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Space Elevator
- isghoor 3y agoSo cool!
- adlpz 3y agoThat was absolutely fantastic. I just left a pretty rough meeting and came to HN for some healthy procrastination. Really made my day.
- JOnAgain 3y agoHeight is in m, but temperatures are in f. Complete unusable :) I loved this.
- mpsprd 3y agoMaybe it depends on your location? I see celcius here.
- yurishimo 3y agoI think it depends on your browser language? I saw meters and Fahrenheit as an English speaker in NL. You can click on the temperature to toggle the units.
- karthickgururaj 3y agoClick on it - the unit changes
- Karsteski 3y agoThis is absolutely fantastic, I'm sharing it with everyone I can :)
- xg15 3y ago"Above this altitude is known as the 'death zone', because there isn't enough oxygen for human life." whooper swan casually floats by
- obituary_latte 3y agoVery cool. Only wish we could switch from meters to feet the same way we can switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
- brvsft 3y agoVery cute way of conveying this information. Love it.
- ibdf 3y agoThe space elevator music was particularly good.
- seanplusplus 3y agoThis was absolutely wonderful ... A perfect way to start my day
- nayuki 3y agoA scrolly solar system with a similar presentation style: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.... , https://hn.algolia.com/?query=If%20the%20moon%20were%20only%201%20pixel&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=If%20the%20moon%20were%20only%...
- dxbydt 3y ago(Sorry, am not a science person). Why does the temperature go down until 11000 metres, then stay at -70F until 20000m, then starts going back up to 28F until 50000m, then starts going down again 83500m, stays at -119F until 90500m, rises up again until 100000m ?
- uncertainrhymes 3y agoThat is the measured air temperature, but it isn't used the way we normally think about it. At very high altitudes, the atmosphere is very sparse (i.e. very low pressure). There are not very many molecules of air, but those few do get hit with a lot of ionizing radiation, meaning they have a lot of energy. It would not feel warm to you though, it would feel basically like space. This is a poor analogy, but consider the difference between a single drop of water hitting your skin at high speed, versus a slow moving wave of water going over you. The drop has more energy, and if you just measured its 'speed' it would be higher than the wave.
- marcodiego 3y agoIt shows temperature and altitude... would be very interesting if it also displayed pressure. EDIT: and curves.
- gooseyman 3y agoI learned that temperature drops until just before the mesosphere where it starts to increase before dropping again. Wild!
- TravisLS 3y agoThis is great! But also, in case you missed it, click back to the homepage. There are a bunch of other equally great diversions.
- mike10921 3y agoVery impressive. So few entertaining websites of this type these days. I really enjoyed it
- lobo_tuerto 3y agoThis was fun, thanks for the experience. :) I see you can switch degrees from °F to °C, thanks. Would be nice to have a switch from m to km, too.
- elbigbad 3y agoI’m a simple hacker news lurker. When I see a post that links to Neal.Fun I click. Always such high quality work
- gsanderson 3y agoMe too! They are always great.
- TimMeade 3y agoWell. Neal. That was fun. Thanks
- macrael 3y agoAnyone have an RSS feed for Neal.fun?
- nivethan 3y agoHe has a newsletter which seems to function as an rss feed. Also his twitter is fun to read!
- AlbertCory 3y agoSpace elevator: an idea that resurfaces every 5 years or so, until the practicalities get (re)discovered. Is there any prospect at all of a material strong enough to handle this?
- seabass-labrax 3y agoAh yes, I thought, scrolling past the Learjet 45, the de Havilland Vampire, the Caproni Ca.161, all high-tech jet aircraft of the space age... hang on, the Ca.161?! I must say I'm sceptical that such a single-engined biplane could reach 50000 feet. The most advanced piston-powered aircraft, the four-engined Lockheed L-1649 Starliner, had a cruising altitude of no more than 30000 feet.
- winrid 3y agoWow, this is beautiful and well done. Also, didn't realize how badass Monarch Butterflies are.
- sam1234apter 3y agoPlease change the height to feet
- Julesman 3y agoOr at least change Fahrenheit to Celsius. heh.
- archibaldJ 3y agoThis is beautiful. I cried. And then I bought Mr Neal a coffee. the space elevator.. it is a story of human progress .. it is something we will get to build one day
- robswc 3y agoWow, I really love these sites. Reminds me of years ago when things on the internet were more fun... sure a bit janky but people just went to town and built stuff they wanted. Now everything is pretty mute and minimal (not saying its bad, I do this for my UX/UI too) so its nice to see this stuff!
