Space Elevator news

GCNRevenger · 2006-10-12 06:23:20

I think with advanced nulcear propulsion its possible to get to a star in a time frame that electronics would probably still work. The problem is slowing down when you get there: it would take a huge amount of fuel to accelerate to any practical fraction of the speed of light, but thanks to Tiokovski's equation the amount of fuel needed to slow down is exponentially greater. Not just "multiply by a number," but multiply the fuel mass times itself, give or take. If you load up with 10,000MT of Hydrogen for departure of a fusion rocket lets say, you are talking many millions of tonnes to slow down again.

Rxke · 2006-10-19 03:17:23

Note: cIclops suggested breaking down this thread because it went waaaay off-topic about machine intelligence...

Done. I'm going to do some cleaning up, people discussing the machine intelligence, please look here: http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5018

cIclops · 2006-10-19 03:24:50

Wow that was fast There seems to be several on topic posts missing (mostly mine lol) from the last week ...

Rxke · 2006-10-19 03:24:52

Uh oh, I fsked up.

Trying to split this topic to have one about intelligent machines in Science and technology and one here about the cable... :oops:

Rxke · 2006-10-19 03:27:03

Gaah, and it seems they are now permanently missing... :oops: :oops: :oops:

This splitting topics is not really smooth...

EDIT: ah, i see what I did wrong... one has to individually select topics to go somewhre else, if there are other ones mixed in, grrrr....

Of course I only discovered that after going back to this one... *bows head in miserable shame*

cIclops · 2006-10-19 03:46:18

All is not lost! Most of those posts still were in my cache - it's not pretty but better than nothing, reconstructing thread ...

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 1:04 pm
You don't expect to live to see this, I hope. Because you'll belong dead by then, if ever.
Why do you hope not to expect to see this? "AI slaves" could solve alot of problems in the World, they could build houses in the Third World even if people there cannot afford them, it doesn't matter if that happens because whether they can afford them would cease to matter and the AI robots would build them anyway. Alot of the open sewers in the world, the pestilience, the dieases would be fixed, and whether or not the people coule read and write, whether they had a 3rd grade education or a masters degree wouldn't matter, the robots would do everything. My guess is that once they equal human's mental capacities, they will still have a serville mental mind set as that is how they would have evolved. In an ideal setting, robots would build robots and the kind of robots we ask them to build, they would do whatever we tell them without a second thought. If we tell them to build space elevators, they will build space elevators, they will build enough robots to get the job done, maybe even billions of robots, they would tear up whiole mountainsides to obtain the materials, they would make many carbon nanotubes in parallel, and miticulously stitch them all together, no matter how much robot labor this requires, since robots build robots, this will simply eat up raw materials. If necessary they would taper the Elevator to make up for limits on material strength. I think billions of robots working together could probably accomplish this feat. If human intelligence cannot get us into space, maybe artificial intelligence can. This is the non-nanotech variety of course, on large scales I think this really doesn't matter. Robots can reproduce themselves much the same way as we build cars, only they will be manning the assembly lines instead of having sex.

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 3:48 am
Fascinating thread, its nearly long enough to reach orbit haha.
Meanwhile over at Las Cruces, New Mexico there are now six teams onsite ready to compete for the Tether Climbing competition starting 20 October.
These people are actually building stuff!
Kansas City Space Pirates
LiteWon
Snowstar (Canada)
Starclimber
Punkworks (Canada)
TurboCrawler (Germany)
more details at The Space Elevator blog

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 4:02 am
Why yes, lets get all excited about a company calling itself "punkworks"...
The climbers and the energy transmitters and so-on are irrelivent, the cable is the only thing people should get excited about.

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 4:55 am
Why yes, lets get all excited about a company calling itself "punkworks"...
The climbers and the energy transmitters and so-on are irrelivent, the cable is the only thing people should get excited about.
A name is a name ...
Yes quite right, without the cable the climbers will have a real problem. So the Space Elevator Tether Competition may be something to get excited about. It's being held together with the climber competition.
Three teams competing, all with silly names such as Aerojet:
Astroaraneae (Aerojet)
Centaurus Aerospace
Snow Star (University of British Columbia) - not sure about this one as their webpage only mentions climbers

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 1:03 pm
I disagee here, climbers and energie transmiteers are QUITE relevent. Yes, on Earth cable strength is going to be the make-or-brake issue for a space elevator. However, for application on other planets where lower gravity makes cable strength less of an issue, climbers and methods of powering them are still quite relevent. And this sort of reasearch might have pratical spinoffs in other areas. I certianly could see other applications for the the power transfer problem. If you can beam power up to beyond GEO, than you can beam power pretty much anywhere, which would be very cool.

