I find 15 years to be a very ambitious statement. Just the amount of time and resources needed to build a sattelite such as this, not to mention the amount of money, is already prohibitive. Now...
I find 15 years to be a very ambitious statement.
Just the amount of time and resources needed to build a sattelite such as this, not to mention the amount of money, is already prohibitive. Now top it all of with the problems that come with engineering in the vacuum of space, creating sustainable and liveable conditions, as well as finding people who would volunteer to travel there.
Now add the problems that you will face from the asteroids in the asteroid belt, the health issues that come with living in zero G and without the protection of Earth's magnetic field, and many others I don't know.
Don't space elevators require theoretical materials that we haven't actually invented yet in order to work? That seems like one big flaw in this particular plan right there.
Don't space elevators require theoretical materials that we haven't actually invented yet in order to work? That seems like one big flaw in this particular plan right there.
It's a little more complicated than that, and depends on a few things, mainly gravity, rotation speed, and tensioning method. For instance, if you're tensioning the elevator cable with something...
It's a little more complicated than that, and depends on a few things, mainly gravity, rotation speed, and tensioning method. For instance, if you're tensioning the elevator cable with something in a stationary orbit (the traditional space elevator), with current materials we couldn't build one on Earth, but we could build one on, say, Mars. But if you're tensioning it with the centrifugal force of a cable circling the planet at orbital altitude but rotating at greater than orbital speed (an orbital ring), you can do one anywhere with just modern materials, even on like Jupiter, because you cut the necessary length of the cable from tens of thousands of kilometers to tens of kilometers.
That said, you wouldn't use a damn space elevator to get things off Ceres even if it would be pretty trivial to build one there. You'd use a much smaller, cheaper, and simpler mass driver, same thing with any other airless body.
I'm pretty unimpressed with this paper: while it's not badly written, it also doesn't engage with over fifty years of prior scholarship on the topic. Re-deriving things from first principles that Gerard O'neill was working on in the seventies isn't contributing all that much to the discussion or scholarship of the topic at hand, particularly when you do a worse job at it.
Falcon 9 has been flying for almost 11 years already. Give Starship the same amount of time and I think we could get there. It’s the only rocket that could bring us there in that time frame.
Falcon 9 has been flying for almost 11 years already. Give Starship the same amount of time and I think we could get there. It’s the only rocket that could bring us there in that time frame.
Agree on all points about humans. But I would love it if we were able to start 'harvesting' asteroids for rare earth metals and other industrial medals in 15 years using semi- autonomous robotics....
Agree on all points about humans. But I would love it if we were able to start 'harvesting' asteroids for rare earth metals and other industrial medals in 15 years using semi- autonomous robotics. This will allow us to stop the destructive process of mining/strip mining earth.
I find 15 years to be a very ambitious statement.
Just the amount of time and resources needed to build a sattelite such as this, not to mention the amount of money, is already prohibitive. Now top it all of with the problems that come with engineering in the vacuum of space, creating sustainable and liveable conditions, as well as finding people who would volunteer to travel there.
Now add the problems that you will face from the asteroids in the asteroid belt, the health issues that come with living in zero G and without the protection of Earth's magnetic field, and many others I don't know.
15 years just seems to be unrealistic.
Don't space elevators require theoretical materials that we haven't actually invented yet in order to work? That seems like one big flaw in this particular plan right there.
It's a little more complicated than that, and depends on a few things, mainly gravity, rotation speed, and tensioning method. For instance, if you're tensioning the elevator cable with something in a stationary orbit (the traditional space elevator), with current materials we couldn't build one on Earth, but we could build one on, say, Mars. But if you're tensioning it with the centrifugal force of a cable circling the planet at orbital altitude but rotating at greater than orbital speed (an orbital ring), you can do one anywhere with just modern materials, even on like Jupiter, because you cut the necessary length of the cable from tens of thousands of kilometers to tens of kilometers.
That said, you wouldn't use a damn space elevator to get things off Ceres even if it would be pretty trivial to build one there. You'd use a much smaller, cheaper, and simpler mass driver, same thing with any other airless body.
I'm pretty unimpressed with this paper: while it's not badly written, it also doesn't engage with over fifty years of prior scholarship on the topic. Re-deriving things from first principles that Gerard O'neill was working on in the seventies isn't contributing all that much to the discussion or scholarship of the topic at hand, particularly when you do a worse job at it.
Falcon 9 has been flying for almost 11 years already. Give Starship the same amount of time and I think we could get there. It’s the only rocket that could bring us there in that time frame.
Starship should bring launch costs down quite a lot, but that means other problems will be bottlenecks.
Agree on all points about humans. But I would love it if we were able to start 'harvesting' asteroids for rare earth metals and other industrial medals in 15 years using semi- autonomous robotics. This will allow us to stop the destructive process of mining/strip mining earth.