Space elevator

Design for Space Elevator Wins Prize

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“It would revolutionize the way we get to and from space and make it more viable.”

Jordan William Hughes via the BBC

Going Up

A spectacular design for a space elevator, with the goal of efficiently transporting passengers into outer space, has been awarded a $11,000 prize.

As the BBC reports, British architect Jordan William Hughes won the prize for space architecture and innovation from the Jacques Rougerie Foundation in Paris.

His concept, dubbed Ascensio, connects an ocean-based ship to a structure in Earth’s orbit via a cable-like structure. The ship is designed to keep up with the spaceport by moving around the ocean.

Of course, it’s only an inspired work of science fiction and likely won’t be built any time soon, if ever. But that doesn’t mean we can’t dream of a future in which space is a simple elevator ride away.

“It would revolutionize the way we get to and from space and make it more viable,” Hughes told the BBC.

High Times

Space elevators would elegantly solve one of the biggest hurdles in space travel, foregoing the need for heavy and expensive rockets to access the Earth’s orbit. The concept was first envisioned by Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in a 1895 book called “Dreams of Earth and Sky,” in which he described an imaginary 22,000-mile tower. Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov later expanded on the idea, describing a cable that connects the Earth’s surface to a geosynchronous satellite.

While some experts have posited that space elevators aren’t actually as far-fetched as they sound, science still has plenty of catching up to do.

In his interview with the BBC, Hughes admitted that he doesn’t expect anything like it to be “built in the next ten years. But I am pretty much certain that at some point this will be built. Not my project, but a space elevator.”

“It’s a bit fanciful today,” he added, “but I’m sure it will happen because this is the only way space travel and space exploration actually works and becomes efficient.”

Can we really build a space elevator?

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One of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome to continue our quest into space is the outrageous amount of money it takes to get things out of Earth’s atmosphere and into orbit. While reusable rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 are certainly heading in the right direction, they still require a lot of fuel and, therefore, money to pull off. So what’s the answer?

In short, no one knows yet, but one of the most popular ideas is for us to createa gigantic space elevator that could lift supplies and other things from the ground to a docking area in space where ships and other vehicles could grab them without returning to Earth. But how would that work, and is it even possible? Luckily for us, Kurzgesagt is back with another video asking that very same question.

According to the video above, we first need to understand how orbits work in general. Basically, for something to remain in orbit, it has to get pulled towards the centre of the larger object, but keep moving sideways fast enough to ensure that it doesn’t crash into it – it’s essentially falling and missing the ground at the same time.

When NASA or some other space agency launches something into orbit, they shoot a rocket straight up and then sideways to increase its speed around the globe. Since this speed is faster than gravity, it starts to orbit.

So with that cleared up, how would a space elevator work?

The basic idea is to have a tether attached to Earth with a counterweight on the end. Using this tether, a vehicle could climb into space like an elevator car uses a cable to get you from floor to floor. As the vehicle climbs higher and higher, its sideways speed increases because Earth is rotating, which allows things already in orbit to simply take off from a dock on the counterweight.

Though this project would go down as the most expensive structure ever built, it would reduce the cost of getting things into orbit by almost 100 percent. This means that, even with its high cost, it will save us a tonne of money in the future.

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/qPQQwqGWktE

 

Space Elevators Are Totally Possible.

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and Will Make Rockets Seem Dumb…

It’s the scourge of futurists everywhere: The space elevator can’t seem to shake its image as something that’s just ridiculous, laughed off as the stuff of sci-fi novels and overactive imaginations. But there are plenty of scientists who take the idea quite seriously, and they’re trying to buck that perception.

How to Build a Space Elevator

To that end, a diverse group of experts at the behest of the International Academy of Astronautics completed an impressively thorough study this month on whether building a space elevator is doable. Their resulting report, “Space Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility and the Way Forward,” found that, in a nutshell, such a contraption is both totally feasible and a really smart idea. And they laid out a 300-page roadmap detailing how to make it happen.

The “why build a space elevator?” part is easy. First up, it’s because rockets aren’t cutting it. Rocket technology is such that 80 percent of the mass is fuel and 14 percent is structure, leaving just 6 percent for the payload. Then the rocket takes off, spews a bunch of chemicals into the atmosphere, and never comes back. A cable-based transportation system, by comparison, would have no constraints on the size or shape of the payload, and at a fraction of the energy and cost, the study explains.

Image: IAA

 

Moreover, once the elevator’s cargo can safely switch from large payloads to transporting people into orbit, that could usher in a new era of space exploration that would lead to a “renaissance” that would transform the Earth, researchers write:

The facility to provide power to any location on the surface [space solar power satellites] will enable development across the world. Several examples are that Africa could skip the 20th century of wires while the outback of countries like India or China would not have to burn coal and the  Amazon region could retain more of its rain forests. In addition, the increase in communications and Earth resource satellites will remake the emergency warning systems of the world. Some intractable problems on the Earth’s surface would also have solutions, such as the safe and secure delivery—and thus disposal—of nuclear waste to solar orbit.