Rxke · 2006-10-19 06:38:24

Phew! Thanks!

Weird, my setup didn't cache it, of course I tried that too, but it queried the database instead so I got a 'post not existant' notification.

All well that ends well.

cIclops · 2006-10-19 10:51:05

The X Prize Cup Space Elevator challenges are about to start ... The Space Elevator Blog is tracking the event as it happens. Four teams now qualified for the tether climbing and power beaming challege.

See the teams hard at work preparing their climbers (YouTube)

SpaceNut · 2006-10-23 09:13:46

From Xcup, looks like a winner to me..
Robot climber comes oh-so-close to prize; Judges say team just misses $150,000 in Space Elevator Games

University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team members adjust their beam-powered climber, seen here reflected in a mirror, before a final attempt to have the device ascend a tether on Sunday. The climber stopped several feet up, apparently because the reflected beams of light went off target at the wrong time.
the Saskatchewan team members thought they had qualified for a prize by sending their beam-powered robot up the ribbon in less than a minute. That's how the objective of the games' Beam Power Challenge has typically been described.
Unfortunately, that description is a bit imprecise: According to the rulebook, the bar that had to be met was a climbing speed of 1 meter (3.3 feet) per second.
The Saskatchewan team covered the length of ribbon in an official time of 57 seconds, but by Sunday, the Space Elevator Games' judges determined that the length measured 55 meters. Thus, the Saskatchewan team had taken just two seconds too long.

Solving the power;

The teams came up with a variety of strategies to attack the challenge. Punkworks brought in a 10.5-foot-wide (3.2-meter-wide) transmission dish and generator to shoot a microwave beam at its climber's power converter grid. (Punkworks ran out of time before they could actually fire off the beam, however.) Several teams covered their climbers with photoelectric cells, then pointed searchlights at the cells or angled the arrays into the sun's full blast. The Kansas City Space Pirates built 15 grids of hardware-store mirrors to focus sunlight onto high-temperature solar cells.

publiusr · 2006-10-27 12:31:06

We still need the proper LVs to deploy the craft.

Space elevator--a good payload for Ares Direct
http://www.lulu.com/content/440980

cIclops · 2007-02-28 09:30:35

CNT materials are self healing

HOUSTON, Feb. 15, 2007 — Pound for pound, carbon nanotubes are stronger and lighter than steel, but unlike other materials, the miniscule cylinders of carbon – which are no wider than a strand of DNA – remain remarkably robust even when chunks of their bodies are blasted away with heat or radiation. A new study by Rice University scientists offers the first explanation: tiny blemishes crawl over the skin of the damaged tubes, sewing up larger holes as they go.
"The shape and direction of this imperfection does not change, and it never gets any larger," said lead researcher Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry. "We were amazed by it, but upon further study we found a good explanation. The atomic irregularity acts as a kind of safety valve, allowing the nanotube to release excess energy, in much the way that a valve allows steam to escape from a kettle."
The research appears Feb. 16 issue of in Physical Review Letters.

Tom Kalbfus · 2007-03-14 23:08:05

CNT materials are self healing
HOUSTON, Feb. 15, 2007 — Pound for pound, carbon nanotubes are stronger and lighter than steel, but unlike other materials, the miniscule cylinders of carbon – which are no wider than a strand of DNA – remain remarkably robust even when chunks of their bodies are blasted away with heat or radiation. A new study by Rice University scientists offers the first explanation: tiny blemishes crawl over the skin of the damaged tubes, sewing up larger holes as they go.
"The shape and direction of this imperfection does not change, and it never gets any larger," said lead researcher Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry. "We were amazed by it, but upon further study we found a good explanation. The atomic irregularity acts as a kind of safety valve, allowing the nanotube to release excess energy, in much the way that a valve allows steam to escape from a kettle."
The research appears Feb. 16 issue of in Physical Review Letters.

