Google Earth Community: Space Elevator

3D Model of this Proyect

As early as 1895, a Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky suggested a fanciful "Celestial Castle" in geosynchronous Earth orbit attached to a tower on the ground (a satellite that always stays over the same point of the Earth). Another Russian, Yuri Artsutanov , wrote some of the first modern ideas about space elevators in 1960. His story never caught the attention of the West. The concept finally came to the attention of the space flight engineering community through a technical paper written in 1975 by Jerome Pearson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. This paper was the inspiration for Clarke's novel ( The Fountain of Paradise ) . "One of the fundamental problems we face right now is that it's so unbelievably expensive to get things into orbit," said Pearson. "The space elevator may be the answer."

While the Shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it hasn't met the goal of greatly reducing launch costs. Today the cost per kilo sent to the sky it´s about $20,000 The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005, and is estimated to be $174 billion when the Shuttle retires in 2010.
NASA's plan for using the shuttle to launch all unmanned payloads declined, then was discontinued. Opinions differ on the lessons of the Shuttle. While it was developed within the original development cost and time estimates given to President Richard M. Nixon in 1971, the operational costs, flight rate, payload capacity, and reliability have been worse than anticipated.
A working elevator would reduce the cost of launching anything into space by roughly 98 percent. The $500 million it takes to launch the average satellite (insurance not included) would be a thing of the past.

So, what is the Space Elevator? Basically it´s a huge cable attached to a base on the Earth in one extreme and with a big geosynchronous satellite in the other. An elevator could rise trough this cable from the Earth surface to an external orbit without being a rocket. No fuel to take and burn, no explotion risk, a lot of payload can be carry in each trip, no need to be protected against the heat of a re entry as it´s going to travel slowly, in comparison with a shuttle.

So why nobody already make it! Well, there are still many technical problems, but science is reaching the needed knowledge and materials to do it.
Many known material or modern construction method doesn´t work for making this proyect.

Nano Technology is something new that could give us the solution to make a cable strong and light enough to do this proyect.
Now it is possible to put atoms the way we want to make a material. Fiber materials such as graphite, alumina, and quartz have exhibited tensile strengths greater than 20 GPa (Giga-Pascals). The desired strength for the space elevator cable is about 62 GPa. The estimated tensile strength of this Carbon Nanotube Material is 200 Giga Pascal. So that will be fine. This material have the potential to be 100 times as strong as steel, at one-sixth the density.

And the elevator would be electrical?

Yes, but as it is impossible to have an electrical power cable of that long we have to invent something to power it. Batteries can´t be used because of the power we need and their weight and size. So, we are done? Never….here comes WPT Wireless Power Transmition. Another new technology. This mean the possibility to send electricity trough the air. There are 2 ways in developing stage to make this. One is trough Microwaves and the other is trough a Laser Beam. It´s funny but the original idea of this was thought to solve an inverse problem. Peter Glaser suggested in 1968 to collect solar energy in space and send it to Earth converted in Microwaves. Then, bigs antennas would re-convert it to electricity. In the 1980's, researchers at NASA Langley, particularly Ed Conway and Gilbert Walker, worked on the potential use of lasers for space-to-space power beaming . In 1991, John Rather at NASA Headquarters suggested to send energy from Earth to Moon with a Laser Beam. The idea is that the elevator itself would have an array of photovoltaic cells that would transform the Laser Beam onto electricity to have enough power.

Ladies & Gentleman, last world Stop….

A big “attached” Spacial Station would be the place to reach after 4 or 8 days of traveling up and up… Some proyects add a counterbalance satellite far away the station. But we want to reach just that place. There we could produce starships, sun light collectors to send energy to Earth (with the new WPT technology), take raw materials from Earth surface to outer space to make our Earth Rings .
Then, when we arrived to other planets, we can make new Space Elevators there to extract minerals from those new lands and bring back home. The list is open, so….you can post suggestions!

All these structure would be anchored to Earth in a quiet place. The Pacific Ocean near Ecuator line it´s a good place, said scientists. It would be like an oil platform, so it could be move to avoid the cable to be hit by a passing satellite.

Science Fiction

Many people could say all this is science fiction. But we are closer to do it than technology was at the time Jules Verne wrote about going to Moon…

Source 1 / Source2 / Source 3 / Source 4 / See what happens if the cable is broken / Source 5 / Source 6

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Clic Aquí.

Edited by Gerardo64 (05/30/06 10:10 AM)