{"id":1266,"date":"2009-08-20T14:14:28","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T19:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1266"},"modified":"2009-08-20T14:14:28","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T19:14:28","slug":"alan-boyle-and-the-space-elevator-reality-check","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1266","title":{"rendered":"Alan Boyle and the Space Elevator ‘Reality Check’"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a number of feeds in my RSS reader.\u00a0 Periodically I go through and clear out a bunch that are no longer of interest to me.\u00a0 One that I’ve never cleared out and always enjoyed reading is Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log<\/a>.\u00a0 Alan always finds the most interesting bit of information to pass along.\u00a0 If you don’t subscribe to his blog, you’re missing a treat…<\/p>\n

Alan has also been an avid follower of the efforts to develop a Space Elevator and has been to most of the competitions and most of the US conferences, including this year’s US Space Elevator Conference.<\/p>\n

Here is his take<\/a> on this year’s conference and the Space Elevator in general.\u00a0 The picture with the tether that the Japanese team brought to this year’s Strong Tether competition shows that tether draped over yours truly’s fat fingers…<\/p>\n

Alan refers to Ben Shelef’s Space Elevator Feasibility Condition<\/em><\/a> paper and I’m glad he does.\u00a0 As I’ve opined here before, I think this is the most significant paper that has come out of the space elevator community in quite some time.\u00a0 It’s most important point states that unless some sort of unforeseen breakthrough can happen in the development of carbon nanotubes, we’re going to have to live with a tether that is no stronger than ~50 MYuris.\u00a0 A tether \/ Space Elevator is still possible with this strength, but it gives us less leeway than we thought we had in the past.<\/p>\n

I hope Ben is wrong about this (so does he), but if a ~50 MYuri tether is all we’re going to get, then we should start designing towards that.\u00a0 This will be the subject of a future post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a number of feeds in my RSS reader.\u00a0 Periodically I go through and clear out a bunch that are no longer of interest to me.\u00a0 One that I’ve never cleared out and always enjoyed reading is Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log.\u00a0 Alan always finds the most interesting bit of information to pass along.\u00a0 If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements","category-spaceelevatorcompetitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266","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=1266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}