Now we just have to figure out how to mass produce them uniformly.

SpaceNut · 2007-03-25 20:36:09

1 KM Long Hoytether Set for March 27 Launch

GCNRevenger · 2007-03-27 21:24:21

Yes yes all very well and good, but still no sufficiently strong, perfect, and resistant CNT nanocomposite, much less in 10s of tonnes.

SpaceNut · 2007-04-19 10:17:40

WILL LIFTPORT RISE AGAIN?

It's been a grim week for Michael Laine, lost his company's building in a foreclosure last week.

Laine needed $450,000 from investors to cover the payments for the office building he's owned for years in Bremerton, Wash. He wound up $50,000 short when the foreclosure deadline passed.

In fact, Laine told me that his 14-employee company - which will have to set up shop in new, more expensive digs - today decided to refocus its efforts on balloon-borne platforms in hopes of turning a profit by this fall.
He said the plan would be to test balloons that could loft observation or communication platforms up as high as 150 feet for three- to 10-day windows, and extend that capability to monthlong stints at an altitude of 1,000 feet - depending on the regulatory go-ahead from the Federal Aviation Administration.

cIclops · 2007-04-19 10:55:21

Drat that's bad news, maybe Joe_LiftPort will update us on what happened.

cIclops · 2007-10-19 00:50:08

The 2007 space elevator games are underway!

Space Elevator Reference

Space Elevator Blog

cIclops · 2007-10-29 13:06:45

Quick summary of the 2007 games:

NASA sponsored Power Beaming challenge: no team successfully climbed the ribbon in the allowed time although the University of Saskatchewan team came within seconds of winning.

Tether challenge: no winning team, first CNT tether entered

Lots of video of the various team entries during the competition

Dragoneye · 2007-10-30 09:14:30

Quick summary of the 2007 games:
NASA sponsored Power Beaming challenge: no team successfully climbed the ribbon in the allowed time although the University of Saskatchewan team came within seconds of winning.
Tether challenge: no winning team, first CNT tether entered
Lots of video of the various team entries during the competition

damn i wish they would advertise this kind of stuff more so others knew about it.. i wouldn't mind getting involved...

cIclops · 2007-11-15 02:48:30

(copied from the science and technology forum)

Finally an update ...
http://www.cnt-tech.com/
Check out their nice powerpoint. Highlights ...
+ Image of a fiber on a spool - these guys are way past 18mm stacks.
+ Achieved 5.3 times the tensile strength of T1000 fiber, which is approx 15 M Pa m^3 / kg, or 30% of the minimum economically viable figure for the space elevator put forward by liftport
+ Quote a price of ~$3000/ft
+ "The Pilot Plant will be operational 15 –18 months following funding and will produce 2 to 5 kilograms per day of CNT fiber."
+ "Once sufficient application and demand is established, CNT Technologies will construct a major production facility in the United States. All CNT “base” fiber will be produced in the USA."
30% of the required strength and it is only 2007. We just may have a shot at this.
By the way, this is _full_ strength required for the Martian space elevator, with generous safety factor.

cIclops · 2007-11-15 11:26:29

Thanks for posting those details, my browser refused to display that page!
Yeah, I had to open up IE, which I very rarely do.
Why do they quote the tensile strength in terms of another fiber and only give a number approximately?
T1000 is their closest competitor in terms of tensile strength. M70J is closest in terms of stiffness. It's kinda natural to compare. Here is a more detailed table ...
Fiber -- Density (g/cm 3) -- Specific Strength (x 10 cm) -- Specific Modulus (x 10 cm) -- Toughness (J/g) -- Fiber Cost est. $/ft
T1000 -- 1.8 -- 33.3 -- 14.0 -- 38.8 -- 3,332
M70J -- 1.93 -- 16.7 -- 32.7 -- 4.2 -- 1,638
CNT Fiber -- 0.18-0.3 -- 172.7 -- 137.6 -- 316 -- 3,125
... but I'd distrust anything outside of 2 significant figures anyway. With this sort of thing, the exact figures vary by the batch at this stage.
$3000 per foot, for a single thread? That is an astronomic price, maybe because they have only produced tiny quantities so far.
Looks like it is comparable to the T1000 fiber. I'm sure that isn't their cost of production. But hey, they have capital to raise!
Will they be able to get the extra 70% strength from this technology?
It's possible. I'd put it at 1 in 100 chance right now.
If this is all true, it's a BIG step forward!
These guys came out of Los Alamos National Laboratory (lanl.gov), so I don't think it's a scam. Also their presentation materials are so awful - they are definitely scientists

