Height is in m, but temperatures are in f. Complete unusable :) I loved this.
Maybe it depends on your location? I see celcius here.
Space Elevator
71–80 of 216 posts
Re: Space Elevator
#72I love this. Reminds me of a thread I perused once re Orbital Ring Space elevator concept, and how it seems not only possible, but almost disgustingly cheap (in terms of the gains) with current technology. Not only would such an endeavor restore some aspect of pride to humanity, but the benefits are quite numerous. To name a few low-hanging fruit: The research done to make it possible, would definitely advance severa…
The original paper for the ORS was engineered out of COTS from materials in the early 80s, designed to be built on a UK-friendly budget renting space from the US Space Shuttle program. With Space-X-like tech, it'd be hilariously cheap: especially with the new superconducting tape which didn't exist 40 years ago.
Here's the thing with an ORS: why have one 350km-high ORS, when you can build a stack of ~60 of them out to geosynch? Such a stack is an ORS-Jacob's-ladder, and is a compromise between a full Clarke-style space-elevator and reality.
Re: Space Elevator
#73Height is in m, but temperatures are in f. Complete unusable :) I loved this.
Click on it - the unit changes
Re: Space Elevator
#74FYI, this crashed my browser with extreme prejudice; I can't remember one other time when I've had to force-stop the application. (Firefox on Android)
Sounds like another good reason to move on from Mozilla.
Or perhaps a reason to update Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511713
Re: Space Elevator
#75Height is in m, but temperatures are in f. Complete unusable :) I loved this.
Maybe it depends on your location? I see celcius here.
I think it depends on your browser language? I saw meters and Fahrenheit as an English speaker in NL. You can click on the temperature to toggle the units.
Re: Space Elevator
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The structure wouldn't be able to passively stay together. If it was to be destroyed then it would burn up in the atmosphere like anything else. It is not made of a magic non-existent material that is infinitely strong. Of course if you had a massive dense asteroid attached that would not, so it makes sense to be careful with what is around it. But the orbital ring itself would break up and be no more dangerous than…
I'm more concerned about what's already within our atmosphere and isn't going to burn up. That's a lot of kinetic energy, and nobody says it's going to destroy the Earth, I said it would be devastating. You're forgetting religious extremists and countless suicide bombers.
It would be cheaper to drop an equivalent massed object out of a plane. Or just use the plane as the weapon.
You break a space elevator at the ground, it floats upwards.
You break it at 30,000 foot then everything above the break floats away upwards, everything below "crashes" down, at a relatively low terminal velocity and thus with pretty low amounts of energy.
An elevator isn't a tower, it's a rope handing from a counterweight in orbit which is kept taut by a centrifugal force. It's anchored at the ground to stop the rock floating away, but if you break that anchor everything above will swing away from Earth
If you have the ability to break the cable at say 100km above the ground, you have the ability to drop objects from that height anyway, don't have to deal with no-fly-zones, and can target somewhere not on the equator.
Want to cause chaos? Get a bunch of heavy dense cheap bits of metal, put them in a high altitude balloon, then drop them over a city. You'll cause more damage to the people on the ground than anything you could do to a space elevator (short of the financial impact of having to resplice it)
If you can damage the elevator at the counterweight end, then you have the ability to drop a "rod from god" and cause more damage that way.
Re: Space Elevator
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like another good reason to move on from Mozilla.
Or perhaps a reason to update Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511713
The comment I replied to said that they use Firefox on Android. What relevance does Windows have to Android in this discussion? None.
Re: Space Elevator
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm more concerned about what's already within our atmosphere and isn't going to burn up. That's a lot of kinetic energy, and nobody says it's going to destroy the Earth, I said it would be devastating. You're forgetting religious extremists and countless suicide bombers.
For a ring with a density of 10kg/m, that kinetic energy is about 5 megatons… spread over 40,000km. It's negligible when it's that diffuse. Even if it didn't burn up, it's mostly lost to air resistance, with everything over a few hundred meters being limited to about terminal velocity. And that size ring, is pretty useful.
Re: Space Elevator
#79Couple of things I learned from this: 1. Some birds go really high into the sky. Not sure how they evolved to tolerate such a hostile environment. But it seems that Duck-like birds are able to handle very high altitude. 2. There are lots of cool spaceships that man has made. But it seems most of these were made in the 1950-1990 era. It's a shame that we are no longer doing that.
I have to wonder what you mean we're no longer making cool spacecraft? The SpaceX starship is about to launch in an hour, it's very cool.
Re: Space Elevator
#80This was great! Niggle: With a trackpad, you might need to scroll "down." I thought it wasn't working, for a few seconds, but that's a fairly common issue with trackpads and mobile interfaces. "Up" and "down" are kind of relative.
Not with mine. You have your trackpad set reverse to mine which is default in some systems because kids expect it to work more like a smartphone/tablet rather than a scroll wheel.