Re: Space Elevator by 2019?

From: Vincent Cate (vince_at_offshore.ai)
Date: 06/27/04 

Date: 27 Jun 2004 06:33:18 -0700

stevejdufour@yahoo.com (Steve Dufour) wrote in message news:<744cc401.0406262255.6c863004@posting.google.com>...
> "It's not new physics ? nothing new has to be discovered, nothing
> new has to be invented from scratch," he said. "If there are delays in
> budget or delays in whatever, it could stretch, but 15 years is a
> realistic estimate for when we could have one up."
 
Edwards is making it sound like we know how to make the rope when
the truth is we can not even make a rope of 1/10th the needed
strength/weight. We can make strong molecules, but we are not
able to bind these together into a really strong rope. The
space elevator needs a rope with tensile strength higher than
40 GPa and we have never made a rope with even 4 GPa. People
trying to get money from politicians have found they sometimes
get more by making things sound better than they are. Remember
how NASA lied about how good the shuttle was going to be in order
to get money from congress? Edwards may be doing a similar
thing here.

The rope is still a research problem. We had 20 GPa "carbon
whiskers", which are very similar to carbon-nanotubes, 48
years ago and we still don't know how to make a 4 GPa rope out
of these yet. To talk about a 15 year timetable for development
when the research for the rope is not finished yet is either
foolish or dishonest.

I think that 5 years ago Edwards was also estimating 15 years. And
I expect that 5 years from now he will still be estimating
15 years more.

  --- Vince

Relevant Pages

  • Carbon Nanotube Rope as NASA Centennial Challenge
    ... Instead of spending millions of tax dollars on carbon-nanotube ... and space elevator research, I think we would be better off ... demo a rope for each GPa from 1 GPa up to 50 GPa. ... The demo rope might have to be 10 meters long and lift at least 10 Kg. ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Carbon Nanotube Rope as NASA Centennial Challenge
    ... Instead of spending millions of tax dollars on carbon-nanotube ... and space elevator research, I think we would be better off ... demo a rope for each GPa from 1 GPa up to 50 GPa. ... The demo rope might have to be 10 meters long and lift at least 10 Kg. ...
    (sci.space.policy)