Yes, I believe there is a group working on this project at the Institute for Shit that Won’t Ever Get Built.
They are also working on the Transatlantic Tunnel and mile high skyscrapers.
I suspect that somebody is in dire need of a research grant.
I think he’s spot-on with either one or the other… if we threw several trillion bucks at the project, I’m sure it can be done in fifteen years. OR, if we wanted to dump only a few bil into it, it’d take half a century.
I think it’s an inevitability, and I like to see that the material science is catching up, but for the short-term - that is, the next two decades or so - I think the Scramjet is our best bet.
RickJay, I see your point, but I don’t necessarily think that you’re right (odds are, however, we’ll not live long enough to know for sure, sadly). Yeah, the space elevator is a new concept, and some thing that’s never been done before. However, the Saturn V was the first rocket built capable of putting a man on the Moon, and it didn’t take all that long to go from planning (the original idea was conceived in 1957, IIRC) to execution (first launch 1967). Granted, a space elevator is umpteen kajillion times larger than a Saturn V, but the Saturn V was the largest, most complex thing ever built in the 1960s and pushed the design envelope for rockets in ways that had never been done before (or since, alas). Even today, halfwits don’t think it was capable of sending humans to the Moon.
Aspects of the space elevator’s design already exist in many things like elevators and suspension bridges. A space elevator doesn’t even have to be capable of transporting humans to be a success, either. A relatively small version which can be used to launch satellites and unmanned probes would be quite useful, I think.
In breaking news on the nanotube front, they’ve managed to get a really long piece spun.
The needed strength isn’t there yet, though.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series has a space elevator which gets destroyed by terrorists. I believe the cable gets cut near the top-- so the counterweight gets thrown into space like a rock out of the biggest sling ever.
The cable then proceeds to wrap around the equator several times over, with parts of it burning up upon entering the atmosphere. Needless to say, it’s messy for anyone too close to the equator.
I’ve read something else where a space elevator cable gets severed at the base, in which case the cable takes off and goes spinning away into outer space, without doing anything to people on the planet.
Exgineer said:
But it’s not going at ‘orbital velocity’, other than at geostationary orbit. The parts that are near the earth are not going very fast at all. In fact, they are just rotation with the earth, stationary to the atmosphere. If you jumped off the ribbon at, say, 1000 miles, you’d drop straight down. The only re-entry speed would be the speed you built up on your way down.
Plus, the structure itself isn’t all that big. It’s massive, because it’s so damned long. But the mass of any given section is quite modest.
Plus, the thing won’t hold together as it comes down. The carbon fiber nanotubes are strong in tension, but not so much in shear and crushing. Once the thing snapped, my guess is that it would fragment into small pieces, which would come down independently. The pieces up to a couple of hundred miles would come down and hit the earth, each one impacting like a jet airplane hitting the ground. The pieces near geostationary orbit would probably be pulled away from earth entirely. The next bits down from there would burn up on re-entry, as a free-fall from 20,000 miles would build up a pretty good speed.
So it’s not going to dig a trench that would dwarf the grand Canyon. It wouldn’t dig a trench at all. There’d just be a lot of crap dropping on people along a line measuring a few hundred miles. Except that there’s nothing there, because this thing would be anchored mid-ocean.
And if large pieces do stay together, their relative mass per unit length means there would be significant air resistance. They wouldn’t hit the ground at orbital velocity - they’d hit at terminal velocity, which wouldn’t be enough force to dig a trench at all.
Just my guess.
I’ve already put in an application to be the first bellboy. You bastids better tip good, being such a long ride.
To add to what Sam said, it seems reasonable to me that they’d have something like demolition charges installed, so that if the cable did fall down, it could be easily shattered into smaller pieces which would be less likely to do a great deal of damage.
Actually, the scenarios are different, the shuttle was moving through the magnetic field of the Earth, a space elevator would not do that because it´s anchored to it´s surface, so it doesn´t cut through the magnetic field “lines”. But in any case it would probably build up a whooping electrical charge, if for not other reason that air would be blowing over it. However, what happens if you connect a conductor from the ground to the ionosphere?, or up to the Van Allen belts? Now that´s a good question…
OK, since you´re asking for it here´s my opinion
[Gets on soapbox]
What is needed are three things, a reusable personal carrier ship, a BDB and a space tug.
Let´s start by the BDB, that stands for Big Dumb Buster, imagine a central rocket like the one used by Rutan on the SS1; a large hybrid motor, basically a long tube with an ablative nozzle on the bottom and an oxidant tank on the top; no turbo pumps, nozzle cooling circuit, simple, reliable, cheap and expendable. Add two solid fuel buster on the sides, like the ones on the SST, make them of a as few segments as possible to avoid pesky toroidal seals (see Chalenger), this busters could be reused. Add as many busters as necessary for the specified payload, 2, 3, 4 and so forth. finally the avionics are integrated to the payload section, not the core rocket itself.
Now that would make a good BDB, it´s scalable (more payload, strap a couple busters more) cheap and safe since it doesn´t have complex fuel systems or structures and only the simple core rocket is expended (which shouldn´t be more costly than a SST external tank IMO)
That´s the key, simple, reliable, proven. Rocket science has to stop being an awe inspiring term, we need flying barges.