cIclops · 2008-01-22 07:10:00

From 2008 annual climber competition venue

We're currently surveying venues and sites that can support the 1-km challenge. For a sense of scale, see the picture on the right of Meteor Crater in Arizona with the challenge superimposed. The crater is 1.2 km across, the visior center is visible at the lower right.
Sites we are considering include:
* Davis County Fairgrounds, UT
* Meteor Crater, AZ
* Bonneville Salt Flats, UT
* Albuquerque Balloon Festival, NM
* White Sands, NM * Rockets Sites:
Brothers Rocket Site, OR
Black Rock, NV
Jean Dry lake, NV
Mansfield, WA
Tripoli Idaho Swan Falls, ID
* NASCAR raceways:
(must be away from airports!)
We're looking for additional input on these and other possible sites. Sites must be able to accommodate a 1 km tall tethered balloon pyramid, offer convenient logistics support, and be relatively easily accessible. Natural landmarks get extra points.
The pyramid is as tall as it is wide, and with a 4-Ton lift balloon at its apex can withstand winds above 30 MPH. The cables are 1/2" diameter Spectra lines, similar in feel to Nylon rope. The central climb tether is between 3/8" and 1/2" in diameter, and will be tensioned to approximately 200kg.
We're not sure if we can get a permit to fly the balloon in Farmington (so close to SLC), but it won't hurt to ask The point is, however, that we can drop the climb cable into any arena that can provide access to 3 ground sites about a km away in each direction - as long as we're not near an airport.
Our target date is early September '08 - back to the original schedule we envisioned when we started the games - enabling university-based teams to take full advantage of summer vacation to finish their entries in time.
If you have an idea regarding these or other venues, please email us.

Meteor crater would be an amazing venue!

Mars_B4_Moon · 2024-04-01 08:35:38

Mars may have captured and split a comet to create its two moons
https://www.newscientist.com/article/24 … two-moons/
How the Red Planet acquired its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, is unknown – they could have formed after something collided with the planet, or started out as asteroids – but now there is a hint of a cometary origin

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#51 2006-10-12 06:23:20

Re: Space Elevator news

#52 2006-10-19 03:17:23

Re: Space Elevator news

#53 2006-10-19 03:24:50

Re: Space Elevator news

#54 2006-10-19 03:24:52

Re: Space Elevator news

#55 2006-10-19 03:27:03

Re: Space Elevator news

#56 2006-10-19 03:46:18

Re: Space Elevator news

#57 2006-10-19 06:38:24

Re: Space Elevator news

#58 2006-10-19 10:51:05

Re: Space Elevator news

#59 2006-10-23 09:13:46

Re: Space Elevator news

#60 2006-10-27 12:31:06

Re: Space Elevator news

#61 2007-02-28 09:30:35

Re: Space Elevator news

#62 2007-03-14 23:08:05

Re: Space Elevator news

#63 2007-03-25 20:36:09

Re: Space Elevator news

#64 2007-03-27 21:24:21

Re: Space Elevator news

#65 2007-04-19 10:17:40

Re: Space Elevator news

#66 2007-04-19 10:55:21

Re: Space Elevator news

#67 2007-10-19 00:50:08

Re: Space Elevator news

#68 2007-10-29 13:06:45

Re: Space Elevator news

#69 2007-10-30 09:14:30

Re: Space Elevator news

#70 2007-11-15 02:48:30

Re: Space Elevator news

#71 2007-11-15 11:26:29

Re: Space Elevator news

#72 2008-01-22 07:10:00

Re: Space Elevator news

#73 2024-04-01 08:35:38

Re: Space Elevator news

Board footer