{"id":1101,"date":"2008-10-21T00:05:27","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T05:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1101"},"modified":"2008-10-21T23:10:14","modified_gmt":"2008-10-22T04:10:14","slug":"wheres-my-space-elevator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1101","title":{"rendered":"Where’s my Space Elevator?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the Discovery Channel’s DiscoverySPACE section<\/a>, Spaceward’s Ben Shelef gives us a feel for what a Space Elevator tether might look like at ground level and\u00a0discusses the benefits we might expect when these come into existence…<\/p>\n

Money quote:<\/p>\n

“…payload size is practically unlimited because space elevators can be built to any scale. Replace the quarter-inch tether with a 2.5-inch tether, and the elevator could lift 100 times the weight. That’s more than 1,000 tons in this case — about 40 shipping containers or three complete <\/em>International Space Stations (ISS)<\/em><\/a> — per day!”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Currently the assembled ISS components<\/a> weigh 300,214 kg – about 300 metric tons.<\/p>\n

3 of these per day?\u00a0 That’s what I’m talking about…<\/p>\n

The question arises, of course, who would want to ship that much stuff up into space…\u00a0 To answer that question, take a look at the history of railroads in this country (or in any country).\u00a0 As soon as the freight capacity\u00a0was there,\u00a0people came up with\u00a0all sorts of\u00a0things to send from Chicago to Oregon or New York to Los Angeles.\u00a0 Once this capability was put into place, people began shipping\u00a0stuff cross-country that once seemed fanciful; everything from refrigerated food\u00a0and automobiles to\u00a0raw materials, people and livestock.\u00a0 And now that energy efficiency is becoming important again, railroads are\u00a0becoming more important than\u00a0ever.<\/p>\n

Items traveling up the Space Elevator will be inside\u00a0standardized shipping containers.\u00a0\u00a0Individuals and companies who want to move into space, or visit other places, or put satellites into orbit or manufacture things in space, etc.\u00a0will use these containers.\u00a0 You won’t have to worry about things shaking loose or having to be subjected to crushing g-forces.\u00a0 There will be a shipping depot on the ground (or in the ocean) to load\u00a0and one or more depots in space to unload.\u00a0 Shippers will be given a bulk rate and a container size to work with – the rest will be up to them.<\/p>\n

And,\u00a0shipping will\u00a0work both ways.\u00a0 Once material can be gathered in\/from space (be it raw materials or items that are manufactured\/grown in space), the Space Elevator can bring them back down.\u00a0 Return items will also be in those same standardized shipping containers – no “Shuttle tiles” necessary to stand the heat of re-entry.<\/p>\n

We cannot possibly imagine all the uses of the Space Elevator, but only the truly unimaginative can fail to see how it will benefit mankind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the Discovery Channel’s DiscoverySPACE section, Spaceward’s Ben Shelef gives us a feel for what a Space Elevator tether might look like at ground level and\u00a0discusses the benefits we might expect when these come into existence… Money quote: “…payload size is practically unlimited because space elevators can be built to any scale. Replace the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}