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Space Elevator Rebuttal From LiftPort Founder
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 26, 2007 12:56 AM
from the take-a-second-look dept.
from the take-a-second-look dept.
TropicalCoder is the reader who submitted the story about the possible demise of LiftPort a couple of weeks back. The resulting discussion was mostly negative about the feasibility of building a space elevator. TropicalCoder writes: "At one point during the discussion, LiftPort founder Michael J. Laine personally entered the discussion, but for the most part remained invisible since he hadn't logged in. I responded to his comment that if he would like a chance to rebut the criticisms, he should contact me and I would undertake to interview him and post the resulting story on Slashdot." Read below for the story of how Mr. Laine's detailed reply and rebuttal to that Slashdot discussion came about. TropicalCoder asks, "After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
Michael Laine called me long distance via cell phone that very day from his back yard near Seattle, and spoke with me for over an hour. Michael came across as a rather sober, likable fellow, not at all like the crackpot image one would conjure up from reading many of the Slashdot comments. He was clearly wounded by the stinging criticisms in the Slashdot discussion, and I couldn't help empathizing with him. Here was man who had put his money where his mouth was, risking everything on his dream, perhaps suffering his darkest hour, and enduring ridicule on top of that.
At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for. It was clear to me that he sincerely believes in what he is doing. Whether he succeeds in the end or not, I would prefer to call him a "visionary." After all, for every great visionary you can recall from history, there must have been a thousand others who tried and failed, but are no less visionary because of that. The jury is still out on LiftPort, and rumors of their death would be premature. They continue their research, and as I write are preparing for the "Tethered Towers" demo on Thursday June 28.
At the end of the conversation it was agreed that I would summarize the Slashdot discussion for him and offer him an opportunity for point-by-point rebuttal. I completed this summary (in which many Slashdot readers will recognize their own words), and sent it off to him the next day. He acknowledged receipt and promised an answer shortly. A few weeks passed, and I imagined that he must have decided in the end that the criticisms were so severe, perhaps it would be best just to try to forget it. It was a total surprise to me when a thoroughly detailed response arrived in my mailbox today, demonstrating that the people at LiftPort at least are still convinced that building a space elevator is possible.
Space elevator themes have been celebrated in science fiction and many Slashdot readers have shared the dream, only to become disillusioned with the apparent pending demise of LiftPort. After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
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Space Elevator Company LiftPort In Trouble 257 comments
TropicalCoder writes "The LiftPort Group, founded four years ago with the lofty dream of building a stairway to heaven, has seemingly reached the end the line. The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit. Elevator cars would be robotic 'lifters' which would climb the ribbon to deliver cargo and eventually people to orbit or beyond. Now LiftPort has all but run out of funds, and the State of Washington's Securities Division has entered a Statement of Charges (PDF) against LiftPort Inc. dba LiftPort Group and founder Michael Laine."
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Good Writeup! (Score:3, Interesting)
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WHy Yes (Score:2, Funny)
Why yes, I do believe my spirit has elevated. My feelings on the matter have definitely been lifted.
Ok, here's my comment (Score:5, Insightful)
LiftPort: We disagree. So far as our official road map is concerned, we are on schedule - and in fact, we are even a little ahead of schedule on some projects.
Ok, that's great, but you're the ones making this amazing claim that you could build a space elevator today if only you had the money. Amazing claims require amazing proof. Your official road map doesn't exactly cut it.
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We need to translate that statement first. They don't mention what KIND of steel. Steel can have a tensile strength of 0.3 GPa to 1.88 GP
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Re:Ok, here's my comment (Score:5, Insightful)
What DID this guy DO to you and all the other moaning slashdotters? Yeah probably like me you grew up post-Apollo and parte-Shuttle and wanted to be an astronaut when you were a kid, so I guess you're a little bitter that the whole spage-age thing hasn't really happened. But hey, why is it all directed at these guys? Did they sneak into your room when you were a kid and molest you, promising that if you kept it a secret from mommy and daddy that you'd get the first ride into space on their space elevator?
