21–30 of 304 posts
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is humor against HN rules? I regularly see such posts being downvoted and it doesn't make sense to me.
It’s just a culture thing. HN tends to be more news and factually focused than reddit/Twitter/etc. People here just prefer to stay on topic, especially since humor is very different between people and can be very hit or miss.
The 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?
http://gassend.net/spaceelevator/breaks/
In summary, if the cable breaks at the base, the elevator will fly harmlessly into space. If it breaks at the counterweight, a large portion of the cable (several thousand miles long) will collide with the Earth’s equator.
I know nothing about physics... but wouldn't the space station need to counter the cable tension?
Carbon 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.
A nanotube suspension bridge would be pretty amazing to see.
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.
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.
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.
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 washing facilities of some sort are mandatory, and a kitchen with at least minimal food-prep capabilities (even if it's mostly pre-made); modern airplane galleys only need to deal with trips in the tens of hours.
18m x 17.2m is really really not a lot of space for all that.