March 16, 2019
Space Choo-Choo
Timothy Birdnow
The satire site Babylon Bee has a fun little piece suggesting NASA build trains to outer space rather than use rockets. Liberals love trains and so may be on board with renewed space exploration.
From the piece:
Read the rest.
Actually, while this is entirely a tongue-in-cheek prooposal, there are ideas of building "space trains" as a way to launch people and equpment into orbit. Called Space Elevators, Beanstalks, or skyhooks, the idea is to string a cable from the surface of the Earth to an anchor rock well beyond an orbital station. You would ride the rail up from the ground over the course of several days, like a super duper train.
Essentially, a cable will have to be made - a cable constructed of a very unusual material, one with an unbelievable tensile strength, and stretching sixty thousand miles from the surface of the Earth well past a geostationary orbit (not geosynchronous since that wobbles relative to the surface, but actual geostationary, meaning it stays over the same point on Earth all the time.) It will have to be tethered by something massive, likely a pretty pure nickel-iron one. Massive solar panels would provide most of the electricity needed, although being in geostat orbit it will be in shadow for a fair amount of time, so you may need a nuclear power station at the base. You build the sixty thousand mile cable in orbit (from material from the asteroid, perhaps, although you are going to have to make some amazing stuff and it will require a lot more tech and materials than just some iron) then you drop it own to Earth where you sink it deep into a foundation. After that you attach cars to the gigantic Indian rope trick contraption and ride your way up! This reduces the cost of moving materials to space immensely; from over twenty grand a pound to just a couple of hundred bucks or less.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is probably the inventor of the idea; he conceived a tower to space, a sort of a new and improved Tower of Babel. The compression would make such a structure impractical, but this would be a little different.
But there are some issues. Space.com gives us the story:
Two critical problems stand in the way of a space elevator, but each is solvable. That's the view of space elevator expert Jerome Pearson, the president of STAR of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
The first (and tougher) problem is making the tether material strong enough to support its own weight hanging from geostationary altitude.
"Progress has been made, and after decades of work, there is the prospect of single crystals 62,000 miles [100,000 kilometers] long with the required strength. The best materials are based on carbon structures, either nanotubes or graphene sheets," Pearson told Space.com.
The second problem involves avoiding collisions of the elevator ribbon with satellites and space debris, Pearson said. Since the elevator would be fixed and debris is moving at high speed, the collision velocity is high enough to sever the ribbon. One solution is to create "waves" in the ribbon to avoid satellites, but this is difficult with debris objects because there are so many of them, he said. [Space Junk Clean Up: 7 Wild Ways to Destroy Orbital Debris]
End excerpt.
This soft-peddles the problems to an amazing degree. First, we don't know how to make any material anywhere nearly strong enough to support this weight and support the tension on the wire that is necessary. Carbon nanotubes are as close as we come, Carbon nanotubes are a flexible material that is one hundred times as strong as steel. They are also very flexible, and it is hoped that a wire a few inches wide will be adequate for the task. You need a tensile strength of at least 100 gigapascals, something that is beyond current material science. Other materials under consideration are boron nitride nanotubes, and diamond nanothreads.
Also, the elevator would pass through the Van Allan Radiation Belt, thus frying passengers - unless they were heavily shielded. The damned elevator moves too slowly in these critical spots. And of course the thing could be hit by debris - both on the Earth and in space. What happens if there is an Earthquake that damages the base? A Typhoon? A giant who likes to play a super-sized Jews Harp?
In space itself impact with meteoroids would be devastating. Remember, the cable can't really move out of the way of anything.
I suspect a space elevator is one of those dreams that will never be realized, at least not on Earth. But that isn't the end of it; they could be useful in space itself, to launch from orbit to parts out "yonder. Also, we could possibly build one on the moon to allow us to move materials for space construction, or even perhaps one on Mars (as Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his Mars Trilogy). But Earth? I wouldn't ride the unsafe thing.
And the Moon and Mars and other bodies with little or no atmosphere are ideal for the tether, but other systems would work as well or better. Launching lasers, for example, would work fine on an airless - or nearly airless as in the case of Mars - body. A launching laser is a ground based laser cannon that fires at the underside of a solid booster. The booster is composed of a material that vaporizes easily, thus producing thrust. It has no internal working parts; it's just an inverted cone of light weight material that acts as propellant. This winds up being easier to build, cheaper, and is far less dangerous, in my opinion. It wouldn't work well on Earth, where the fairly thick atmosphere would block the beam. But on the Moon or even Mars it would be a handy technology, and would probably be, well, not better than a space elevator, but as good and a lot cheaper.
Most dangerous of all, Man himself would be a constant threat to this. So many of the radical environmentalists would hate this thing, as would backward countries and cultures. There wouldn't be a lot of protection from terrorists or even missiles for a space elevator.
Liberals love trains. I think the fascination with these space elevators is just another manifestation of their infantile desire to play with toy trains. Trains to the stars!
Or a new Tower of Babel; we know how well THAT worked out.
The satire site Babylon Bee has a fun little piece suggesting NASA build trains to outer space rather than use rockets. Liberals love trains and so may be on board with renewed space exploration.
From the piece:
A new environmental proposal would have the US replace all public and private spacecraft with high-speed trains by the year 2030, reports confirmed Thursday.
"We are wasting so much rocket fuel to generate the thrust necessary to leave Earth's orbit when we could just build a train track all the way to Mars or Jupiter," said a lobbyist for the train industry. "And just think about how pleasant a ride from Earth to Mars would be, coasting along the space tracks at 200 miles per hour for the next 193 years."
