Anchoring the Space Elevator in the Atlantic Ocean?

As mentioned in the LiftPort April, 2006 Technical Newsletter, Jasper Bouwmeester, an Aerospace Engineering student in the Netherlands, will be interning at LiftPort this summer.  The Newsletter describes a Space Elevator concept project that Jasper and his team did, with one of their conclusions being that the Space Elevator should be anchored in the Atlantic Ocean.  The Newsletter contains a link to the paper created – you can also find it here.  It’s well worth the read.

11 thoughts on “Anchoring the Space Elevator in the Atlantic Ocean?

  1. Bob Munck

    “The” Space Elevator? Do you mean the first one? Or the second, a year later? Or the third, eighteen months after that? Or the eleventh?

    A point of netiquette: you really should put a warning on a link to a 4 MB .pdf file. Even with two broadband connections (DSL, cable), it wasted a bit of my time to download something I already had in my memex. And have I mentioned that I really dislike pdf?

  2. Ted Semon

    As regards to “which” Space Elevator I meant, the one I referred to in my posting is simply the one they’re proposing. Only time will tell if it is the “First” or the “Second” or whatever…

    And, sorry about not mentioning it’s a 4MB file – I’ll try and remember that in the future. What’s your beef with .pdf files anyway? They’re usable on practically all platforms, the tool required to open/read them is free and they’re a de facto (and well deserved, IMHO) standard… I, for one, am happy it wasn’t a Microsoft Works document, or something in a Mac or Linux software format that I might have to find a converter for.

  3. Brian

    I, for one, am happy it wasn’t a Microsoft Works document, or something in a Mac or Linux software format that I might have to find a converter for.

    We wouldn’t do that to you. For better or worse PDF is the file exchange format and that .. is that.

    Come to think of it I can’t think of an explicit Mac or Linux format. I can gen documents in XML (my preference), Word Doc or PS and PDF.

  4. Ted Semon Post author

    “Come to think of it, I can’t think of an explicit Mac or Linux format”. And maybe there’s not. But I do know that I’ve been in the situation where I’ve had to hunt for a converter to install into Microsoft Word so that I could view a non-Word document.

    I have no problems with .pdf. Version 6 of the Adobe Reader was a bit of a hog, but I like Version 7. It just works…

  5. Bob Munck

    What’s your beef with .pdf files anyway?

    You’re going to be sorry you asked that.

    They’re usable on practically all platforms, the tool required to open/read them is free and they’re a de facto (and well deserved, IMHO) standard…

    Agreed, and there’s another standard with those same characteristics: HTML! PDF, at least the way it is most used, is a standard for printer output. I’m unlikely to print out this 136-page document, and I think that’s true of most people, especially since it requires a color printer.

    So, because you’re forcing me to view a printed-page document on a computer display, I’m hit with the following annoyances:

    o Columns that are too wide to read comfortably — when you’re reading, your eyes normally scan down the middle of the column. If the column is wider than about 64 characters/10 words across, that doesn’t work and your eyes have to zig-zag horizontally to read. The columns in your document are about 100 characters/15 words wide. (On the other hand, quite a few pdf documents use 2-column format to solve this problem. Because the page is generally higher than the monitor, this means you have to scroll down to read the first column, then back up to read the second. Horrible.)

    o Because the pdf assumes physical pages, there’s a page break every 11 inches, even if it comes right in the middle of a sentence. We get about 3 inches of completely useless footer and header information. Also, the Adobe reader doesn’t handle scrolling over page boundaries very well; I often have to painfully scroll back up to read the last few lines of the previous page because the display suddenly jumped to the next one.

    o Because it’s a single document that encapsules all the text and graphics, pdf files are clumsy and slow to download and to load into the Adobe reader. That reader itself is very badly designed and the company’s updating processes are a pain in the behind. I just double-clicked on a local copy of your document in an effort to see how long it took to initialize; Adobe complained that it hadn’t finished installing the previous update, demanded that it be allowed to check for new updates, downloaded something that took me from version 7.0.4 to 7.0.5, installed it, made me reboot, and then finally showed me the document. I lost track of the starting time. This would be ok if it happened every couple of months, but Adobe seems to do it weekly.

    Enough for now. Suffice to say that if you want to supply printable documents and support those who will read it on a monitor, use HTML and add a link to the pdf file. Better, do the HTML style sheets so as to support both monitor format and printed-page format. This is, after all, the World-Wide Web.

  6. Bob Munck

    Ted, Brian, what was this document created in originally? Word? LaTeX? Framemaker? I’m guessing LaTeX because of the many and well-rendered equations. Was any attempt made to run the original document through a converter to HTML? If not, would you let me try?

    (I’m a huge fan of LaTeX; Don Knuth was inspired to do the original TeX by the nscript2 processor that Stu Madnick and I did for CP-67 in the late 60’s.)

  7. Ted Semon Post author

    Bob, your points are noted and, in general, agreed with. But I think it’s easier to view a .pdf file than to print an .html document – printing html just invites getting some of it chopped off. But, never having spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, I guess I could be wrong.

    By the way, this is the way I found the document – I didn’t change it from anything to anything…

    You’ll need to contact the author to find out what he created it in.

  8. Brian

    Bob, I”m guessing LaTeX from the background of the student but I have no idea. He published it as PDF and gave us a copy in the format

    You’re correct about the ‘best’ way to provide files for viewing. But we don’t always get the source document to fiddle with. Someday I’ll have the infrastructure to setup a script to let the authors do this – submit the postscript and let latex bork it around, html links and a link to PDF.

  9. Bob Munck

    But I think it’s easier to view a .pdf file than to print an .html document – printing html just invites getting some of it chopped off.

    As I mentioned, you can specify different style sheets for the browser to use to render the document for differrent display media. That is, I could have one paragraph (<p>) format for a large-screen display, another for a handheld, another for a printer, etc. It’s possible, in theory, to do an HTML document that will print exactly like the .pdf document prints, but will display on a monitor in an appropriate way for a monitor. I’ve only done this occasionally, and I’ve seen very few online documents that do it, so I don’t know how well it’s supported by the various browsers. If the author hasn’t done that at all, then yes, sending his HTML to a printer is problematic.

  10. Jasper Bouwmeester

    By accident, I have found this blog mentioning the report I worked on. Very intresting to see that a lot of people read it!
    Due to our small project time of three months, it still contains errors and coarse simplifications. Still, I think it is worth reading of

    The most intresting parts in my opinion, which contains more or different information than other reports on the SE:

    – the thermal household of the system (neglected by NIAC report)
    – the location of the SE
    – the static stability (the role of the strain of the cable )
    – the fact that transporting passengers will be a huge design driver (better first build some unmanned SE’s)

    We do not intend to build an actual space elevator by the way. This was a design project to complete our BSc. program.

    It is indeed created in Latex. PDF is in my opinion a perfect way to spread documents. The latex source in unreadable to most of the people and I do not think it is relevant to spread those around. Most institutes use a post-script format because of compatibility and copyright reasons.

  11. Ted Semon Post author

    I thought the document was excellent (both in content and in formatting 🙂 ). I haven’t seen the idea to build it in the Atlantic Ocean seriously proposed and defended before.

    I look forward to seeing the fruits of your internship at LiftPort.

Comments are closed.