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One disappointment with space elevators is the speed at which you can safely travel along them. For example, if you were to travel at 1000 km/h it would take 15
by davidhyde 7y ago
One disappointment with space elevators is the speed at which you can safely travel along them. For example, if you were to travel at 1000 km/h it would take 15 days to get to the moon and just under 2 days to get to geostationary orbit (if there was also an elevator for that)
- gameswithgo 7y agoThat might be disappointing for human travel, but for cargo its great. As long as throughput is high the latency is no big deal.
- perl4ever 7y agoBut you can't get high throughput unless you have a large capacity in terms of mass. It's easy to say "cargo", but if the only cargo it can carry is a flea, not so much.
- toss1 7y agoDisappointing in one way, but in another, it seems like it would be extraordinarily pleasant to be able to enjoy such a journey for a while, perhaps like old trans-oceanic cruise ships...
- extropy 7y agoyou don't need to hold on to the tether all the time. Linear motors on the car and embedded metal strips every 1 km and you have a Lunar rail gun :) In practice the rotational speed difference at different altitudes will make it a bit more complex. But nothing that cannot be solved.