Next a manned capsule, reusable. Pretty much like the Soyuz, perhaps a bit bigger to accomodate up to 6 passengers. The Soyuz, on it´s simplicity and redundancy of systems has been the most succesful design ever, there has been only two deadly accidents with that spacecraft (1967 and 1971), four cosmonauts dead all in all. But more significant is that there have been four accidents in that time, in the other two (launchpad and midflight rocket explosions) the crews were saved because the capsule can eject from the rocket at any point of the flight. A simple solution once again.
So we have this beefed-up reusable Soyuz, we strap it on top of our BDB and use the capsule as the brains for the rocket, no need to add avionics to a one shot rocket. Off it goes with a crew of six that has the chance to bail out if things get rough.
Reentry as usual for a Soyuz, fire retrorockets and fall back to Earth, no necessity for a precise reentry maneouvre, it´s a stable design, it simply falls down. A splash down is IMO the best landing, you can´t miss an ocean and the landing is soft (compared to a Tundra touch down, anyway) so the capsule is not damaged and can be reused.
Now we have a BDB and a capsule, so there is stuff and people going up there. We need something so the two can interact, enter the Space Tug.
It´s an old idea and it´s damn good time to put it into practice already.
Instead of sending up a shuttle to fix the Hubble or whatever needs fixing up there, why can´t be a spacecraft parked, let´s say, on the ISS? it would only need fuel and the spare parts for each mission, no need to launch a whole space vehicle every time, If a space station can operate for years in orbit, why not a space tug?, is not much different anyway, it just smaller and has a OMS attached to it.
Three simple designs, reliable, based on (gasp!) old technology; yeah, the SST does all that, but at a great cost in expense and risks; why keep pushing the envolope?, let that be reserved for experimental concepts that maybe, someday will work better than the current technology. But there are already good enough designs and technologies and here comes another quote:
From Russian Admiral Sergei Gorshkov: ‘Best’ is the enemy of ‘good enough’
BDB, Soyuz style capsule, space tug; good enough.
[Steps down from soapbox]
Okay, assuming this thing is built. You do realize that they invented this little thing called RADAR a few years back, right? I think it’s relatively easy to defend a stationary target that’s in the middle of the ocean.
You’ve seen too many movies.
Look…I hate to break it too you nice folks, but I don’t think it’s as simple of sending up a shuttle and fishing out a couple thousand miles of nanotubes. No struture of this kind has ever been built…anywhere…ever. It would probably take years just to invent the construction equipment that such a thing would require. Not to mention the logistics of having hundreds or thousands of construction workers operating in space, which has also never been done.
How many rocket trips would it take to deliver 64000 miles of cable to orbit? How does the thing react to shifting wind patterns? How do you keep it from oscillating? Then there are the problems that no one has even thought to think of.
You know how difficult it is to build a terrestrial skyskraper? And you think we are going to construct something 60,000+ times as high as anything ever built?
One. It could be a seed cable weighing about 20 tons. They could use that to hoist up more cables to gradually strengthen it.
One of the benefits of a mobile platform is that it could be moved out of the way of storms.
The scheduling of climbers would be an important part of reducing oscillations. It would still need some kind of intelligent damping system along the cable. One proposal is to damp against the Earth’s magnetosphere and possibly even generate power from that.
Fortunately we have skeptics like you to remind us. 
Not a clue. However, I’m pretty sure with my present knowledge and skill set that it would be impossible for me. But who cares? I haven’t ever needed or wanted to know but others have some pretty good ideas about it.
I have no doubt about it. The only problem is how much more money, time and life will be wasted on other pointless crap like the invasion of Iraq. $151,100,000,000 by the end of this year.
Are you serious?
This thing is a pipe dream. I don’t think my grandchildren will see one built.
Can you imagine the largest offshore platform ever built outmaneouvering a storm?
I can´t.
At best, the thing would have a speed of 5 knots, probably less, there´s no way it can dodge an incoming storm. What the heck, much faster ships and boats often get caught on the middle of storms.
I don’t understand how it’s supposed to move at all. It’s attached to the friggin’ elevator.
I think some people just don’t appreciate the scale of that thing.
Ummm… Yes? Why can’t you just assume it’s serious and deal with it as if it were? Maybe it would enlighten some of the other pipe dreaming fools here if you elaborated about your concerns (if you have any) and the likes of Tuckerfan can just give up on it.
Do you have a problem with that as a tactic to avoid storm systems or is it because you don’t think that it would be enough?
Gest, you’re proposing that a sea based platform, tethered to 157,000 tonnes of carbon move fast enough to dodge a thunderstorm. There might be some small issues with that.
I don’t believe it could be moved.
I can imagine it. What are you basing your at best guess on? How fast can aircraft carriers move? Most of my objections to nuclear power would be eliminated with the cheap, safe disposal option presented by a space elevator. Particularly since the waste wouldn’t need to be shipped long distances to the platform.
I’m not sure about the physics of it either. Whether it would necessarily change the orbit of the station at the top of the cable or not (which would necessitate the release of more cable) I don’t know. I do know that much of this stuff is counterintuitive to someone used to gravity and so a physicist would be of more help.
Gest, you can spy a storm at what 100 km? If it moves at 30 km an hour you have 3 hrs to move your platform. Say these storms are never more than 100 km across. That means in 3 hours you need to move the platform 50+ km at 17+ km/h. There is no way in hell you’re moving an ocean platform that fast, especially from a complete standstill.