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At least for the space elevator, we do not have the necessary materials to create it. There's been some hypotheses that carbon nanotubes could have the require

by kentm 8y ago

At least for the space elevator, we do not have the necessary materials to create it. There's been some hypotheses that carbon nanotubes could have the required strength, but we cannot produce strands long enough.

athenot 8y ago
And there are other challenges, including: - Wind: variable speed & direction, can be high. - Ionosphere charges: the sapce elevator would essentially be a giant ground rod in the ionosphere… that might attract a few bolts of lightning.
- Retric 8y ago
  You don't need to attach a space elevator to the ground. Keeping one end of the tether at 100,000 feet still makes access to space cheap without many of the security issues of a ground based tether.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    Interesting. How do you get stuff to 100,000 feet? I'm imagining some sort of cargo helicopter but that is probably not at all the right idea.
    - Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
      We used a balloon to lift Felix Baumgartner 135,000 feet for his record jump [1]. Could this be scaled up for larger payloads? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner
    - Retric 8y ago
      Rockets or balloons can get to that altitude fairly easily. You could even build a second elevator that gets to 100,000 feet hanging off a balloons. But, really it's just a security precaution to prevent terrorists or whatnot just flying into the thing.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Forget terrorist, an accident is more likely including earth quakes, tsunamis and storms and one of the biggest problems is that while building it might just be the easy part maintaining it and decommissioning it when the material fatigue sets in is a much more complicated mess. Depending on the failure you might have a cable with a length greater than the earth’s circumference if we are putting it to a geostationary orbit falling down to earth. For a space elevator to work it’s center of mass needs to be at or above geostationary orbit, depending on the counterweight at the end of the tether it will likely be at least 50,000KM long.
  - beamatronic 8y ago
    So what we need to do is start building down towards Earth from an anchor point

by kentm 8y ago

athenot 8y ago

And there are other challenges, including: - Wind: variable speed & direction, can be high. - Ionosphere charges: the sapce elevator would essentially be a giant ground rod in the ionosphere… that might attract a few bolts of lightning.

Retric 8y ago
You don't need to attach a space elevator to the ground. Keeping one end of the tether at 100,000 feet still makes access to space cheap without many of the security issues of a ground based tether.
- jrockway 8y ago
  Interesting. How do you get stuff to 100,000 feet? I'm imagining some sort of cargo helicopter but that is probably not at all the right idea.
  - Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
    We used a balloon to lift Felix Baumgartner 135,000 feet for his record jump [1]. Could this be scaled up for larger payloads? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner
  - Retric 8y ago
    Rockets or balloons can get to that altitude fairly easily. You could even build a second elevator that gets to 100,000 feet hanging off a balloons. But, really it's just a security precaution to prevent terrorists or whatnot just flying into the thing.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Forget terrorist, an accident is more likely including earth quakes, tsunamis and storms and one of the biggest problems is that while building it might just be the easy part maintaining it and decommissioning it when the material fatigue sets in is a much more complicated mess. Depending on the failure you might have a cable with a length greater than the earth’s circumference if we are putting it to a geostationary orbit falling down to earth. For a space elevator to work it’s center of mass needs to be at or above geostationary orbit, depending on the counterweight at the end of the tether it will likely be at least 50,000KM long.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  So what we need to do is start building down towards Earth from an anchor point