Space Elevators Are Possible

http://www.techblog.co/space-elevators-are-totally-possible-and-will-make-rockets-seem-dumb/

by cyphersanctus • 12 years ago

79 79 12 years ago

kornork• 12 years ago

Great! What does the paper say about overcoming some of the problems that seem to make it tough, like the radiation that humans will receive riding up, or avoiding space debris? I'm assuming problems like building a rope strong enough to hold its own weight will be overcome, as well as developing the technology to climb the elevator.

aunty_helen• 12 years ago

The fragile humans could still hitch a ride on a (reusable) rocket and extraplanetary garbage collection is something that is currently being proposed and could be a good source of materials too.

eru2• 12 years ago

Why should radiation be much more of a concern than for rockets? (Couldn't you just add shielding?)

mullingitover• 12 years ago

The rocket ride is shorter.

mahranch• 12 years ago

Radiation is only a minor concern, astronauts in the space station experience similar radiation doses. I assume if it's cheaper to get things into orbit [with the elevator], it's also cheaper to shield the entire contraption. Climbing isn't much of a concern either, they've already run a bunch of tests and NASA has already awarded their prizes out for the challenge. The real issue is mass producing the carbon nanotubes.

It's like saying "Warp drive is possible" then saying all you need to do is build a ship that can manipulate the fabric of spacetime. Well of course that's all you need to do.

Sure, producing carbon nanotubes is easy. I've seen them make the it in a lab. It's making the tubes to spec and making thousands of miles of the stuff that is the hurdle. It's the equivalent of asking computer engineers in the 60s to mass produce 22nm CPUs with billions of transistors. Can it be done? Sure. In about 50 years.

mcv2• 12 years ago

Radiation is only a minor concern, astronauts in the space station experience similar radiation doses.

Why would they be similar? The space station is only in LEO. That's not remotely comparable to geostationary orbit, or the Van Allen belts.

Fortunately, shielding is a lot cheaper than on anything a rocket carries.

cgrubb• 12 years ago

Early in the book:

    The first few years will enable 20ton payloads without humans [radiation
    tolerance an issue for the two week trip]...

From Finding 7-5:

    Radiation is not a problem for tether climbers, as the designers will
    incorporate this threat into the design requirements and ensure operational
    success through any radiation environment.  Historic precedence supports this
    conclusion as the space community runs spacecraft in all regions where the
    space elevator will be operating.  However, when people are included in the
    tether climb [after some years of robotic success], the radiation problem
    becomes an order of magnitude more difficult.  There are many ways to reduce
    the radiation and shorten the trip, which will have to be incorporated when
    the human element is added.

Although the authors envision eventually using the elevator for transporting humans, I don't see any discussion about how to speed up the trip or increase the shielding.

There is a fairly long section on debris. The authors note that significant debris only exists in low earth orbit. They think the chance of collision is small, but large enough that the situation needs to be monitored. They think debris can be tracked and that if a collision were forecast, the cable could be moved. Also, they think space faring nations should be tasked with removing some of their junk from orbit.

elktea• 12 years ago

The animated icon on this site is terrible

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

The writing isn't too hot, either.

frozenport2• 12 years ago

This HN needs a downvote button or an embargo on upvotes. For example, you can only upvote 5 minutes after you have read the link. Having been away for a year I am shocked by the number of upvotes everything is getting.

mehwoot2• 12 years ago

What happens if something hits the cable and it breaks? Does the whole thing drift off into space?

ars2• 12 years ago

Depends where it hits.

On the tether there is a "zero" point. Below that point things fall toward the Earth, above that point things "fall" away from the Earth.

So it depends on where it broke and how much weight there is above vs below that point. (To keep the tether in the air they put lots of weight above the point, which falls away from the Earth and pulls the tether taught.)

If I were making one of these I'd make several tethers, spaced such that a single object can not break more than one at once. Then tie the tethers together periodically.

This object is about max: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event so I'd make the multiple tethers at least 200m apart. That's pretty far apart, so I'd invest in better detection technology to reduce the size maximum undetected object. (Although that raises the question of what to do if you do find a big one and it's headed right toward you.)

atgm• 12 years ago

If I were making one of these I'd make several tethers, spaced such that a single object can not break more than one at once.