Naturally, how to build a space elevator is more difficult to answer. The gist of the idea is this: A long, strong tether is anchored at the equator and extends into geosynchronous orbit some 62,000 miles above the Earth. At the other end is a counterweight far enough away to keep the center of mass in orbit with the Earth so the cable stays over the same point above the equator as the planet rotates. The rotation keeps the cable taut, to counter the gravitational pull as robotic, electric “climbers” ride the line up into space carrying the payload. Boom.

This basic concept hasn’t changed much since Arthur C. Clark’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise first popularized the idea of an elevator to space—though no one took it seriously. Decades later, in 2003, Clarke stated, “The space elevator will be built ten years after they stop laughing … and they have stopped laughing.”

What made people stop laughing? Nanotech. Carbon nanotubes were developed in the 90s and promised to be the uber-strong, light, flexible supermaterial needed to build the kind of 62,000-mile cable that could transport humans into space. By the end of the 90s, NASA had released its report on the technological progress: “Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium.”

This month’s IAA report gives something of an update. “The materials currently being tested in the laboratory have surpassed that level and promise a tether that can withstand the environmental and operational stresses necessary,” it states. “Will it end up being carbon nanotubes, or boron nitrite materials, or something else?”

Nanomaterials are strong and light enough, but the rub is that scientists can’t get them to scale yet. Luckily, billions of dollars are being poured into this area of research. The report predicts a suitable material will be ready by the 2020s.

As material engineering research continues, experts are feeling increasingly comfortable putting an ETA on the long-imagined space elevator. A couple years agoJapan predicted it could create the machine “by 2050”. Rumors that the secretive Google X lab was building a space elevator sparked at least one prediction that it would “replace rockets in 50 years.”

RELATED: This Hypnotic Animation Makes Space Rocks Look BeautifulGoogle has since denied any such project, but plenty of other attempts to make the journey into space easier and cheaper are still on the table. There is the research out of the International Space Elevator Consortium, the ambitious Kickstarter project to build a vehicle that travels from the Earth to the Moon, the Japanese space elevator that runs on solar power cells attached to the ISS, Elon Musk’s reusable rockets, NASA’s plan to launch objects into space with rail guns and magnetic levitation, and acclaimed sci-fi author Neil Stephenson’s moonshot project to build a tower so tall it reaches to the stars.

The IAA report, for its part, is ready to put the rubber to the road. It lays out everything from the technological infrastructure of the machine and the physics of defying gravity, to the funding profiles of the future space markets it would open up, and when investors should expect a return on investment from the elevator. “No doubt all the space agencies of the world will welcome such a definitive study that investigates new ways of transportation with major changes associated with inexpensive routine access to GEO and beyond,” IAA president Gopalan Madhavan Nair writes in the report.

Be it 20, 50, or 100 years from now, if the elevator/bridge/gun/train/tower next-gen celestial transport system comes to fruition, it could be rockets that people are laughing about in the future.

 

Graphene the perfect material for a Lunar Elevator.

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Scientists at Columbia University conducted a study which revealed that graphene retains most of its mechanical properties even when it has been stitched together from small fragments. This discovery may have been the first step toward large scale manufacture of carbon nanotubes, which could be essential in the manufacturing of the first space elevator, light – strong materials, and flexible electronics.

Lunar Elevator

At the present moment, a practical breakthrough in the construction of a lunar elevator has not been realized. However, many scientists have performed experiments which show it will be possible through use of graphene. In these experiments, they have measured the strength of the microscopic carbon nanotube and proved it can indeed support the construction of such elevators.

The space elevator ribbon is constructed out of carbon nanotubes, which are at least 100 times stronger than steel but have flexibility equal to that of plastic. Scientists will only be able to make the ribbon to be used in the space elevator if they manage to make fibers out of carbon nanotubes. In the recent experiments, the materials that were involved were neither strong nor flexible enough to form such a ribbon.

Graphene ribbons have a very high tensile strength and very high elastic modulus, theoretically they are said to make the process of building a space elevator easy. There are two major ways that a lunar elevator ribbon can be built: in the first case a long carbon tube ideally several meters long will be braided into a rope like structure, and in the second case a shorter nanotube will be placed in a selected polymer matrix.

So far graphene is the ideal material for construction of the ribbon, the carbon-carbon bond in graphene is at least 0.142 nm. Scientists have proved that two sheets of graphene are held together by much stronger van de Waals forces than bulk Graphene.