Edwards-Westling book<\/a> on this subject.\u00a0 Build it on the equator?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Build it out of carbon nanotubes (or other super-strong material)?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Increase the capacity of the “seed” tether by using the elevator itself?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Power the climbers with lasers?\u00a0 Check.<\/p>\nBut there are some differences too.\u00a0 Williams has the elevator based on an island rather than an ocean-going platform that was described in the Edwards-Westling book.\u00a0 While this simplifies some things, it also becomes more difficult in other ways as there are no unclaimed islands – wherever you want to build a land-based space elevator, you will have a local government to deal with (Williams writes about this a lot in the book).\u00a0 Also, and this is my second biggest quibble with the design, Williams describes multiple tethers going up to a single space station.\u00a0 According to technical people I know and trust, this is just not realistic.\u00a0 Tethers spaced so closely together will inevitably touch and get tangled up, causing all sorts of problems.\u00a0 The counterweight (“Apex Anchor” in the current vernacular) will keep everything generally taut.\u00a0 But there will be oscillations in the tether which will naturally occur and also those that have to be propagated throughout at least some parts of the tether to avoid satellites and other large space debris.\u00a0 And my biggest quibble with the design is on the subject of space debris, this book ignores the issue.<\/p>\n
Still, all in all, it’s not a bad depiction of a possible space elevator – certainly better than some of the half-baked ideas I see on various internet forums…<\/p>\n
The writing of the book was, in general (and IMHO of course), fairly well done.\u00a0 There were a couple of loose ends, some spelling\/grammar errors, etc. and also some stereotypes which, for me anyway, detracted from the story.\u00a0 For example, the “evil government bureaucrat” was an ugly, single, middle aged woman who owned a cat.\u00a0 Hello!\u00a0 And the “journalist” who was portrayed as being biased and uniformed was named “McYaps”.\u00a0 The good people were really good and the bad people were really bad – not much grey there.\u00a0 Corporations could do no wrong and government could do no right.\u00a0 And some of the villains, the Chinese and Iranians, were fairly predictable.\u00a0 Finally, things seemed to go just a bit too well in every technical aspect of the space elevator and colonization of the moon – only one accident was recorded.\u00a0 Again, that’s just not realistic.\u00a0 But all in all, the book kept me very interested in what was going to happen next.<\/p>\n
And, as implied earlier, Williams is not afraid to offend various ethnic and religious groups, in ways that one usually doesn’t see.\u00a0 As this is The Space Elevator Blog, and not FoxNews or MSNBC, I’ll not comment on his political leanings.\u00a0 I will say, however, he has a unique take on how things could fall apart and how they might be put back together again…<\/p>\n
Overall, I give this book a rating of 3.5 stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, I said that my next post was going to be on tether capacities and power systems, but that can wait – a new space-elevator themed book is available! Celestial Phoenix is written by new (I think) author A. P. Williams and is available on Kindle at Amazon. Be warned – this book is NOT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2239","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=2239"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2248,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2239\/revisions\/2248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"\/media\/CelestialPhoenixCoverTrimmed.jpg\")
<\/a>Celestial Phoenix<\/a><\/em> is written by new (I think) author A. P. Williams and is available on Kindle at Amazon.<\/p>\n