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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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An uplifting experience The Space Elevator concept is one I’ve always found to be of interest, but which I personally placed at least a century or more in the future. I remember many fun discussions in the early days of the sci.space netnews group; in which calculations of exponential tapers, masses and tensile strength tables were batted about gleefully. Carbon nanotubes were still in the future back then; and even in later discussions we all considered mass production of real fibres to be very far off.
Well, sometimes even those of us who have one foot in the next decade are too pessimistic. A company, High Lift Systems, has been formed to work on a near term design. Advances in production of carbon nanotubes have (mostly) solved the last basic problem. We will soon be able to build sufficient quantities of sufficiently strong material to actually build one.
Of course there is that one little detail of raising $10 billion dollars in the capital markets…
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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$10bn isn’t that much money. E.g. it’s £167 for every man, woman and child in Great Britain. It’s probably less than $40 per American. If there was a point to doing it, then it’s affordable.
Unfortunately, as I understand it, there aren’t yet practical applications of micro-g manufacturing that would provide the market for the thing. If there were…
Micro-g manufacturing isn’t the only reason for the elevator. Satalite repair and recharging would be a profitable bussiness. Satalites have to be very small and run for a very long time, those two things make them expensive. Cheaper lift cost and easy acess remove those cost. There are many uses for easy space acess, and an elevator gives just that.
The primary market would be tourism, which would be many billions at the costs provided by an elevator. Unfortunately, there are some other problems with it than raising the money, like the collision hazard issue.
If those guys could find some other applications for their research that don’t have quite the startup cost, they can raise the money *that* way. How did Bill Gates get his first $10 billion? By begging the IMF or the Ex-Im Bank?
Ah, satellites – hadn’t spotted that.
Ten billion dollars wouldn’t come even close to paying for a space elevator. Try a hundred times that (a trillion) and maybe you’d be in the right ballpark. The biggest problem is not supporting the weight of a payload. It’s supporting the weight of the cable itself. At the surface, the cable could be fairly thin. It would have to widen as it rises, and even with carbon nanotubes it would be many metres wide by the point it met the tether counterweight (which in practice would probably have to be a small asteroid).
A really big problem is what happens if the cable snaps high above the earth. The mass of this thing would be enormous, and the rotation of the earth would spool the cable up, destroying everything within a wide zone either side of the equator. Being in Quito would be a bad idea at this point.
Rand: They can greatly alleviate the impact problem with Forwards HoyTether(tm) concept and active and continous repairt-bots. If you can afford to build one of these (and by the time you can) you can afford the solutions.
Raising The Capital: Until markets develop you just aren’t going to raise this sort of capital. It is easy to do on zero risk infrastructure, but not on high risk technological ventures. It just won’t happen…. until, as Rand noted, the Tourism industry really clicks in.
It isn’t enough: Well, look at High Lifts business plan. Perhaps it is too low… but not by orders of magnitude. We’re not talking about NASA pricing; technology has moved on a great deal since those 1980’s trillion prices were bandied about; and yes of course I and enyone else who has ever looked at beanstalks knows about the exponential taper required. The taper gets rapidly smaller as the tensile strength goes up, and the win in total mass and construction cost is also expenential. If buckytube cables can be built cost effectively, we are at the near theoretical limit of materials strength and the cost factor is no longer quite so astronomical as it would be for lesser materials.
I might also add that trillion dollar costs were for rather larger systems that had a large midpoint station and a captured asteroid for an upper end anchor. A bit of a larger proposition that what High Lift is talking about.