You didn’t misunderstand me at all. There are entire companies that basically exist of patents they bought (generally ones that are overly broad that get through the system) and lawyers to litigate infringement.
I guess those spaceplanes will have a tailhook like Naval aircraft that land on carriers have. And I guess there will be a catapult for them too.
I don’t see it happening. Not like that, not at 20 km.
It is fishy but perfectly legal if you don’t lie to your investors. They aren’t claiming they can built it, they’ll claim that they want to build it. They won’t say they can’t build it even if they know they can’t. And depending on their plan their investors may not care, they just need to believe they can make a profit somehow, even if it’s off the backs of other investors.
That sounds sort of Ponzi-ish.
Yep. I’d say this is a defensive patent to stake out their territory and enhance their credibility in applying for research work. I image the military or NASA would be interested in even a 1/4 mile inflatable tower. Think about the DARPA autonomous vehicle and robotics contests. DARPA went looking for inventors and got several alternate concepts even if some weren’t successful.
I believe that Arthur C. Clarke suggested beginning by lowering a cable from a satellite in synchronous orbit.
Different approach. Not that this is actually a ‘space’ elevator. More like a very tall platform.
Still, they’re not building this thing in the next 17 years (19 years, whatever the patent period is). The odds are infinitely greater that Hillary Clinton & Donald Trump will be caught having passionate sex. Today.
Maybe a century from now it might be feasible to build something like this, but this patent will have expired many generations ago by then.
At best, it’s a lark; at worst, some kind of scam.
Again, this is a common and legal technique for raising money for research. You can consider it a lark or a scam but it is legal and it is done, and sometimes produces results, and more often produces a profit for someone. They can file new patents based on their research that protect them for a longer time. Patents don’t have to be materialized, most of them aren’t.
Not only would that not be feaible, you wouldn’t want it to be that rigid as it would transmit all of those inertial loads to the base. In fact, it probably doesn’t make much sense to anchor a structure of this scale to the ground, it would make far more sense to just have it floating. But how you would get assembled vehicles or propellants up to the top, much less operate in the near vacuum conditions is entirely unclear. This is what we call “cartoon engineering” with no detail studies or clear system requirements analysis behind it.
Do not need the imagery!
Stranger
If you mean that the thing will inevitably come crashing to the ground, then yes…
It is, after all, an elevator. Clarke’s characters traveled in pressurized elevator cars.
Sure, but they were running up a tensioned cable going to GSO orbit, likely powered by a solar collector at the upper terminus and/or regeneratively recovered momenutum for payload being returned to ground; as the terminus is already at orbital speed a relatively small amount of propellant mass to achieve other orbits (provided they are low inclination) or a positive C[SUB]3[/SUB] to achieve interplanetary trajectories. This is, in effect, is just a really tall building that is supported by some combination of compressive strength and buoyancy, with the top not moving anywhere near orbital speed, thus still requiring a large launch vehicle and a lot of propellant mass to achieve Low Earth Orbit, and the momentum of which will never be recovered.
I don’t know if this impossible (although I’m morally certain the material strength requirements are going to be beyond the state-of-the-art) but I fail to see any utility in it even if the concept is practicable.
Stranger
The idea seems to be a variant of “We can totally build this, we just need enough Unobtanium for the structure”.
Can somebody figure out how much fuel this would actually save?
A savings of 30% seems like an awful lot. 12 miles up gets you out of the thickest part of the atmosphere, but you still need to get up to orbital speed which is really the hardest part of getting into orbit.
You do still need to lift all the fuel, passengers and cargo 12 miles in the air, probably by means of an awkward system of pumps, containment vessels and elevators. Those passengers and everybody involved in running the place are going to need air, water & food shipped up as well. That isn’t happening for free. How efficient is an aircraft carrier compared to a conventional airport?
I am no Buzz Aldrin. Would you not posses some of that velocity by being so high up?
The circumference of a circle 12 miles up is only 76 miles longer than the circumference of a circle at the Earth’s surface so unless I’ve made a mistake, you would only be travelling about 3mph faster.
The equatorial rotation speed is 465.1 m/s. At 12 mi (19.3 km) altitude above the equator you would gain a whole 1.4 m/s increase in rotational speed. Achieving Low Earth Orbit requires reaching 7.8 km/s not withstanding losses to gravity and aerodynamic drag, so launching from this platform would net you at best a 0.02% reduction in required impulse. The more significant benefit is the lowered air density from 1.225 kg/m[SUP]3[/SUP] to 0.326 kg/m[SUP]3[/SUP], but dynamic viscosity only goes from 1.789 to 1.458 (10 N•s/m[SUP]2[/SUP]), which is only an 18% reduction (however, most of the aerodrag losses are going to come from wave drag, not form drag).
You could get the same result with substantially less infrastructure, at least for a moderate sized space launch vehicle, by deploying from a carrier aircraft a la the Orbital Pegasus or GenOrbit GOLauncher 2. Doing this for a much larger payload like the proposed Stratolaunch Systems vehicle carrier vehicle and whatever booster configuration they end up ising, however is a major challenge, but still, not as much as building and maintaining a 64 kft inflatable skyscraper.
Stranger
Pumps and elevators are so much more efficient than rocketry that it’s not even funny.
If this thing actually works, the work to lift the fuel and payload to the top of it is going to be a rounding error compared to the additional fuel (and portion of rocket required to carry the additional fuel) that it takes to rocket up to that height.