Are they making outlandish, unfounded claims with the sole intention of scraping money from willing idiots? Possibly, I don't know for sure, but I'd love to see a space elevator go up, and the technological and exploratory benefits to mankind that followed. So let's give these guys a chance, even if all they're doing is collecting ideas, theories and munging it together with some nice 3d graphics the more people take notice and take the idea seriously the better. But so what if they don't shit one out of their assholes tomorrow morning just for you personally to ride on, give it a rest.
Critique, debate and peer review on any matter are always warranted but shooting insults and slander from the hip because, well, presumably you expected a LiftPort TM by 2005 and free trips to space or something is frankly unwarranted, childish and should be moderated into oblivion.
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If the only problem is that it would cost too much, tell us how much
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It's an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary evidence. If you can't produce that evidence, don't make the claim.
Unless, ya know, you want your credibility to be completely shot.
Re:Ok, here's my comment (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, the guy said they could do it with existing technology, given the funds for 100s of heavy lift rockets (Delta-V maybe?) and A LOT of Honeywell Spectra fibre. Think for a second how much 100s of heavy lift rockets would cost, even if they could have that many made within a production timespan - that's crazy money for most anyone. But if a group of BIG companies got together (Japanese style) I reckon it's almost feasible.
OTOH, and relating back to our Mars [slashdot.org] story, IF this cat can show big investors a serious engineering proposal for a project with existing technology, we just got our first "train station".
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But what next? (Score:5, Funny)
In all seriousness, though, I wish the LiftPort guys luck. I'm not sure how feasible it is, but I'd rather have people investing in creative, sometimes radical technologies than just sitting back and saying "no, that'll never work".
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That kid... (Score:3, Funny)
I hope his pants get caught and a bloodbath ensues.
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Increased Pessimism (Score:3, Interesting)
Not at all. If anything my pessism has increased when I read the spin, handwaving, misdirection, and evasions in Mr Laine's 'rebuttal'.
For example, this little gem:
Q: Business model is predicated on a technology that not only does not exist but you are incapable of inventing.
A: That's true for the president of Boeing too. There's no way he could engineer the likes of the 777 with just the top level executives. He hires the right people to design, test and build these wonders of technology. Rather than waste our investors money on hiring full time engineers that could not succeed within the timeframe allowed by the dollars available, we subcontract. Outsourcing is not a new concept, and it saves companies quite a bit of money and time.
Notice the answer completely unrelated to the question and the 'spin'.
Or this one:
Q: Perhaps should have been managed by a more highly qualified individual, such as a professional engineer with advanced engineering management degrees
Because all engineers make good business administrators? Engineers are (and this is a generalization, I admit) generally too cautious. Innovators are risk takers. Entrepeneurs are risk takers. Engineers want triple redundancy and safety factors. To run a company for 4 years off a $200,000 investment takes talent. Granted, much more was invested by Mr. Laine himself, from his personal income, to keep this business running.
More spin - and the fantastic claim that running a business for $200k for four years implies some kind of 'talent'. Heck, I could run a business for two *centuries* with that kind of investment. (It wouldn't produce a profit - but it would be 'run' and about as effective as LiftPort.)
Q: You'll never see a fully functional space elevator on earth. The requirements are too close to the edge of what is even theoretically possible.
If it weren't for the costs, we could build one this year.
To put it bluntly - this is an outright lie. Period. if it were true - why is LiftPort spending money on R&D rather than production?
Q: Even if the materials science isn't the problem, we have never made 36,000 miles of ANYTHING before.
Roads? Railroads? The SMW3 fiber optic cable is 39,000km long. That's over a third of the 100,000km necessary to build the Elevator to Space (not 36,000 miles).
The SMW3 fiber optic cable isn't a unitary and (for all practical purposes) flawless carbon nanotube fiber. Roads and railroads aren't unitary either. Micheal is either very disingenuous or very clueless.
Q: You need a material approximately 3 times the strength of a (perfect) carbon nanotube in order to be a relatively safe civil/space engineering construction.
That goes back to my statement earlier about engineers. No. You're not going to be able to have triple redundancy, and safety factors. You will have safety margins, and one of our first cargoes would be the second space elevator. We should be able to build that with half the strength of "perfect" SWNTs. We will employ standards of safety. We're sure the international legal community would see to that. About half the team grew up near the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The failure of this bridge is a standard lesson in how NOT to engineer something for most engineering schools. We understand what is at stake.