What I'd worry about is security, honestly.

What if some nation decides that the space elevator existing isn't in the best interest of their national security, or some paramilitary group wants to make a point?

Bombing the base station would hurt the elevator. But of course, we should expect that to be secured. That still leaves the entire length of cable running up and down the elevator -- that's a huge volume of space to secure against anything explosive or fragmentary.

lutorm2• 12 years ago

I didn't see it mentioned in this article, but the cable is actually very small. I read this older NASA study that said that for a carbon nanotube tether, an optimal cable would be a thin tape something like an inch across. That has pretty small cross section for being hit by a meteoroid.

andrewflnr• 12 years ago

On the other hand, a satellite a couple meters across has plenty of cross section with which to find the cable. Even if we take all those down (not in our lifetime), there is a lot of little stuff in orbit, and it would only take one.

badsock• 12 years ago

Your question's been well answered by ars, but often the next question is: how dangerous would it be to people on earth if it broke? The answer is not at all. As lutorm points out the cable would be vanishingly thin - there would be a lot of gentle drifting and no firey death from above.

mehwoot2• 12 years ago

I'm not thinking of the danger, more the immense cost if it drifts off.

ars2• 12 years ago

This kinda glosses over the hard part: Making that tether!

ericd• 12 years ago

If we can make one, it seems pretty obvious from the studies I've seen that it will be the major enabling technology for getting into space in a large way. Unfortunately, I don't think we've hit the carbon nanotube lengths that we'd need (on the order of meters).

Here's a great book that came out of a NASA funded study that breaks the issues down well, including costs, necessary tech, and methods for dealing with potential issues like cable breakage: http://www.amazon.com/Space-Elevator-Earth-Space-Transportat...

Their conclusion was that it would be much more cost effective than most people think, and that it would enable an incredible reduction in cost to orbit due to not needing to use a pyramid of fuel to carry other fuel for later, or enormous one-time-use precision machinery, and instead using simple containers with electric motors and transmitted electricity.

avmich2• 12 years ago

The main problem with the elevator, in my opinion, for many years already is not in the strength of the material. After all, nanotubes are known for many years, and their properties are sufficient for the tether, so in principle it can be done. No, the main problem is with satellites. In fact, asking many times - what to do with existing or future satellites - I never heard a workable answer, even in principle.

Just a reminder - every satellite crosses the equatorial plane twice for every rotation around the Earth. Majority of satellites are below the geostationary orbit. So, given enough time every satellite will hit the tether - and even if tether is near-zero width, the satellite isn't.

One of ideas was to dynamically move the tether - from the Earth, making propagating wave along the tether, which would avoid the satellites. This means we need the good means of watching the space and predicting satellites movements - even small satellites can bring trouble. But that's not enough, we might get a situation when we need to perform conflicting movements, considering the current state of the wave.

This problem is well known for decades. Attempts to launch satellites from the elevator - and the elevator makes it tantalizingly cheap, so we'll want to launch many - will exacerbate the problem. The whole world astronautics will have to adjust to accomodate the elevator - and nobody knows how it is going to look like.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

I was going to bring this concern as well. I expect that in theory we could build a space elevator but I doubt we could keep it in space. Between space junk, meteorites, and regular gear flying around like GPS nodes, items in a non-orbit (which they would be in this configuration) will be hit with more than enough energy to destroy even the strongest materials we have out there.

shaneofalltrad• 12 years ago

I would also want to know the impact of a counter weight attached to the earth and it's effect on our ability to orbit naturally while it's drag is attached to even water. Could an impact on this force it into a spin around Earth creating Centrifugal force or something not studied before?

bduerst2• 12 years ago

The benefit with space elevators is that you can use mechanical energy to move payloads up the gravity well, as opposed to the chemical energy we use now. What do you think of rail guns, which use electrical energy?

bsamuels• 12 years ago

You would never make it through the atmosphere. At the speeds required to achieve orbit from a surface launch, the projectile leaving the apparatus and hitting the atmosphere would be like smashing it into an ocean of water. Even on a very tall mountain the air density is still enough to stop any projectile-based solution in its tracks.

twic2• 12 years ago

They're still less efficient. With a gun, you have to put all your energy in as kinetic energy at the start of the trip, which means the payload leaves the earth at a considerable speed. Objects passing through the atmosphere with that sort of speed lose a lot of energy as drag.

