Hi Bruce, I apologize. I'll keep all my replies civil. I really do encourage constructive comments. I was trying to respond to this comment by Andreaus: ...
The Yoyo that you drew actually will move with almost the same force as that on the string, there is only a 199:200 lever. However, to move the Yoyo at 2000...
Geoffrey, You cannot multiply safety factors and you certainly cannot multiply design factors. Those factors are calculated as in a chain, the strength of the...
Hi Ratt, Again, thanks for your valuable insights. But so far, I have not seen a single valid comment that discredits any the dozen SE innovations I...
Geoffrey, ... In fact, you propose a "genset" (I assume you mean generator) and electric motor to accomplish this task. Let us state three facts: 1) To lift...
Bert, There is not a shred of evidence that even with giant telescopes, a laser can be sufficiently collimated to be used directly, whether it is pointed at...
The Kare paper is actually quite interesting (http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/597Kare.pdf). I think you are mistaken that we cannot...
I've posted a 40,000 pound elevator cab design ("Transfer Module 1") for my loyal skeptics. And I've built a model of it....and it works! I'll try to post the...
Is it still going up at 2000 mph, much faster than the drive ribbons? If so, that is not evident on the figure and should be better indicated. Also, it is not...
The pellet idea is interesting, but targeting at such ranges is more than a bit difficult, plus, at close to C velocities, you are not going to be able to...
It's too early to start development plans for the Moon in terms of raw materials production. One good reason to go back to the Moon is to stay long enough to...
When a space elevator rotates into night, the lower part just outside the atmoshere will be in 3°K darkness for up to 12 hours at a time. It's extremely thin...
... Half the directions around it are near that temperature and the other half of its sky is the earth, ~250 K as seen from outside. That averages to at least...
It depends where you are on the cable- a lot of the cable is higher up and sees the Earth's disk as a lot smaller and thus can get significantly colder. Twice...
... Good point. But towards the altitude where it still gets an hour, even five minutes, of night, the earth covers much less of the sky and the cable will get...
As a general rule of thumb, the simpler a material's construction is, the less of a problem it has with thermal expansion. At the atomic level, if the material...
Or, the tension would vary a little without the counterweight moving much at all. Not sure which, but I don't think an instantaneous response is likely,...
Usually, yes, but in the case of the SE the strain caused by cable elongation is much greater than that from thermal expansion, so whichever way you deal with...
Success in 'space elevator' competition John Antczak, Associated Press Writer – Wed Nov 4, 9:04 pm ET EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – A robot powered by a...
With space junk an increasing future problem, reducing the production of future junk, moving the tether at the location of impact, or destroying junk before...
Arthur Clark actually addressed this in the fiction. The elevator, or elevators in his future vision of earth, quickly make geosynchronous satellites obsolete....
Since it is unlikely that we will ever have a space elevator in Earth orbit, we need to find other means of accomplishing similar goals. Some sort of rotating ...
Or perhaps a large, pancake-shaped piece of aerogel could be effective at sweeping clean a particular range of orbits with time, if it is orbited retrograde...
We will need an interceptor program ready when the ribbon goes up. The technology recently developed for "Star Wars" could be easily adapted. We already track...
Ding, ding, ding...reality check. We only track items down to about 8-10 centimeters in size, and not nearly all of those. You have to detect before you can...