The initial proposal would only cost approximately $10,000 trillion, according to a representative of one environmental think tank in D.C. "This is really a bargain when you think about it," she said, pointing to a complex series of calculations she had performed on a LeapFrog laptop. "Besides, we can just print money to pay for it. Or maybe have a bake sale or something."
"We are wasting so much rocket fuel to generate the thrust necessary to leave Earth's orbit when we could just build a train track all the way to Mars or Jupiter," said a lobbyist for the train industry. "And just think about how pleasant a ride from Earth to Mars would be, coasting along the space tracks at 200 miles per hour for the next 193 years."
The initial proposal would only cost approximately $10,000 trillion, according to a representative of one environmental think tank in D.C. "This is really a bargain when you think about it," she said, pointing to a complex series of calculations she had performed on a LeapFrog laptop. "Besides, we can just print money to pay for it. Or maybe have a bake sale or something."
Read the rest.
Actually, while this is entirely a tongue-in-cheek prooposal, there are ideas of building "space trains" as a way to launch people and equpment into orbit. Called Space Elevators, Beanstalks, or skyhooks, the idea is to string a cable from the surface of the Earth to an anchor rock well beyond an orbital station. You would ride the rail up from the ground over the course of several days, like a super duper train.
Essentially, a cable will have to be made - a cable constructed of a very unusual material, one with an unbelievable tensile strength, and stretching sixty thousand miles from the surface of the Earth well past a geostationary orbit (not geosynchronous since that wobbles relative to the surface, but actual geostationary, meaning it stays over the same point on Earth all the time.) It will have to be tethered by something massive, likely a pretty pure nickel-iron one. Massive solar panels would provide most of the electricity needed, although being in geostat orbit it will be in shadow for a fair amount of time, so you may need a nuclear power station at the base. You build the sixty thousand mile cable in orbit (from material from the asteroid, perhaps, although you are going to have to make some amazing stuff and it will require a lot more tech and materials than just some iron) then you drop it own to Earth where you sink it deep into a foundation. After that you attach cars to the gigantic Indian rope trick contraption and ride your way up! This reduces the cost of moving materials to space immensely; from over twenty grand a pound to just a couple of hundred bucks or less.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is probably the inventor of the idea; he conceived a tower to space, a sort of a new and improved Tower of Babel. The compression would make such a structure impractical, but this would be a little different.
But there are some issues. Space.com gives us the story:
Two critical problems stand in the way of a space elevator, but each is solvable. That's the view of space elevator expert Jerome Pearson, the president of STAR of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
The first (and tougher) problem is making the tether material strong enough to support its own weight hanging from geostationary altitude.
"Progress has been made, and after decades of work, there is the prospect of single crystals 62,000 miles [100,000 kilometers] long with the required strength. The best materials are based on carbon structures, either nanotubes or graphene sheets," Pearson told Space.com.
The second problem involves avoiding collisions of the elevator ribbon with satellites and space debris, Pearson said. Since the elevator would be fixed and debris is moving at high speed, the collision velocity is high enough to sever the ribbon. One solution is to create "waves" in the ribbon to avoid satellites, but this is difficult with debris objects because there are so many of them, he said. [Space Junk Clean Up: 7 Wild Ways to Destroy Orbital Debris]
End excerpt.
This soft-peddles the problems to an amazing degree. First, we don't know how to make any material anywhere nearly strong enough to support this weight and support the tension on the wire that is necessary. Carbon nanotubes are as close as we come, Carbon nanotubes are a flexible material that is one hundred times as strong as steel. They are also very flexible, and it is hoped that a wire a few inches wide will be adequate for the task. You need a tensile strength of at least 100 gigapascals, something that is beyond current material science. Other materials under consideration are boron nitride nanotubes, and diamond nanothreads.
Also, the elevator would pass through the Van Allan Radiation Belt, thus frying passengers - unless they were heavily shielded. The damned elevator moves too slowly in these critical spots. And of course the thing could be hit by debris - both on the Earth and in space. What happens if there is an Earthquake that damages the base? A Typhoon? A giant who likes to play a super-sized Jews Harp?
In space itself impact with meteoroids would be devastating. Remember, the cable can't really move out of the way of anything.
I suspect a space elevator is one of those dreams that will never be realized, at least not on Earth. But that isn't the end of it; they could be useful in space itself, to launch from orbit to parts out "yonder. Also, we could possibly build one on the moon to allow us to move materials for space construction, or even perhaps one on Mars (as Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his Mars Trilogy). But Earth? I wouldn't ride the unsafe thing.
And the Moon and Mars and other bodies with little or no atmosphere are ideal for the tether, but other systems would work as well or better. Launching lasers, for example, would work fine on an airless - or nearly airless as in the case of Mars - body. A launching laser is a ground based laser cannon that fires at the underside of a solid booster. The booster is composed of a material that vaporizes easily, thus producing thrust. It has no internal working parts; it's just an inverted cone of light weight material that acts as propellant. This winds up being easier to build, cheaper, and is far less dangerous, in my opinion. It wouldn't work well on Earth, where the fairly thick atmosphere would block the beam. But on the Moon or even Mars it would be a handy technology, and would probably be, well, not better than a space elevator, but as good and a lot cheaper.
Most dangerous of all, Man himself would be a constant threat to this. So many of the radical environmentalists would hate this thing, as would backward countries and cultures. There wouldn't be a lot of protection from terrorists or even missiles for a space elevator.
Liberals love trains. I think the fascination with these space elevators is just another manifestation of their infantile desire to play with toy trains. Trains to the stars!
Or a new Tower of Babel; we know how well THAT worked out.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
07:54 AM
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