2007 Space Elevator Games – (Entry 44)

Centaurus failed to qualify.  They were unsure of the reason, but the climber only moved a few inches, not enough to consider this a qualification.

There may be one more run tonight.  LaserMotive may get one more shot at this.  I don’t know at the moment, but will put up at least one more post tonight, letting all of you know what is happening and summarizing the evening’s results.

It’s starting to rain pretty hard here…

2 thoughts on “2007 Space Elevator Games – (Entry 44)

  1. Dave

    my brother and i were discussing the space elevator concept and he brought up a point that i couldn’t answer. wouldn’t a space conveyor be more practical than an elevator? 2 belts operating side-by-side would allow one to be down for inspection or replacement of segments while the other continued lifting payloads into space. further, the ground station could be anchored next to a diverted river and water could be used to generate the required ‘lift’. just curious.

  2. Brian

    ‘Practical’ is one of those hard to define deals when there isn’t any hard data to work with. So all of this is with a great big cup of ‘it depends’.

    The first thing a rational SE builder would do with his first Edwards style SE is … build another. Then you’ve got a spare and a ribbon that can be used to build more ribbons.

    Also – there may not BE a market for stuff coming down.

    Going up you’ve got to ship your cargo to the ribbon head – no getting around it.. Coming back you could drop stuff by capsule anywhere there is open space or water.

    Stuff coming back by SE incurs an extra cost – it’s a long way from the ribbon head to anywhere else.

    Running water in an of itself isn’t going to generate the lit needed – or I don’t think so. A conveyer belt requires that the entire mass be shoved around – that’s a lot of mass and horsepower. Dams for hydro power? Expensive – I’ll bet we can run distributed lasers for less cost than building a single massive hydro plant.

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