Japan starts space elevator experiments
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Japan starts space elevator experiments
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Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#2Carbon nanotubes are cool, but i will believe space elevators possible once someone shows me a carbon nanotube rope i can climb with. I'd settle for a bike or motorcycle chain. A nanotube-based shoelace would be worth a noble prize or two.
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#3The cars would travel at up to 200kph and arrive at the space station eight days after departure from Earth.
These early cable experiments are important, but someone should also be working on the composing an 8 day Elevator Muzak score that won't drive you insane.
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#4The experiment sounds great. But should this work and a real cable to orbit is built, what happens when the cable snaps!? Can such a structure be made failsafe?
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#5The cars would travel at up to 200kph and arrive at the space station eight days after departure from Earth. These early cable experiments are important, but someone should also be working on the composing an 8 day Elevator Muzak score that won't drive you insane.
Music? The first four days will be safety announcements. The last four will be debates as to who is responsable for cleaning up all the vomit. A week of near-zero-g in a room with 30 people will not be fun.
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#6The experiment sounds great. But should this work and a real cable to orbit is built, what happens when the cable snaps!? Can such a structure be made failsafe?
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Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#7The experiment sounds great. But should this work and a real cable to orbit is built, what happens when the cable snaps!? Can such a structure be made failsafe?
That's what safeties are for! We already have a lot of engineering around making elevators safe. TLDR the elevator will clamp on to the rails to slow the free fall.
Neat info below on snapping elevator cables and some of the things that would help you.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-m...
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#8Carbon nanotubes are cool, but i will believe space elevators possible once someone shows me a carbon nanotube rope i can climb with. I'd settle for a bike or motorcycle chain. A nanotube-based shoelace would be worth a noble prize or two.
It could be that shoelaces and space elevators turn out to be on the same side of some tipping-point technological breakthrough.
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#9The experiment sounds great. But should this work and a real cable to orbit is built, what happens when the cable snaps!? Can such a structure be made failsafe?
Physics would tend towards "No."
Assuming a catastrophic break near the upper end of the cable (before the counterweight), there's not much you can do to keep it from coming down.
Re: Japan starts space elevator experiments
#10The experiment sounds great. But should this work and a real cable to orbit is built, what happens when the cable snaps!? Can such a structure be made failsafe?
That's what safeties are for! We already have a lot of engineering around making elevators safe. TLDR the elevator will clamp on to the rails to slow the free fall. Neat info below on snapping elevator cables and some of the things that would help you. https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-m...
What rails? They're not going to run more than one of these difficult-to-build structures up for each elevator. There will be a single cable, and the car will climb it. What happens if the cable snaps will depend on how far up the car is. Low enough, and it will descend to the surface on a builtin parachute. High enough, and it will perform some portion of an orbit, before descending on its parachute.