There's a continuum between guns and rockets: you can fire a projectile with a motor on board. That lets you launch with a lower speed, but you have to lift fuel along with your payload. It's a tradeoff.

Space elevators step outside the tradeoff because they add energy to the payload during the trip, to avoiding the drag cost, but don't have to lift the energy as fuel, so avoiding the weight cost.

ghayes• 12 years ago

Couldn't the elevation of the satellite be at a specific elevation that no other satellite is allowed to orbit at? I.e. using the z-axis to your advantage?

avmich2• 12 years ago

No. The elevator's tether is a continuous object of length at least 36 000 km, from atmosphere to geostationary orbit. Practically all satellites are flying within that range of heights.

twic2• 12 years ago

If by 'elevation' you mean 'latitude', then no. The elevator has to be on the equator. Or rather, the geosynchronous anchor has to be over the equator. I think the elevator cable could run to any point on earth, but it's going to hang as a curve where most of it is vertical over the equator, and so is in the way of satellites in equatorial orbits.

grecy• 12 years ago

Would a satellite/tether collision damage the tether, or just destroy the satellite?

If it just destroys the satellite, I'm kind of tempted to say "who cares", because by then we will have other solutions, or satellites out past the counterweight, or we can easily launch more now that we have the fancy elevator, or whatever... but then we'd have the problem of an unimaginable amount of space junk orbiting the earth.

Tuna-Fish• 12 years ago

Everything in low earth orbit has 30MJ/kg worth of kinetic energy. TNT has 4.6MJ/kg worth of chemical energy. A rule of thumb: when the kinetic energy of things goes above the chemical energy of high explosives, you can assume that nothing survives.

User8712• 12 years ago

1. How fast can a satellite travel up the tether? Let's say 50km/h, and it's going to an altitude of 35,000km. That's a month just in travel time. Using the tether for that period of time would be extremely costly. Currently, around 125 satellites launch a year, so they would need to be going up the tether at 500km/h, one after the other, day and night. And if we need to wait for a platform to descend, they need to be moving at 1,000km/h. Otherwise, we need multiple space elevators, or multiple shipments climbing at once and passing one another to meet current demand.

2. What's the cost of building and maintaining a space elevator?

3. What's the cost of having a satellite climb the tether to an altitude of 35,000km? That's a lot of energy.

Taking this into consideration, is it tantalizingly cheap compared to strapping on a rocket? SpaceX has run tests with a reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Cost of fuel for a launch is $200,000. I'm skeptical the space elevator would be much cheaper.

The magic of SpaceX...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4

Downside of a rocket, it's heavy, and most of the energy is wasted lifting the rocket, and not the payload. Advantage, you don't have to pay to maintain cables that are long enough to wrap around the entire Earth.

percentcer• 12 years ago

Couldn't you launch multiple satellites at a time?

userulluipeste2• 12 years ago

Many activities are affordable only as long as the true costs are not paid in full. The world had to allow massive burning of fuels, even if it's costly for the environment, only because the alternatives were not feasible yet. When better technologies allowed even a mild reduction of the pollution's effects (like combustion engine improvements, and later development of hybrid/electric solutions), things started to change and the reckless burn of fuel is now discouraged. Don't stop at the level of 125 launches per year, expect it to grow orders of magnitude, and the effects to grow proportionally. The market cost for fuel may be only $200,000 and it might get even lower, but the true costs... well, I think you got the idea.

S4M• 12 years ago

How about making the elevator start in the North pole (or South pole) and go vertically from there. That way, we can be sure that it will never meet the trajectory of a satellite?

