5 ms·

So what if a bomb goes off on the thing and manages to sever the cable? Look out below! Up to 62,000 miles of high-speed fun coming your way... Multiple SF a

• 3pt14159 13y ago
  Engineers, like myself, are able to design systems that do not fail spectacularly when faced with predictable threats.
• Zikes 13y ago
  Depending on where the cable is severed, the majority of it is likely to just fly off into space. Remember, it's being actively pulled by centripetal force. However, if it's severed at some point in the middle, say just below the geostationary orbit point around halfway up the cable, then the majority of what falls toward Earth would actually just burn up in the atmosphere. Only about 100 miles of cable would likely reach the ground, and it would probably weigh about as much as your average power line of similar length.
  • jerf 13y ago
    Indeed. The real question about a Space Elevator is not whether it would be safe in a disaster, the question is whether it would work, at all. If Space Elevator terrorism is to become a thing someday, it probably won't take the form of threats to cut the elevator. Especially once you have more than one, that's not a very interesting attack (and even if you only have one, the damage would be primarily economic, not physical). The way you'd do terrorism is to sneak something terrifying into orbit, since it's so much cheaper to do that than it is now.
    • Zikes 13y ago
      Yeah, tungsten telephone poles in orbit could do some serious damage, as much as a small nuke. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god#Project_Thor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god#Project_Thor
      • Florin_Andrei 13y ago
        Project Thor has got to be one of the most appropriately named projects ever.
    • zachrose 13y ago
      Being suddenly slung into outer space sounds pretty terrifying.
      • lutusp 13y ago
        > Being suddenly slung into outer space sounds pretty terrifying. Definitely a breathtaking experience.
      • jerf 13y ago
        It is something the elevator cars will be designed for, and just by the nature of the elevator we'll have a lot more orbital infrastructure ready to receive the cars. IIRC, much like airplanes at takeoff and landing, there are some windows where it is impractical to recover from a detached elevator that occurs at precisely the wrong moment, but they are relatively small. (Depending on the precise numbers, it may be possible to build a passenger car that has no such windows, but cargo cars will probably just run the risks since it greatly increases their payload.) I won't promise NOTHING WILL EVER GO WRONG!!!1!, but there are a lot of engineering options to mitigate disaster.
• tmoullet 13y ago
  Can you recommend SF books which contain space elevators?
  • tjl 13y ago
    Arthur C. Clarke's "The Fountains of Paradise" is about building a space elevator. It's probably one of the first science fiction books to include it. There's also Heinlein's "Friday" and Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars". Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
  • geuis 13y ago
    Fountains of Paradise, Red Mars, Blue Remembered Earth There's a lot but these are 3 off hand. FoP was the one that really popularized the idea. Red Mars and it's sequels have a small part about what can go wrong. BRE just uses it as it would really be used. A piece of generic ordinary transportation technology that people used to it don't think twice about.
• pavelrub 13y ago
  Does the possibility of a bomb exploding in a nuclear reactor also seems to you as an example for why we can't have nuclear reactors, while in practice we have hundreds of nuclear reactors and zero bomb explosions? Seriously, of all the possible problems with constructing and managing a space elevator, this one seems like a non-issue.
  • varelse 13y ago
    In theory, nuclear power should have been a vital part of a comprehensive strategy to stop climate change in its tracks. In practice, human greed and stupidity makes them more dangerous and expensive than they should be as well as reflexively feared by the marching morons who prefer the status quo of belching coal into the atmosphere without limit and inadvertently providing them with more radiation exposure than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... So I think nuclear power is a great example actually of what really happens when the monkeys get their hands on otherwise cool technology.
    • pavelrub 13y ago
      I think you have missed the point of the analogy.
• ef4 13y ago
  Robert Zubrin's space elevator book analyzes this situation and concludes that most of the mass would either escape or burn up in the atmosphere. Only the bottom-most section would hit the ground. His design contemplates anchoring to a movable ocean-going platform, both for this kind of safety issue and because it means you can steer it away from big-but-easy-to-track tropical storms.
• Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  It can be (and arguably should be) designed so that tension at the bottom is zero. Cut it at the base, and it would float, and maybe drift slowly. If it's cut above that, it depends. In most scenarios, part of it would shoot out into space, the rest would whiplash around the Earth, mostly burning in the atmosphere, some of it (pretty short chunk) would hit the ground at very large velocities.