Space Rope Trick Experiment Goes Awry 200
Tjeerd writes "An experiment that envisaged sending a parcel from space to Earth on a 30-kilometre tether fell short of its goal yesterday when the long fibre rope did not fully unwind, Russian Mission Control said.
It was intended to deliver a spherical capsule, called Fotino, attached to the end of the tether back to Earth — a relatively simple and cheap technology that could be used in the future to retrieve bulkier cargoes from space.""
Is a 30km rope (Score:3, Interesting)
Space Elevators endanger EVERYONE. (Score:0, Interesting)
Even sci-fi authors like Kim Stanley Robinson have included disaster scenarios when contemplating this technology, but irl nobody ever discusses the massive dangers.
The tech is premature and unnecessary at this point, and the risk/reward is insane. This isn't a chicken/egg scenario. Let's get something going in space before we kill thousands and destroy millions in property for nothing.
what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Previous try (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is a 30km rope (Score:2, Interesting)
Spooling is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Managing big spools of line is surprisingly difficult. Oceanographers run into this all the time, as they try to lower a few miles of line into the ocean. The textile industry runs into it when they try to use very large spools so they can run machinery longer without splicing. Designing something to unspool 30Km of line under near-zero tension in zero G is non-trivial.
Here's a discussion of spool winding [amacoil.com], if you're really interested. There are even companies that specialize in spool winding [independentusa.com].
Re:Is a 30km rope (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that LEO is at least 200km, the object would still be at 170km when released, and would have to survive the entire brunt of the re-entry problems. I'm not sure how lowering something on a tether is more economical/effective than using thrust to de-orbit, though.
FedEx Satellites (Score:4, Interesting)
Federal Express spend *billions* on the system, and it failed utterly. What happened was the same companies that helped them develop the Group III standard made their thermal machines cheap and interoperatable. Soon, everyone had them, and the thermal paper wasn't too bad. You could always photocopy it once if you wanted a more permanent record. That, and falling long distance phone prices made it overall cheaper to fax a document than to have FedEx do it for you.
To sum up, FedEx has already been to space. They are looking at it, and it's always way too expensive for any kind of regular service. (except some data)
After a minute and a half on Google. (Score:3, Interesting)
The tether was made of Dyneema.
Wikipedia says this is a synonym for ultra high molecular weight polyethylene
Regarding the weaknesses of UHMWPE, thermal properties are highlighted and consist of the following:
The weak bonding between olefin molecules allows local thermal excitations to disrupt the crystalline order of a given chain piece-by-piece, giving it much poorer heat resistance than other high-strength fibers. Its melting point is around 144 to 152 degrees Celsius, and according to DSM, it is not advisable to use UHMWPE fibers at temperatures exceeding 80 to 100C for long periods of time. It becomes brittle at temperatures below -150C.
Googling for the temperature outside of the space station turns up a Yahoo answers page.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061215121108AASpIMx&show=7 [yahoo.com]
Which says the answer is -250 F. Convert to Celsius and we get -156.7C
Maybe this helps to explain what might have happened.