't have to be rigid, just basically stationary. You can't let it move around too much or you get problems with harmonic vibrations on the line. That would cause wild gyrations in certain spots that could damage the cable and/or cause the climbers problems. Anyone see the video of "Galloping Girdy", the bridge that tore itself apart in the wind. That wasn't because of a tremendous wind, it was just a slightly more windy than normal day, but the frequency of the vibrations in the bridge tore itself apart. That's the concern with the wind for the space elevator. That sort of thing can be actively dampened for the ribbon, but that requires manipulation at the ends. So they have to be attached to base stations. That is the danger of wind.

I don't know if they have any plans to reel up the cable in emergency situations like this, but there is no reason why you couldn't do it all the way from the high orbit. An intermediary station would be an unnceccesary complication. You don't have to take up the entire length of the ribbon, jsut reel up 15 miles or whatever to get the bottom end above the weather. The only quetions would be the reel having sufficent torque to take up the mass of the entire length of the cable. But the reel will have to be able to handle the mass of the entire length of the cable anyway or you would never be able to get it down to the ground in the first place. The only way to set the elevator up is to launch the spool in the conventional way and then reel it down from orbit.

Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

So I could buy myself a £50 ticket and scoot up a cable off the coast of Australia at 9am. Then I could zing around the Earth on a super-fast space cable car and scoot back down another cable in the North Sea in time for lunch the same day. (except that it would be midnight... yeesh, jet lag would be horrendous.)

You could also send packages from Tokyo at 8:00am, and they would arrive at the pacific coast of america by 5:00pm the previous day!

[Urendi Maleldil]

As long as they don't make you climb the cable in gym class.

[geoschmo]

If something like this gets built I can really see it become some sort of "Holy Grail" for those base jumping lunatics that climb tall buildings and parachute off of them.

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
If something like this gets built I can really see it become some sort of "Holy Grail" for those base jumping lunatics that climb tall buildings and parachute off of them.

Oh, you want to know about jumping from space do you. Well, try this OT link

[sachmo]

Ok, here is what space.com has to say about the space elevator...

http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020327-1.html