"Japanese Space Elevator?" Topic

Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradisemay come true in less than four decades, if a Japanese company achieves its goal: link

Made famous by Clarke's novel, the idea originated in 1895 from Russian futurist and rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (who also conceived of the famous spinning space station idea).

It's not a pipe dream, either. Carbon nano tech is catching up with Clarke's concept of a "diamond filament wire," NASA has proven that cable deployment from orbit is possible in one historic Shuttle mission, and engineers are already developing systems for the "climbers" that would ride the cable.
(For some scale attempts, read here: link )

So our future may be here sooner than we think.

As for gaming, well, I'm not certain how you'd handle it on a tabletop, but an assault or attack on the elevator is an interesting idea. I can imagine a four-tiered assault— one on the ground station, one on the climber en route, one on the terminus station and one on the counterweight station. Factions could range from eco and religious terrorists to rival nations, space companies or even aliens trying to halt human proliferation into space.

Could be fun with a four-level set up of ground, atmosphere (the climber assault), and two orbit sections, the air and space levels being made of plexiglass. Or it could be split across different tables, with gamers trying to coordinate efforts between the different commands.

Question: If we were invaded by a obviously advanced race could Beanstalks be deployed like Mulberry Harbors at D-Day?

For basic safety, there is going to have to be an explosive charge set fairly low in the beanstalk. Probably no higher than the edge of the atmosphere.

Because the weird thing about a beanstalk is that it's actually under tension, not compression from gravity. So if you have a break down low, the rest of the beanstalk will actually fly away from Earth.

Of course, that still leaves a good 100+km of beanstalk to come crashing down to earth.

Earthquake anyone?

Be fun filling out the Health and Safety form

Cue Music

The Moon Rope
Love Exciting and New
come aboard, we're expecting you

The Moon Rope
soon will be making another run
The Moon Rope
promises something for everyone

Set a course for adventure,
your mind's on a new romance

And Love
won't hurt anymore
it's an open smile
on a friendly shore

As long as they build it with a Lido Deck, we're all good.

But it won't be the Japanese who build it. They'll either all be dead from population decline and/or too busy playing with their sexbots.

Isn't it delicious?

Hmmm…anyone remember Traveller:2300/2300A.D.?
Both Earth and Beta canum venaticorum had beanstalks

What people routinely overlook is that the second you build one of these, you effectively have to get rid of EVERYTHING else in Earth Orbit.

There have been suggestions on how to make the stalk 'wiggle' to allow satellite to miss it, or put it on a moveable ship in the ocean to allow it to move around other objects, but nothing I would consider practical.

So, in exchange for this launching system, we lose ISS, GPS, most of our Earth-Observing satellites…

Really does make it an all-or-nothing prospect.

I seem to recall that things went very badly in at least one movie, when the space elevator came crashing down to Earth.

Talk about cracking the whip on an epic scale, with much death and destruction to follow………..

Or was that the book Red Mars? There was a dramatic description of what happens when the elevator is destroyed.

Yeah old news. But if you've seen Gundam 00 you'd know what eventually happened to one of the space elevators.

Imagine debris in low earth orbit falling over an area of hundreds of miles near a population center.

That's why I said you needed to have a shearing charge at about the top of the atmosphere. If you DON'T shear the beanstalk down low in the event of a developing high-orbit break, you're looking at an impact of millions of billions of tons of carbon nanotubes (~3 grams/cc, with many multiple-meter-diameter strands) at orbital velocities, and that tether will wrap around the world multiple times.

Fortunately, Beanstalks need to be on the equator. I figure the one the Japanese build is going to be anchored in the ocean, with a good 500km "splash zone" for the sheared section to land in. As long as you can shear the section before anywhere higher breaks, you can control how big a section drops onto the Earth. The area above your sheared section will fly away from Earth!

What people routinely overlook is that the second you build one of these, you effectively have to get rid of EVERYTHING else in Earth Orbit.

I don't believe you're correct on that at all. You would only need to deal with orbital paths that will directly intersect the very limited area occupied by the elevator "tower." "In orbit" covers a lot of ground (so to speak), and I don't think satellites necessarily intersect every square inch of equatorial sky in their flight. Current active satellites also are equipped with thrusters to make adjustments to their orbital path in the event of collision threats. Between thrusters and "wiggling," I suspect that elevator and satellites could coexist quite comfortably.

You're forgetting a fact about human nature Lion. Sure if you build one far enough away from any population area what would happen? Humans will start building a population center near it anyway because of the economic impact such a thing would create. All things being shipped into orbit would go to these centers before getting loaded onto the elevator.

Try and make the world idiot proof and the world will just build a better idiot.

The difference is that you know which way the bottom end of the beanstalk will fall, so there will be some safe areas to build in, and some areas that will need to be kept clear.

Sure, you could send fishing boats into the splashdown range, but anything permanent will need to be sunk with extreme prejudice.

What people routinely overlook is that the second you build one of these, you effectively have to get rid of EVERYTHING else in Earth Orbit.

I don't believe you're correct on that at all. You would only need to deal with orbital paths that will directly intersect the very limited area occupied by the elevator "tower." "In orbit" covers a lot of ground (so to speak), and I don't think satellites necessarily intersect every square inch of equatorial sky in their flight. Current active satellites also are equipped with thrusters to make adjustments to their orbital path in the event of collision threats. Between thrusters and "wiggling," I suspect that elevator and satellites could coexist quite comfortably.

There might be ways to mitigate it… sort of. But any satellite that is not in a synchronous or harmonic orbit WILL eventually impact the space elevator.

Doubling the mass of new satellites so they can carry more fuel for course changes might be an option, if you can launch them from the elevator. But all current LEO satellites are going to need to go away.

'Wiggling' of the elevator strikes me as a very bad and impractical idea, but I've been wrong before (I thought SpaceX was smoking something when they resurrected the idea of tail-landing rockets).

The elevator will wiggle anyway. That's what puts the speed limit on the trains going up and down the beanstalk. Too fast and the train will shake itself right off the beanstalk, as I understand it.

The trick is to time the wiggles properly.