NPR Talks Skyhooks 328
David writes "NPR's Talk of the Nation this past week featured Brad Edwards, President of Carbon Designs Inc., to talk about their plans to develop an elevator that would lift people to an object orbiting in outer space. The project's homepage details their plans and ambitions. The discussion expands on callers' concerns about such problems as commercial airliners running into the super long cable or if it would act as a conduit for lightning."
Re:Towers 2.0 (Score:3, Informative)
I thought this as well, but no, they don't. A rough diagram of a space elevator would be:
O--------
Where the "O" is the Earth. Imagine, right before "tying down" the base of your elevator, you drag i "up" a few dozen degrees to New York. The farther North you go, the more of an angle it will have, but it's not unstable so long as it's anchored.
The first thousand miles of the climb would be like a very steep gondola ride.
*NIX and no Real (Score:2, Informative)
Should work if one has mplayer but does not have realplayer.
Re:Muzak (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:1, Informative)
Re:wrong concerns (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting interview (Score:3, Informative)
Highlights
- Location? Straight south of California near the equator.
- Timeframe? 15+ years
- What if an airliner flew into it? Pretty much screwed. But the location is 400 miles from any air route so shouldn't be a problem.
- How long would it take to get up? A few hours.
- Wouldn't it be a huge lightning rod? Yeah, but that area of the world does not have lightning, so shouldn't be a problem.
- Wouldn't the car that goes up the cable just pull it down and not crawl up it? Yes, but the car is only a few tons and the weight of the cable and weight on the other end was something like a couple thousand tons. So shouldn't be a problem.
There are a lot of "shouldn't be a problem"'s in there that one of them will be a problem. Exciting technology though.
Re:No free lunch (Score:3, Informative)
The current solution to the problem you outlined is to shoot the thing with a laser (a big frickin' laser) on the ground. Keep the laser trained on the elevator car, and on the car convert that light to the electricity you need to crawl up the line.
I wouldn't be surprised if some day some smart engineer figures out a way to use the potential energy of a down-moving car to supply some of the energy to an up-moving car (Not all, of course, gotta pay mister Entropy).
Re:Skyhooks? (Score:3, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia article:
Re:Maypoling to avoid sats too (Score:3, Informative)
Babel, not Babble (Score:3, Informative)
At the time, it was better known as Babel. It wasn't named Babble until the people could no longer understand each other.
Later of course, Babel and Mabel got together and had lots of Baby Bels. The runt of the family was nicknamed Deci Bel.
Re:wrong concerns (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, this isn't "insightful". Need I say RTFA? Perhaps I do.