- classified 3y agoAbsolutely beatiful. And using the metric system, how refreshingly un-American.
- samuelzxu 3y agoSprites are AWESOME! They look so cool, does anyone know a good place apart from wikipedia to read about them?
- whiterock 3y agoNow please somebody create this in the opposite direction :) Down the mariana trench and beyond.
- eveningsteps 3y agoOh, you'd be surprised! https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ https://neal.fun/deep-sea/
- ilikehurdles 3y agoI don't usually complete these little "fun internet" experiments but I thoroughly enjoyed this journey from start to end, and learned a bit on the way. My mind was blown a few times checking on the scrollbar thinking it's always over only to see we've barely just begun. Excellent.
- sph 3y agoIt's not the first time I happen upon Neal's fun experiments, and I always love them. As soon as I see the domain neal.fun, it is a must click.
- ilikehurdles 3y agoCorrection: almost* not always.
- d_burfoot 3y agoI used to think that the space elevator is a great and necessary concept for building a space-based civilization. How else can we get enough raw physical material into space? There's no way rockets can scale up to the enormous tonnages that will be required. Now I think the solution is to build an industrial base on the moon. The lunar factories and mines (mostly run by robots) will harvest the necessary material, do some initial refining, and then fling the products into space using mechanical techniques (something like SpinLaunch, or a giant catapult). Lifting off from the moon is far easier than getting off the Earth (think of that tiny lander that the Apollo astronauts used).
- barbs 3y agoDoesn't seem to work on my phone - it won't scroll at all. iPhone SE 2016 - iOS 15.7.3
- matthew16550 3y agoFor todays lucky 10,000. Arthur C Clarke wrote a great story about space elevators called "The Fountains of Paradise". https://arthurcclarke.org/site/legacy/fiction/fiction-sz/ https://arthurcclarke.org/site/legacy/fiction/fiction-sz/
- runlevel1 3y agoTime of useful consciousness would be another interesting number to add. Here's a table of average times published by the FAA for a gradual ascent: - 18,000 ft; 5,500 m: 20-30 min - 22,000 ft; 6,700 m: 10 min - 25,000 ft; 7,600 m: 3-5 min - 28,000 ft; 8,550 m: 2.5-3 min - 30,000 ft; 9,150 m: 1-2 min - 35,000 ft; 10,650 m: 30-60 sec - 40,000 ft; 12,200 m: 15-20 sec - 43,000 ft; 13,100 m: 9-12 sec - 50,000 ft; 15,250 m: 8-10 sec Here's a demonstration of the effects of hypoxia and time of useful consciousness done in a hyperbaric chamber by SmarterEveryDay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness
- mojomark 3y agoI'd now like to go down to the core, please!
- poulpy123 3y agoThings I learned here: - butterfly can fly crazily high (3500m) - You can find Pterodactyls and wild Yaks higher than a cessna - a vulture can fly higher than a passenger plane (regular altitude)
- jrootabega 3y agoIf this is true, I predict we will find LeVar Burtons at 7000m.
- AdrianB1 3y agoThe Cessna part is wrong, I can reach over 4000 m in one. The only problems are lack of pressurization and the quantity of fuel to burn to get there, not actually reaching it. In a good day (cold weather, air more dense) it can get even higher.
- graupel 3y agoI handed this to a 12-year-old and am now having trouble getting him off the site for day #2 in a row; between Space Elevator and the rest of Neal.fun it's a whole new world for him - love it!
- r0b05 3y agoI always enjoy using this site. Anyone know the tech stack used to make these?
- sourcecodeplz 3y agoAmazing website.
- davidhyde 3y agoAt 74km/h you would reach space (100km karman line) in an hour and a half but you would need to keep going for another 20 days at that speed reach geostationary orbit in order to not fall back to earth when you exit the space elevator.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoCan the speed be safely increased once you leave the atmosphere and there is no (appreciable) drag? With such a system in place, are there no other interesting places to stop along the way to geosync?
