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> Future moon travelers will still have to ride a rocket, though, to fly up to the elevator’s dangling point, and then transfer to a robotic vehicle, which woul
by umvi 7y ago
> Future moon travelers will still have to ride a rocket, though, to fly up to the elevator’s dangling point, and then transfer to a robotic vehicle, which would climb up the cable all the way up to the moon.
And... how long is that going to take? A few months? A year? 200,000 miles is like going the circumference of the earth 10 times and I can't imagine a machine attached to a pencil-thin cable could go very fast
- hguant 7y agoIf you assume the cable car is moving at a constant 60 miles per hour, about 4 and 1/2 months (138 days). The current fastest elevator in the world (in the Burj Khalifa) moves at 22 mph; taking that up would take you about a year. However, I'm told by a friend who used to work at Otis (the company that made the Burj Khalifa elevator) that the limiting factor on elevator speed is the comfort factor - there's a hard cap on the acceleration a standing person can comfortably take, and the course of the elevator is generally pretty short, so you don't have time to build up a decent head of speed. Presumably we can do a little better than that
- jaclaz 7y agoAs a side note, usually cables used in lifts/cablecars/cranes/etc. have a 5x (or even in some cases higher) factor of safety, i.e. the cable needs to resist at least 5,000 Kg of traction in order to be used for a 1,000 Kg weight. Part of this high factor is because cables wear down during use (and they are usually inspected for all their length every 6-12 months), particularly when relatively high travel speed is used.
- codeulike 7y agohttps://what-if.xkcd.com/157/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/157/