And now on Flickr, we have a picture of;
“The Space Elevator’s temporary low altitude support balloons, photographed here looking down from the construction shuttle at 15 miles above the Earth. The ballons provide additional stability/lift to the carbon nanotube ribbons in the lower 20 miles as they are unreeled from the international space colony transit station, sitting in geo syncronous orbit at approximately 200 miles above ground. The carbon nanotube material was first used commercially in the first decade of the 2000’s for DVD shrink wrapping….proving it’s worth then as a virtually impregnable material and frustrating thousands of consumers.After damage from several incidents involving homemade comets the Space Elevator program is currently stalled pending litigation against ‘Sprockley Space Toys’ and their ‘Comet Creation Kit’.”
The ‘author’ of this picture (Bruce Lemon) also goes on to tell us that;
“The elevators run 24 hrs Mon-Sun Jumahl, as long as it’s not too cloudy..(clouds interfere w/ the laser powered shuttle cars). Fee is $35,000 US dollars per 20 pound/1 cf payload, with a 50% discount for elevator construction consortium governments. 2 buttons currently, w/ an additional planned for the moon at an unknown future date. No smoking, and meals are an extra $10.”
So this is way cool – when can I book a ride?
(Click on the picture thumbnail for a larger version, or visit Bruce Lemon’s photostream on Flickr. He has several hundred pictures loaded, the last one, as of the writing of this post, was of one scary looking goose…)
So is this really how people plan to do it? It makes sense to me. Why not have a multitude of enormous zeppelins helping to suspend the cable in the atmosphere? The cable itself could pipe helium straight to the balloons.
Instead of using ground based lasers for any clamber’s initial lift, why not use lighter than air balloons? In fact, the ground based lasers might serve better heating up hot air balloons.