- midoridensha 3y agoThe other problem people seem to forget is radiation. The Van Allen belts expose people to a lot of radiation; normally it's not a problem, because either people stay under the belts (as in stations like the ISS which are at LEO), or for the few times humans went beyond LEO, to the Moon, they blasted through the belts very quickly and thus had negligible cumulative radiation exposure. But if you're sitting on a space elevator taking days to go through the VA belts, you'll probably get a fatal dose. Wikipedia has an article that touches on this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_safety
- philwelch 3y agoYeah, I wish this went on as far as an actual space elevator would, perhaps with extra visualizations of the heights of various orbits. The top would be slightly above geostationary orbit, since you would need the center of mass to be at the geostationary point in order to work.
- Sharlin 3y agoOr more than slightly if you don't want to haul up a big counterweight but just use the cable itself as a counterweight. The Brad Edwards design proposes a total cable length of around 100,000 km. One very nice side effect of a long cable is that you can slingshot spacecraft from the far end up to ~Jupiter's orbit with zero propellant needed.
- rasengan 3y agoI love this. Space elevators are going to be here much sooner than it seems with carbon nanotube tech. :)
- mcv 3y agoWould be cool, but as far as I understand, even long, continuous carbon nanotubes wouldn't be strong enough to carry their own weight.
- Sharlin 3y agoNot if the cable has constant cross-sectional area, but actual designs call for a cable with an exponential taper, and that would make a carbon nanotube cable feasible. With currently available engineering materials the taper ratio would be too large (~10^8 for Kevlar, ~10^33 for steel…)
- bluber84 3y agoAnd I thought the cable had to be made of spider silk hadn’t?
- Sharlin 3y agoThere's not been that much progress in the 20 years since Brad Edwards proposed the first actually feasible space elevator design. It's difficult to say whether ultra-strong CNT cables are something that's perpetually 20 years away, or something that follows the "progress is slow until it suddenly isn't slow" exponential curve.
- amelius 3y agoToo bad someone will write an article titled "Will we get space elevators sooner than we think?" and Betteridge's law will prevent it from happening.
- buffington 3y agoSimply beautiful.
- avmich 3y agoI don't understand why so many seemingly educated people keep discussing Earth space elevator. For a long time there is a conclusion that the elevator is incompatible with Earth satellites, which mostly fly below GEO, and elevator will collide with satellites, with all negative consequences. The inherent elevator problem has nothing to do with the material of the cable. Am I missing something?
- mLuby 3y ago1) It's the only static non-rocket launch system. As such it doesn't require people to buy into the "active support structure" concept which is a prerequisite for orbital rings (<3), launch loops, or space fountains. (Rotovators, though arguably static, require exotic setups for terrestrial use.) 2) It's been around long enough to have made it into mainstream culture, especially via big-budget Hollywood movies. 3) The name is straightforward and approachable to laypeople. An elevator to space nicely obscures issues like its mind-boggling size, duration of transit, and even "reach space" vs "achieve orbit." 4) Picturing the structure fixed over a point on Earth seemingly sidesteps sovereign territory issues and international cooperation, further simplifying the conversation. The Space Elevator is a gateway to megastructures more than a gateway to space.
- burnished 3y agoCause they are fucking rad! Its grandiose and big but plausible, its like some one heard of archimedes lever and took it as a challenge. Basically it sparks the imagination :) Is that sort of collision inevitable or can you have parallel orbits that don't collide? I'm ignorant and this is the first I'm hearing of this issue. Last I heard the material science part was the heartbreaker.
- JPLeRouzic 3y agoMaybe because it's an old idea, from a time when non-GEO satellites were rare? (when I was a kid in the 60s/70s, the cool thing was geostationary satellites)
- avmich 3y agoGEO is harder to achieve than LEO. There was never time when non-GEO satellites didn't outnumber GEO ones.
- paxys 3y agoAmazing visualization. The most interesting part to me is the weird fluctuation in temperature. You'd think it would trend in a single direction. What causes all the frequent ups and downs?
- wonrax 3y agoAt 17446m mark: > Unlike the troposphere, the temperature in the stratosphere increases the higher you go.
- alana314 3y agoWow, this is charming!
- gibolt 3y agoA key point with space elevators is that they aren't limited to Earth. The solar system has plenty of celestial bodies that could benefit (us) from having one. It may not be as significant as the impact of an Earth-based one, but any propellant savings is a win.
- lastangryman 3y agoA martian space elevator is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, definitely worth a read.
- philwelch 3y agoSome of those celestial bodies are even small enough that we could build the elevators with existing materials, too.
