{"id":524,"date":"2007-02-07T14:22:01","date_gmt":"2007-02-07T20:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=524"},"modified":"2007-06-26T19:00:21","modified_gmt":"2007-06-27T00:00:21","slug":"next-stop-space-elevator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=524","title":{"rendered":"Next Stop Space Elevator"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Universe Blog, the author opines<\/a> about the paradigm shift in thinking required to bring about a Space Elevator – and the resulting paradigm shift that it would make.<\/p>\n

The line that grabbed me the most was this one; “Think about it. No thunderous rocketry. No risky landings. Rockets are so expensive — and launching them so damn burdensome — that they will probably always keep the democratization of space travel at bay.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Is that really true?\u00a0 Lately, I’ve started paying some attention to the private (enterprise) rocketry crowd and I hear claims that they think they will be eventually be able to bring payloads to LEO for “hundreds of dollars per kilogram”.\u00a0 Them’s Space Elevator numbers…<\/p>\n

Can they do it?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I do know that I’ve been unquestioningly accepting the fact that “rocket launches will always be expensive and always be dangerous”, a mistake I don’t intend to keep on repeating.\u00a0 NASA and government rocket launches are expensive and risky, that doesn’t mean they are intrinsically so.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, the pen and ink concept drawing of an Ocean-based Lift platform (from the LiftPort<\/a> archives) that is included in the article is really quite lovely.<\/p>\n

Of course, just because something is done with private enterprise in control (or at least involved), doesn’t guarantee that things will be successful, as this recent video of a commercial Sea Launch Zenit\u00a03SL gone bad<\/a> shows;
\n[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KgsAyvdCURM[\/youtube]
\n.
\nI found it ironic that they cut to the Sea Launch logo immediately after the blast; it seemed like they were saying “This disaster brought to you by Sea Launch”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Universe Blog, the author opines about the paradigm shift in thinking required to bring about a Space Elevator – and the resulting paradigm shift that it would make. The line that grabbed me the most was this one; “Think about it. No thunderous rocketry. No risky landings. Rockets are so expensive — and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-entries","category-pictures-drawings-animations-music-humor-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","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=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}