Of course, it would prove harder to build it in those cold regions.

jccooper7• 12 years ago

Impossible. It must be on the equator. Attaching a line from the ground to a large object in geosynchronous orbit is the essential plan, and GEO only happens above the equator.

phest• 12 years ago

In theory, could elevators replace satellites? If so perhaps an initial batch of elevators could also be used to clean up the space junk (including the now obsolete satellites).

jccooper7• 12 years ago

The counterweight platforms would be a great place for services now performed by geosync satellites. Probably you would also have major GEO platforms in areas not (yet) served by a tether. Take a tug there from the nearest tether. Would really cut down on discrete sats.

Services that need to be done away from the equator (monitoring of the surface, communications at high latitudes) would still need orbits like todays LEO sats. The same model of discrete satellites may prevail, but you might also see larger platforms housing multiple services.

We might see a tether vastly increase the amount of orbital activity, but decrease the number of discrete objects.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

It's not as big a problem as it seems. Space is big, even tethers are small, the amount of time between a collision occurring would normally be quite long. Satellites can have their orbits adjusted just enough every once in a while to avoid the tether.

The value of the tether would be so high that it would be worth the cost of keeping every satellite diverted around it.

flurdy• 12 years ago

That would assume you could adjust all the satellites' orbits. Whilst some satellites have proper propulsion, I think many just have minor systems to only adjust their rotation, and a lot have none. And don't forget all the dead ones that are orbiting space junk.

shoyer• 12 years ago

"given enough time every satellite will hit the tether"

Let's do a back of the envelope calculation: https://www.google.com/search?q=(pi%20*%20(radius%20of%20the...

If a satellite in low-earth orbit has a cross-section of 10 meters, then the timescale for hitting the space elevator is about 300 years.

Given that there are about 3600 satellites in orbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite), a satellite would crash into the space elevator about once a month.

jccooper7• 12 years ago

We already monitor very small debris (anything 1cm or larger), and move things out of the way if needed. The ISS moves about 6 times a year, mostly to maintain a very large margin.

Orbits are quite predictable, and moving the tether around isn't all that bad--after all, it makes getting fuel to LEO altitudes cheap. Also, I would expect active sats to avoid the tether, and the presence of a tether will make removal of dead sats both desirable and much easier.

One would also expect the tether to be multi stranded (which is not so hard once you already have one). You would want at least two, up and down. If erosion or collision in LEO looks problematic, you could run even more stands in that area. It's only a few hundred miles.

My main concern is the lack of a good market to justify investing in a tether. It's only a good deal if there are enough trips to amortize the cost. Hopefully we'll see rockets become cheap enough to help develop larger uses in space that will justify something like a tether.

kamaal4• 12 years ago

Also I guess any space elevator system will deploy a 'tether maintenance' activity every some interval with intermediate stations. There will be likely bots moving up and down the tether to keep it free from debris and other approaching objects.

ohwp• 12 years ago

Another problem never answered: Do we have the resources (funds and material) to create the amount of material needed?

Lets say the cable is 1m2 thick: 1m2 * 100000m (Kármán line) = 100000m3. Maybe this doesn't sound like a lot until you check the prices of nanotube-like materials.

jccooper7• 12 years ago

It will likely be much thinner than that. But that is a problem. Most plans assume "once manufacture becomes possible and cheap enough". Of course, ordering that much (once a process is proven) will quickly drive down the price. Talk about scale!

Sharlin3• 12 years ago

Your length is off by three orders of magnitude. Fortunately, the surface area is off by four. In the most serious proposals, the space elevator "cable" is a flat tape with a cross-sectional area of a few square centimeters. Thus, we get:

2 cm^2 * 10^8 m = 20000 m^3. Yes, it's a lot of nanotubes, but the price of nanotubes per unit mass has dropped exponentially for a long while now, and the economies of scale involved in building a space elevator will lower the prices even more.

kamaal4• 12 years ago

I think you are essentially talking about a 'traffic signal' equivalent of space.

If launching satellite becomes cheap with space elevators. You are going to have absolute mad rush to launch satellites, any way. In any such situation, you will have a lot of satellite traffic up there and merely managing that traffic among satellites itself is going to be difficult.

But even if you discount space elevators, if cost of launching satellites gets cheaper by the day. At some point you have to worry about this satellite traffic problem.