- mcv 3y agoA space elevator on Mars is probably totally feasible. But of course the benefits would be much larger on Earth. The problem is: the benefit of a space elevator is bigger the deeper your gravity well is, but it's also much harder to impossible to make one there. But I've also been wondering: wouldn't it be possible to have a tapering space elevator? Reduce the weight by making the parts that have to carry less weight thinner?
- ben_w 3y agoThe designs already have to taper, so you're right, but you still need supermaterials (or powered/active support structures) to make one on Earth.
- Sharlin 3y agoYes, it absolutely has to taper, with an exponential curve, to keep stress constant over the length of the cable. The taper ratio (in terms of cross-sectional area) for the best currently available engineering materials for an Earth space elevator would be in the tens to hundreds of millions, but a carbon nanotube cable might only require a taper ratio of around ten. (A steel cable would need a taper ratio on the order of 10^33.)
- ronyfadel 3y agoI’m impressed with how high planes and rockets built almost 100 years ago got.
- mcv 3y agoI thought it would go all the way up to the anchor of the space elevator, so I expected to have to scroll up for another couple of hours. I guess the creator wisely decided that was a bit too much. Amazing how high the F-104 Starfighter could fly, by the way.
- brettermeier 3y agoI wonder about the skydiver at almost 3000 m altitude. Isn't 4000 m a typical jump height? Edit: Okay, depends on where you live and learn.
- Moissanite 3y agoFYI, this crashed my browser with extreme prejudice; I can't remember one other time when I've had to force-stop the application. (Firefox on Android)
- hammyhavoc 3y agoSounds like another good reason to move on from Mozilla.
- Anduia 3y agoOr perhaps a reason to update Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511713
- hammyhavoc 3y agoThe comment I replied to said that they use Firefox on Android. What relevance does Windows have to Android in this discussion? None.
- Anduia 3y agoWell I didn't see that. My apologies!
- globular-toast 3y agoThat would require a reasonable alternative.
- jonas-w 3y agoUsing firefox on android and it worked perfectly fine.
- cambaceres 3y agoWhat is a pigeon doing at 2000 meters altitude?
- Etherlord87 3y agoS..itting on people below.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWhat is a human being doing at that altitude? Flying.
- hanselot 3y agoI love this. Reminds me of a thread I perused once re Orbital Ring Space elevator concept, and how it seems not only possible, but almost disgustingly cheap (in terms of the gains) with current technology. Not only would such an endeavor restore some aspect of pride to humanity, but the benefits are quite numerous. To name a few low-hanging fruit: The research done to make it possible, would definitely advance several fields. The ability to access photons from outside of the atmosphere should vastly improve how much energy we could capture from the sun. Pair this with transparent solar tech designed to pass through the wavelengths that are useful to plants, and we can factory farm crops in space using fully automated systems. This could also lead to exploration of engineered crops that can withstand (and potentially absorb radiation), that may serve as a biological wall for the humans. Obviously, it would be a given that asteroid mining would become vastly more simplified, and autonomous robotic space construction and perhaps even asteroid mining would become a fantastic way to profit from it (or/and dilute the value of existing rare earth minerals/metals). Obviously, this would also make intra-solar travel orders of magnitudes cheaper. Maintaining and cleaning up space debris would become substantially simpler. Building planetary defense mechanisms (against extinction level events) would become more feasible if we have this in place. There are obviously an enormous number of things that could go wrong with a project like this, but given a CERN or Manhattan Project level of funding and cooperation, I think we could build this in a couple decades. This is the kind of future I would want to be a part of. The cost estimate I think was somewhere in the trillions, but even so, the potential benefits are so vast that it just doesn't make sense not to do it, right? In case you don't want to google the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring Don't even take my word for it. Go question ChatGPT about it.
- thechao 3y agoThe original paper for the ORS was engineered out of COTS from materials in the early 80s, designed to be built on a UK-friendly budget renting space from the US Space Shuttle program. With Space-X-like tech, it'd be hilariously cheap: especially with the new superconducting tape which didn't exist 40 years ago. Here's the thing with an ORS: why have one 350km-high ORS, when you can build a stack of ~60 of them out to geosynch? Such a stack is an ORS-Jacob's-ladder, and is a compromise between a full Clarke-style space-elevator and reality.
- have_faith 3y ago> Temperatures in the thermosphere can reach 2,500°C, but molecules are so far apart that you wouldn't even feel it. How do the molecules reach that temperature?
