Space elevator

www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/stor...2763,1041360,00.html

70 scientists and engineers are gathering in Santa Fe to seriously discuss building the elevator from Arthur C Clarkes sci-fi book Fountains of Paradise.

"Mr Clarke - who once said a space elevator would only be built "about 50 years after everyone stops laughing" - was due to address the scientists at the Santa Fe conference today by satellite link from his home in Sri Lanka."

To nicley contrast with that story of inspired futuristic orbital transportation, here is a link stressing the importance of bolts on satellites. doh! www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=10299

"As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the "turn over cart" at approximately 7:15 PDT today, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. (See attached photo). The 18' long spacecraft was about 3' off the ground when it fell. The mishap was caused because 24 bolts were missing from a fixture in the “turn over cart”.

Cheers,
~Al

Please correct me if i'm wrong but i seem to remember reading that Clarke based the space elevator on an earlier idea by a russian scientist. (Cannot remember the name).

P.S another book to explore this idea was The web bwtween worlds by Charles sheffield

Below is a quote from the guardian page mentioned in the first posting. See if you can spot the mistake.

""A space elevator would make rockets redundant by granting cheaper access to space. At about a third of the way along the cable - 36,000km from Earth - objects take a year to complete a full orbit. If the cable's centre of gravity remained at this height, the cable would remain vertical, as satellites placed at this height are geostationary, effectively hovering over the same spot on the ground. "" :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:

Hi,

Please correct me if i'm wrong but i seem to remember reading that Clarke based the space elevator on an earlier idea by a russian scientist. (Cannot remember the name).

Youre right, I wasnt aware of the history of the idea.

science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast07sep_1.htm

"As early as 1895, a Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky suggested a fanciful "Celestial Castle" in geosynchronous Earth orbit attached to a tower on the ground, not unlike Paris's Eiffel tower. Another Russian, a Leningrad engineer by the name of Yuri Artsutanov, wrote some of the first modern ideas about space elevators in 1960. Published as a non-technical story in Pravda, his story never caught the attention of the West. Science magazine ran a short article in 1966 by John Isaacs, an American oceanographer, about a pair of whisker-thin wires extending to a geostationary satellite. The article ran basically unnoticed. The concept finally came to the attention of the space flight engineering community through a technical paper written in 1975 by Jerome Pearson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. This paper was the inspiration for Clarke's novel. "

Cheers,
~Al

Albert,

Space elevators (A Stairway to Heaven) is just one of the topics in a fascinating book titled "Our Cosmic Futures" by Nikos Prantzos, published by Cambridge in 2000. Other topics include O'Neill's space colonies, mining asteroidal resources, the conquest of Mars, the Daedalus Project, ramjets and other possible methods of space travel, the Dyson sphere, dismantling planets, celestial dangers + a host of others. Great read.

Regards,

Gordon

Many science fiction books that i have read now call this collection of satellites the O'neill Halo.

BTW i love the fact that the guardian reported that a satellite orbiting at 36,000km (The Clarke orbit) will take one year to complete a revolution. I'd love to know the source of this figure.