I too live near the Tacoma Narrows Bridge - and no, that is not how the bridge collapse is taught in engineering schools. Because in fact, the basic engineering of the bridge was quite sound - they failed however to take into account the effects of the winds. Numerous b
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Uh, it was a lesson taught when I went to engineering school. The Tacoma Narrows engineers f*ed up and didn't take all of the variab
I don't think Liftport will work and here's why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Painful Read (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading the Slashdotters' comments was really painful. Do people around here lack vision and research skills?
Carbon nanotubes are a miracle material. Not just for space elevators, but also for strengthening building/vehicle frames and nanotech. Any research on mass production of high-quality carbon nanotubes will have plenty of spill-over effect.
Unrolling the initial fabric from orbit down to the surface without snagging is a challenge, but hardly an impossible one.
Tesla was playing with remote power transmission a century ago. There's still work to be done, but all the major breakthroughs are in place.
Speed to orbit? Why do you need to go fast? People used to take months to cross the Atlantic, and the treasures offered by cheep space travel are massive compared to the treasures of the New World. Or just send up cargo on the elevator and send people on a rocket (expensive and dangerous in comparison, but quick).
In short, this wasn't Slashdot's finest moment.
right about some things, wrong about others (Score:5, Interesting)
Where these guys are right on is that building a CNT factory would generate the kind of money they need to get going, especially if they can reliably grow high quality tubes. They are absolutely right that spin off technologies could more than make up for their current investments. But, as they recently found out, nanotubes are very hard to grow in large amounts, and they grow very slowly... hence the current high cost.
That leads to where they went wrong: They had "contractors" working on nanotube growth. It's not easy to grow CNTs, and it's not well understood. It's very difficult to reproduce published work on CNT growth unless you really, really know what you're doing. They need to form partnerships with the people working with nanotubes who are on the cutting edge of growth research. While they've tried and failed to build a factory, Iijima's group has made major breakthroughs in growing nanotubes in bulk, and he's the obvious person to start off trying to get on board with this (as a well known Nobel laureate working with nanotubes). If not his group, then any number of dedicated CNT-growth research groups in the US.
At some point, it would not be a bad idea to let a scientist into the upper management of a space elevator company. Just as a smart inventor will let go of some control of a company to a business person, these business people would have been wise to let a scientist make some of their decisions.
By (publicly, at least) focusing on robotics, they missed the boat on one key technology they needed which would have also provided them with the funds to keep everything else going. Hopefully whoever takes over leadership of the space elevator community has more luck.
Shift Key (Score:2, Insightful)
I think I lost any remaining respect I had for him when I read through his comments in the previous discussion. It might seem like a minor thing, but if the guy can't be bothered with little d
Nvidia (Score:4, Insightful)
a computer program around the computers available at the beginning of the design process, or designed the program on your
prediction of the computers available at the end of the development process, the latter would be the better product - suited to
the technology available at the time the consumers were ready to use it.
Nvidia does too. Like, the GeForce FX series of their cards. They were to be released together with DirectX 9. Except that nobody knew what DX9 would support and due to some disagreement between Nvidia and Microsoft, Microsoft wouldn't tell. So Nvidia was "predicting the features of DirectX 9". That is, guessing. And guess what? They guessed wrong. GeForce FX was packed with wonderful features which had no support whatsoever in the OS, while features required by DX9 were quickly hacked into the drivers and worked at snail speed in software emulation.
Sure -sometimes- the predictions work. But when it doesn't, it fails hard.
Space Guns anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
In case you're not familiar with the concept: It's basically about accelerating a small vessel (by a light gas gun, a RAM accelerator, electromagnetically or a combination thereof) in a relatively short (about the order of one km) barrel / tunnel to about orbital speed. The vessel itself will only require enough fuel for circularizing its orbit, so unlike conventional boosters, a much bigger part of its mass can be actual payload as the exponential regime of the rocket equation can be mostly avoided.
