Interview with Dr. Bradley C. Edwards 118
Keith Curtis writes "I recently discovered that Dr. Bradley C. Edwards, noted expert on the Space Elevator pays $4 for coffee at the same Starbucks that I do. I asked him if he would meet up with me and chat and he graciously agreed. I recorded the interview for posterity. In our wide-ranging conversation we talked about NASA politics, getting energy from space, location, space tourism, software, nanotech, and several other topics."
Site slashdotted, article text here (Score:5, Informative)
October 14, 2005 on 1:28 pm | In Uncategorized |
Seattle, A Hotbed For Space Elevator Development?
KC: My jaw dropped when I went to my nearest Starbucks, saw your artwork on the wall, and realized that you lived in Seattle. How long have you been here? It doesn't exactly seem to be a hotbed for space elevator work...
BE: I did my work for NIAC (NASA Institute For Advanced Concepts) here in 2000, and then moved back in June. I was working with people everywhere; most of the collaboration was virtual, and many folks I didn't meet until the end. I don't think I met Eric Westling until after we published our book (The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System). A few people I'm currently working with I still haven't met. I don't work with people just because they're local, I have to find people I think are the best. It depends on what I'm working on. It's an effort that can be largely broken up into sections. "Here is the anchor station, go do it." Actually, it's great that I don't have to have everyone in the same room because it's just not possible.
I tried to look up your biography on the Internet, and couldn't track down some of the organizations you've worked in. Some of them are probably from the early Internet days...
We've been trying to get various projects started. A few were a few false starts, or in some cases just testing the waters. HighLift Systems was a Seattle-based company, and was one of those false starts. I closed it down. I'm not affiliated with LiftPort. I have worked with LiftPort's founder Michael Laine a bit at HighLift in Seattle before we parted ways. [Not on the best of terms; juicy but unsubstantiated gossip about LiftPort removed, Meow!! -ed]
NASA Versus Private Industry
Did you see Michael Griffin's interview in USA Today last week?
No, but I know the general gist. It's not a surprise. In my mind the Space Shuttle and Space Station are not valuable efforts. It's not what NASA should be doing. NASA is using technology from commercial enterprises, or very old technology from the 70's to try and do space exploration. If they are going to be a real premier space agency, they need to be pushing it.
They should be doing stuff which looks to us like science fiction...
It shouldn't be science fiction, but they should be pushing the boundaries and doing work that inspires. That's what Apollo was. The technology for Apollo existed before the program started; they took that knowledge and pushed it to its limits, and it literally inspired the world.
I wasn't around then, but it seems like peoplecared what NASA did back then. NASA has their Moon and Mars pictures up on their website, but I don't know if anyone cares. If you squint as you look, you'd think it was 1930.
It is history; it's old news. And since then, they've done very little.
It seems like there was a long-standing debate between rockets and the Space Shuttle. From where you sit, that's like choosing between Nicki and Paris Hilton.
Even high up in NASA management, they won't officially say it - but they have said it directly to me - that nothing substantial in space can be done with rockets. A federal program with lots of money can take some people up there, but it won't be able to commercialize space. We've been going at it for thirty-five years now, and we've put up telecommunications systems and GPS. If there's a buck to be made and a product to be built, it'll get done. With current technology, I think we've developed space commercially as far as we can. We need something dramatically different--a brand new market, a brand new technology.
Economists should get that. How did trains and highways change America?
Private enterprise is starting to get it. NASA hasn't shown much interest on the space elevator, but there are a number of private entities that have.
But we just laughed at a bunch of them: HighLift, LiftPort. Do any of them have billions of dollars?
Th
Re:How about doing a question and answer session . (Score:5, Informative)
Sometime ago I heard that to pull off the space elevator .. the material cost would be massive that we didnt have enough steel cable to do such a thing and only experimental substances (like spiderweb yarn) would meet the challenge of providing that much material.
Steel is extremely dense. The sheer quantity of steel needed would mean the elevator would collapse under its own weight. That is why nobody plans on using steel cables. Instead, carbon nanotubes are the way to go. Essentially, these are thin strands of carbon engineered in such a way that they are light and strong. A strand the thickness of a human hair has the strength of a steel girder, but weighs around 0.00001% as much. Nanotechnology means more than just making things small, it also means building life-size objects but engineering them at the molecular level to have special properties, such as high strength or low density.
Re:Was this a serious interview? (Score:4, Informative)
The basic idea is an elevator with its center of gravity at geosyncronous orbit, making the elevator stay in one spot over the earth. It would allow for much larger space lift capacities and much lower costs per pound.
Read more at:
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
The Space Elevator Reference [spaceelevator.com]
Liftport Group, a consortium of companies working on space elevator tech [liftport.com]
Also, for a good sci-fi treatment of space elevators, read Kim Stanley-Robinson's Red-Gree-Blue Mars Trilogy
Re:One missing question (Score:3, Informative)
As soon as that is sorted, we need to think up a method of producing that length, and how do we produce it and make it go up to space (do we make it in orbit and just string it down as we make it? Do we shoot a rocket up with nanowire attached?).
But nanowire in and of itself has all the mechanical properties needed to build a space elevator.