{"id":2230,"date":"2015-03-03T21:24:06","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T03:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2015-03-03T21:32:53","modified_gmt":"2015-03-04T03:32:53","slug":"payloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=2230","title":{"rendered":"Payloads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1461\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"\/media\/XKCD1461.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"740\" height=\"253\" \/><\/a>Many of you remember, I&#8217;m sure, a cartoon on the most-excellent XKCD website entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1461\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Payloads<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 This cartoon compared and contrasted, in increments of &#8220;horses&#8221; (which I calculate to represent 1,200 pound increments), the differences in Launch Vehicle Capacity and Spacecraft mass of various space craft from the past, present and future.<\/p>\n<p>The kicker for Space Elevator fans was, if you moused over the original cartoon, the comment &#8220;<em>With a space elevator, a backyard of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute<\/em>&#8221; would briefly appear.<\/p>\n<p>I have no idea where he got the space elevator numbers from but, as a proponent of the idea of a space elevator, I have to compliment the enthusiasm on his part \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/media\/20MTonClimber_rev1_Flattened_WithDate.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"\/media\/20MTonClimber_rev1_Flattened_WithDate.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"296\" height=\"392\" \/><\/a>How much payload COULD a space elevator launch?\u00a0 The answer to that is, as you might expect, complicated.\u00a0 It depends almost exclusively on the carrying capacity of the tether and the power system.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll talk more about this in the next post, but for now, you can read the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceward.org\/documents\/papers\/SEPSAO.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Space Elevator Power System Analysis and Optimization<\/a> document written by Spaceward CEO Ben Shelef.\u00a0 It lays out very clearly why power systems have such a profound effect on the throughput of a space elevator.<\/p>\n<p>Here is my contribution \/ augmentation to the XKCD cartoon showing the weight of the Climber and the Payload which can be carried by a Climber for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Space-Elevator-Earth---Space-Transportation\/dp\/0972604502\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1425439331&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\">Edwards-Westling baseline 20MetricTon space elevator<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Total Climber mass, with Payload, is 20 Metric Tons.\u00a0 Payload makes up about 40%.<\/p>\n<p>Click on the graphic to see a larger version.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of you remember, I&#8217;m sure, a cartoon on the most-excellent XKCD website entitled Payloads.\u00a0 This cartoon compared and contrasted, in increments of &#8220;horses&#8221; (which I calculate to represent 1,200 pound increments), the differences in Launch Vehicle Capacity and Spacecraft mass of various space craft from the past, present and future. The kicker for Space [&hellip;]<\/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-2230","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\/2230","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=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2238,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions\/2238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}