While the capital costs will be high, a space gun is still dirt cheap compared to a space elevator, and isn't prone to be completely destroyed when hit by lightning, space debris or, for the matter, a shotgun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun [wikipedia.org]
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/05/980500-bull.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/julncher.htm [astronautix.com]
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And by envisioned you mean created, because they have been. Certainly not up to spec for a space elevator yet, but they are out there
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There's lots and lots of places on Earth where nanotubes would be very helpful. A whole bunch of them pay for their own R&D without any federal funding.
There's also more than 1 scientifically advanced
Objection: Asked and Answered (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:It was doomed to failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It was doomed to failure (Score:4, Interesting)
EuroSpaceward was just awarded funding by The National Research Fund of Luxembourg to hold a workshop on space elevator climber and tether design primarily focusing on systems for entry in the US and German competitions. The tentative dates are Nov. 14-16, 2007 and the workshop will be held in a yet to be announced venue in Luxembourg.
found at http://www.spaceelevator.com/ [spaceelevator.com]
So it does seem there is still some interest outside US, albeit for entering a NASA based competition. I think that the immigration problems in the US for foreign students will quickly have some negative effect on innovation in the US in the long term. Innovation in the US has always been due to it's courting of students world wide to study and then contribute.
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Is it just me, or were people saying that about Japan just before and after WW II?
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If you like. It might be a more worthwhile use of time & money to put a spaceport there.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The gigantic, orbiting space stations we envisioned as children won't be possible until we can get stuff to outer space cheaply and easily. Neither will manned missions to mars.
With a space elevator, all you do is load it up onto a climber and send it up the cable. It'll get there in a few days. Not as fast as a rocket, sure, but a hell of a lot cheaper, easier, and safer.
Re: Right... (Score:4, Informative)
That and you'd still be able to max cargo transfer for two ribbons at prices that net you more money than the prices you can get for the cargo capacity of one ribbon. (IE 1X$800/kg < 2X$600/kg)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there's some people who think we should force people to stop breeding. Put a limit on how many children you can have so that the birth rate is less than the death rate. Stop treating the sick and old. Stop giving aid to third world countries. Just let em all die so that the population of Earth gets down to a nice manageable level. These people rally under the banner of "Limits To Growth [wikipedia.org]".
Then there's the space advocates. Of which I am one. We believe that the best solution to there not being enough resources on Earth for everyone is to go get resources off Earth. There's thousands of Near Earth Asteroids [wikipedia.org] which contain hundreds of times more metal than the entire crust of the Earth is believed to hold. There are only thousands of them because the Earth has this giant deflector that thankfully stops them from falling on us (although every 60 million years or so we get a big one that nearly wipes out all life on the planet, the last one was about 65 million years ago). This giant deflector is called The Moon and it has millions of craters on it, most of which were caused by these big metal asteroids.. the metal is still up there.
Getting to the Near Earth Asteroids is considered easier than getting to the Moon, but the Moon obviously has a lot more resources on it and, hey, we've done it a dozen times already. The cost of expanding our civilization into space is great. I don't argue that. But the cost of not expanding our civilization into space may well be much much greater. We're eating up this planet, and we don't (yet) have another one.
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Wow, and this on slashdot!
For starters, we have an increasing population on Earth.
Ok, and where will you send people? There is nothing out there where people can live... Space stations, off-world settlements,
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Hmmm... Ah, damn it, let's neuter them!
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
The space elevator - or rather, a technology which gives efficient, low-cost access to space - has the potential to make that scenario a reality. We've got near-earth asteroids, the moon, and the entire asteroid belt full of metals. We've got moons and an Oort Cloud full of CHON - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: the building blocks of all our food. And we've got all of space to discard waste products into. The resources exist in this solar system to keep us in consumables for a long, long time if we can just get out hands on them.
An important - not, of course, the only, or even the hardest, but an important - step towards this is a cheap, high-volume way of ferrying material out of and into Earth's gravity well.
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What do you put on the end of the elevator? An amusement park? With hookers and blackjack?
I am *so* there. What's a ticket cost?
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Cyclone effects? (Score:2)
Re:Cyclone effects? (Score:4, Insightful)
Speculating now about the wind loading on a space elevator is akin to the last question.
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