- exitb 3y agoThey absorb solar radiation. It can't be stressed enough though, that people understand temperatures in terms of the ability to transfer heat and store energy. Due to the extremely low pressure, both of these are actually very, very low.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoSlightly tangential, slightly more achievable (?) , but I was just listening to a BBC Worldservice Radio Podcast on Space based Solar farms that would beam concentrated energy back down to earth [1]. By no means a new idea but they wrap up current thinking in 30min. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5bjt https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5bjt
- debesyla 3y ago> Congratulations! You have made it 0.01% to the moon. Okay, haha, now that gives a nice perspective how far is the Moon.
- virtualritz 3y agoThis is great. I just wish there was one way to switch all units. The temp. can be switched between F/C by tapping on it. The height is metric and seems fixed and then stuff in text bubbles is again imperial (e.g. mph instead of kph).
- once_inc 3y agoThat is mostly because the international space community works with metric, so the Karman line is at 100km above earth, and converting to imperial units would be forced. Remember, there are only three countries that use imperial units; two third-world counties, and a global superpower.
- JoBrad 3y agoThat’s not entirely true. The UK and Australia use Imperial measurements quite frequently, especially for speed.
- midasuni 3y agoColloquial speed yup. Not scientific speed which is m/s Road distance is miles, running its metres. Except for the marathon. Beer is pints, my milk is litres but you can get pints. The lamb in the fridge for the weekend is 2.3kg, I’m 5’11 and way a little over 14 stone as I’m far, probably because of the 200g of Brie I am thinking about eating tonight. I was looking at a floor plan the other day, the room was 6.5m x 3.8m
- byhemechi 3y agohi, i’m australian, the only time i ever use imperial is if i work with hydraulic hoses or (rarely) tell someone my height we pretty much only use metric, unlike the uk
- barbs 3y agoAlso Australian, can confirm although TV/monitor screen sizes are also usually expressed in inches. We also haven't made the switch to metric time yet ;)
- blkhawk 3y agoAs cool as space elevators are - I wish all the other "easier" to build options would be more mainsteam. Say orbital hooks or maybe some of the more sedate active support structures like orbital rings or lauch loop variants.
- davidpronk 3y agoVery very nice. Love the details and the °F/°C toggle. "...above this altitude your saliva and tears will boil if you don't have a pressure suit." :-$
- pavon 3y agoAnd it puts a suit on for you if you don't select one. No stickman snuff animations here.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThis was great! Niggle: With a trackpad, you might need to scroll "down." I thought it wasn't working, for a few seconds, but that's a fairly common issue with trackpads and mobile interfaces. "Up" and "down" are kind of relative.
- globular-toast 3y agoNot with mine. You have your trackpad set reverse to mine which is default in some systems because kids expect it to work more like a smartphone/tablet rather than a scroll wheel.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoI just have it at Apple default. It is the same as scrolling windows, but "up" is interpreted differently, in my brain (not a kid. I'm an old fart).
- penguin_booze 3y agoYou may have to toggle the "Australian mode".
- actionfromafar 3y agoCaproni Ca.161 1938 altitude record Insane. 17k meters. Also there were many others which surprised me.
- unixhero 3y agoI enjoyed that greatly.
- csomar 3y agoCouple of things I learned from this: 1. Some birds go really high into the sky. Not sure how they evolved to tolerate such a hostile environment. But it seems that Duck-like birds are able to handle very high altitude. 2. There are lots of cool spaceships that man has made. But it seems most of these were made in the 1950-1990 era. It's a shame that we are no longer doing that.
- joemi 3y agoI think there are still a lot of cool ones, but not as many sexy ones. Rocket planes like the X-15 were incredibly sexy, IMO, though in many ways not as cool and useful as current rockets.
- O5vYtytb 3y agoI have to wonder what you mean we're no longer making cool spacecraft? The SpaceX starship is about to launch in an hour, it's very cool.
- millerm 3y agoWatching the countdown now! T-00:28:12! Will be spectacular no matter what happens! Yes, I'm excited. Not sure how the parent comment has missed what SpaceX has been doing with Dragon, Starship, Starlink, and all the rockets! Amazing.
- jackcviers3 3y agoIt exploded when trying to orient for the first stage separation. And it appeared to have 5 of the 33 engines out during the first stage flight. This launch gave me very "Don't Look Up" ending vibes.
- kbelder 3y agoJust the opposite. This is engineer-driven testing.