Schwolop2• 12 years ago

Couldn't the tether just have a friendly robot in charge of what I'll politely refer to as "catch and release"?

Fuxy• 12 years ago

Fast moving objects are quite hard to catch even micro meteorites could do considerable damage a fast moving satellite would be a disaster.

The best option energy wise would be to have the satellite adjust its obit however that would deplete its energy reserves a lot quicker then not having an elevator to avoid colliding with.

Then again satellites should never have energy problems ever again since the can just be refueled cheaply via the elevator.

mcv2• 12 years ago

The main problem with the elevator, in my opinion, for many years already is not in the strength of the material. After all, nanotubes are known for many years, and their properties are sufficient for the tether, so in principle it can be done.

You say that now, but I remember that years ago, when nanotubes were hailed as the material that would make the space elevator possible, people quickly pointed out that nanotubes were still not strong enough to carry their own weight over such a tremendous distance.

What changed? Why are nanotubes now strong enough?

placeybordeaux• 12 years ago

This article did almost nothing to aleviate the real concerns.

maxharris• 12 years ago

How do you keep space junk (which can include larger objects as well as small as bolts and the like, all of which may have considerable momentum) from tearing through the cable?

sgt• 12 years ago

"The rotation keeps the cable taut, to counter the gravitational pull as robotic, electric “climbers” ride the line up into space carrying the payload. Boom."

Let's just hope he didn't mean that literally. But early attempts may include some disasters, as often is the case.

SlowButEffectiv• 12 years ago

That's an awful long way to have to stare uncomfortably at the doors.

kamaal4• 12 years ago

At the risk of appearing stupid, I just have few simple questions

1. What exactly holds the counter weight in position?

2. Such a long rope, which the article says is around 62000 miles, won't it function more like rubber band than function like a rope? Due to mere stretching/elastic effect?

3. I'm sure traveling 62000 miles is nothing like fuel efficient especially when you travel in the direction of highest friction(Up). So how do you store the fuel and of what weight that would be? Will such a vehicle be even practical?

jccooper7• 12 years ago

1. The counterweight is in geosynchronous orbit. It is "held up" by its absurd speed like any other satellite.

2. One of the reasons you need a very strong material. The tether will be in tension, but probably will have quite a bit of movement to it. The tether dynamics are not a solved problem.

3. Most plans suggest that power will be beamed from the ground to the climber, either as microwaves or visible light. Some plans might use a paired tether to carry electricity. In either case, no onboard fuel is needed, which us pretty nice, as that's a lot of weight you don't have to pull against gravity. There have been several competitions in this area already.

kamaal4• 12 years ago

Yes, sorry the centripetal-centrifugal force balance thing was completely off my mind when I asked that question.

But with all the remaining two points look in the domain of SciFi to me. I'm sure tether dynamics are going to a materials engineering problem like never seen in history of mankind.

Plus the energy problem is still by and large a very problem. Sending electricity down the tether looks very inefficient give the article says it will 62K miles long.

In short we are still may be what, say 50 years away from this?

Sharlin3• 12 years ago

The center of gravity of the whole system must be in the geosynchronous orbit (36000 km up) so that the thing stays up. This means that half its weight (not mass!) must be above 36000 km; in the modern proposals there's no separate counterweight, but the ribbon itself extends to ~100000 km up. In practice, the CoG must be a bit above 36000 km so that payloads going up don't pull the ribbon down.

frozenport2• 12 years ago

First build the hyperloop, then we will talk.

panacea• 12 years ago

No they're not.

nmc• 12 years ago

Why does this seem like a shamelessly unacknowledged copy-paste from [1]?

Is it the other way around? Where is the original post?

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/space-elevators-are-totally...

vesinisa• 12 years ago

To me, it seems like this site Techblog copied Vice without giving any credit. Vice credits the original story to their in-house journalist, while Techblog.co seems like a news aggregation service. I am cool with news aggregation (think Google News), but they should definitely always credit the original source.

oldmantaiter• 12 years ago

All these comments about space junk, Spaceballs had it right with the giant cleaning lady in orbit. I think we should switch our focus to that instead.

Space Elevators Are Possible

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