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The 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.
Stairway to Heaven is about 8 minutes long, so they better work hard on speeding the elevator up to match that.
> "...six oval-shaped cars, each measuring 18m x 7.2m holding 30 people, ... eight days ...." Whooooa. Let's think about this for a second. Eight days means people need to sleep (and not just sitting up in a chair, no matter how comfy). At 1m x 2m per bed that would be a 15m x 4m space even without aisles to walk between the beds or down the middle or any sort of privacy separators. Also, a bathroom and actual washin…
How much space would they get on the ISS either ways? It'd be a good practice.
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I don't doubt there's a market for that service.
Yes, but it's a completely different market from folks desiring a space elevator. Also, it makes the need for muzak nonexistant because all your passengers are dead and can't hear it anyway. Seems to me that defeats the purpose of trying to time the trip to coincide with the length of a particular song.
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IIRC Specifically there are no materials we can currently produce (at that scale) which would be capable of supporting the weight of the cable alone. Let alone cars that ride along it.
At least we now know the cabin dimensions with a precision of two significant figures.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/180682-google-x-admits-i...
That aside, how might adversaries disrupt such an expensive and precarious venture? Seems a very hard to defend machine.
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The problem is how you keep the tether from dragging behind the orbit when you do that. Space elevators require a fairly delicate balancing act to keep the mass directly over the base of the elevator, otherwise they turn into giant slings.
The center of mass of the cable-counterweight system orbits at geosynchronous height. Also, the gradient of gravity will Stabilize the attitude in the desired orientation. None of this should be construed as an endorsement of space elevators, though. They will never happen on Earth as it exists now. Over and above the material science, you have to clean out LEO of all satellites before you even start construction. It…
If they build this from japan, how would they deal with earthquakes ? Last thing you want is to be flying off to space in 18 x 7 m car
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”Obayashi envisages a space elevator using six oval-shaped cars, each measuring 18m x 7.2m holding 30 people, connected by a cable” I can’t see how one would read that other than as each car holding 30 people. You would need an extra comma to make it six cars holding 30 people in total: ”Obayashi envisages a space elevator using six oval-shaped cars, each measuring 18m x 7.2m, holding 30 people, connected by a cable”
But the original sentence is ungrammatical either way. Under your interpretation there’s still a missing “and”: “each measuring 18m x 7.2m and holding 30 people”.
Someone patented space elevators in 2015. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=90858... No comments...
Thanks for the link. I'm personally very conflicted about patents. In this specific case I classify it as a "speculative" patent => I'm totally against this it. Patents should be allowed only for something that exists / can be demonstrated (which would ensure that patents are something somebody invested in, and therefore at least believed in).