The Great Space Elevator - Is it possible?

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You've obviously never tried to eat my mother-in-law's macaroni and cheese...

 

Patent it!

 

I would, but I believe her recipe includes the casting of some spells on it - maybe Stoneskin or Absolute Immunity; I'm not too sure.

 

I swear my ex's spagetti was made using the Evard's Black Tentacles spell.

 

I thought the "Great Space Elevator" was a joke. I really loved the quote in the article:

The idea is at least a century old - and was most famously popularized by science-fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, who once said the space elevator would succeed "50 years after everyone has stopped laughing."​

So I guess we're looking at 2059 for the earliest date....

 

So stop laughing already!

 

Only if you've stopped laughing... personally I haven't.

NOG,building the elevator itself is neither cheap nor practical (never mind that it's not even feasible with current technology, for reasons I stated above). Granted having it on there will make it cheaper to transport things into space, but we're talking on the very very (VERY) long-term here, which again brings me to the question: why would we need to transport things into space? Colonise the Moon? It's simply not going to happen. The "few technical problems" that you mention are so huge and insurmountable that no one even thinks about the Moon anymore, and that's the reason everyone started dreaming about terraforming Mars: it may be a couple hundred years before we have the technology to colonise Mars, but at least it's possible (though incredibly highly improbable). As far travelling to other planets (especially past Mars), the problem was never having a launch platform that's in space (another thing that won't happen in my grandchildren's lifetime) but the time it takes. Cassini-Huygens took seven years to get to Saturn. That is why space travel is impractical, not the lack of a space elevator.

Let's face it, it's a great concept but it's just too expensive, too impractical and there is no real benefit to it. Getting stuff into space is not a benefit unless we have something do with it when it gets up there, and until now we have nothing to work with. Space is still something we're very, very far away from being able to colonise.

 

Kind of unrelated, but: the moon is like a new undiscovered land - what will happen when humans manage to jump on it? Will it be like the Age of Discovery all over again with powerful countries setting up colonies on it? Will we throw our criminals there? Or will we persecute the native moon bunnies until eventually we can coexist in peace?

So back on the space elevator - I wonder who will be the first person to stick bubblegum on the number plates?

Also, of course it's worth it. It halves your construction time for spaceships pieces, meaning you can get that Alpha Centauri victory that much faster!

 

True, but in order to have proper cost/benefit analysis we'd have to think about not only the initial cost of building the elevator (and the space platform) but also maintenance, which is probably going to be much more than building it anyway. If maintaining the elevator will cost yearly as much as what's spent for orbital launches, then it's just not worth the price.

 

so lets say we could get the elevator into orbit, but to the moon? the Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit would have to be perfectly aligned at all times. Thats without solar winds.

 

True, but extrapolation from the micro-scale tests shows very promising results. Of course, that has to be confirmed in the real-world (which means we need to grow carbon nano-tubes at more than 6 inches), but carbon nano-tubes are looking quite promising.

Actually, contruction probably wouldn't be too much more expensive than the ISS, which we're already doing.

Actually, you're wrong there. The Moon is looking quite feasible at the moment, and many of the problems have been solved. We know how to extract O2 from the regolith (though making it a simple device hasn't happened yet), we know where there's water near the surface, with a space elevator we could ship the food there, and the 'light' side is even protected from meteorites!

Actually, terraforming Mars is pretty much out. It doesn't have the atmosphere any more, and it lacks a geo-magnetic field, meaning any atmosphere we added would be stripped off and the surface is constantly exposed to lethal radiation. Colonization isn't impossible, but you're talking about colonizing it as-is.

Even getting to Mars would take about 9 months. The problem is that we can't practically build a ship large enough to really recycle air and food and lift it into space. If we could build it in space, we could build something the size of an air-craft carrier or larger, and man it with all of 5 people. That's a lot of space for equipment.

As for something to do with it all once it gets up there, how about mining of rare minerals? How about building a radio telescope on the dark side of the Moon (only place in the solar system that never sees radiation from Earth)? The benefits are real. It's just a matter of whether we want to put the resources in at the get-go to achieve them (and whether we can develop the technology for it).

As to maintenance, it depends on too many unknown factors. It may well be very cheap, but it also may be very expensive.

Lol, no no no. No one's talking about building a space elevator to the Moon. We're talking about building a space elevator to an orbital construction yard that could build ships for the Moon and launch them at a fraction the cost of doing it all now (and no weather delays).

 

Now this is interesting. I didn't know they'd actually found water (it was only a likelihood last time I checked) and you're right, this particular point changes everything. I'm a bit less convinced with the problem of oxygen: we don't know how to extract it from regolith, NASA just has some concepts that they're testing (as of July). Considering how much of the element is there it should be relatively easy to to get good yields though.

 

Well, I may have more recent results (or possibly biassed ones) as a professor I know at my university was one of the guys working on the O2 problem. He said they know how to do it, it's just a matter of going up there and doing it. Of course, it could have just been confidence in his own work (not unheard of).

 

That is what I have read and heard as well, they know they could build one of these things they just dont have the money or a reason.