Canadians Vie for Space Elevator Victory 99
unc0nn3ct3d writes to mention a CBC article about some plucky Canadian teams planning to go for NASA's space elevator challenge. From the article: "Teams based in Saskatoon, Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto are among thousands of space enthusiasts expected to converge on a desert site in Las Cruces, N.M., on Friday and Saturday for the X-Prize Cup, a festival mounted by the X-Prize Foundation ... The competitors are gearing up for the Spaceward Foundation's Space Elevator Challenge, which requires them to surmount technical obstacles in the development of a new type of vehicle that would take people and cargo from Earth into space."
Doesn't mention bringing them back though... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't mention bringing them back though... (Score:5, Funny)
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Shhhh!.(why no mention of return) (Score:3, Funny)
George Bush, Tony Blair
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This is only the beginning. (Score:2, Funny)
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Seriously though, I wish them all luck. If Canada wins this it will be an nice addition to producing the Canadarm.
nationality (Score:2)
Who knew that Willy Wonka was Canadian?
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Canadian Laser Powered Climber (Score:5, Interesting)
Do any of you actually believe we are close to being able to produce one of these monsters? I am guessing we are still thirty years away from the appropriate tech.
Re:Canadian Laser Powered Climber (Score:4, Informative)
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Which just means the cable has to taper more. No matter what, any sane civil engineer would have designed it with at least a safety factor of 3.
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Which is why one length of cable simply will not do. Instead the cable must get thicker as you move upwards, so that each strand only carries a small enough amount of weight. Honestly, a 1000km cable of this kind is more than within ourability to construct, but getting all 1000km of its ever increasing frame into space will be the trickiest part. Keeping it up there will be the next.
Space elevators are a "look good on paper" plan, as long as i
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It's an engineering problem like the World Trade Center. It was impractical to have elevator shafts running up the entire building (in the WTC, I believe there was only one shaft that did so).
In the case of a space elevator... why not temporarily "lock" the car at a certain height, then have a mechanism unhoist the cable and change it to another hoist motor? (repeat as necessary)
The net effect that the elevator would hav
Re:Canadian Laser Powered Climber (Score:5, Interesting)
The World Trade Center system worked because the building was there and they attached the segments to the building. A space elevator is problematic because we simply don't have the ability to build a building that tall to hold up segments (if we did, we'd just make the building the cable and crawl up the side). Each segment would have to be self-supporting.
The minimum cable length (to be self supporting) is determined by the angular velocity of the earth, the radius from the center of the earth to the cable mount, and the mass of the earth. There is no way to make a shorter cable that is self supporting.
Your solution requires something to hold up the segments. We don't have that something. We are somewhat closer to being able to build a single cable of that length than we are to building a segmented solution (which requires something like anti-gravity). Further, if we did have the tech to build a segmented solution, we probably wouldn't need to do so. With anti-gravity, we'd just float up -- no elevator cable needed.
I think that what's confusing you is that in buildings, the cable pulls up the car (which is just a big box). In a space elevator, the "cable" has a role more like that of the elevator shaft or the rails of an incline. The elevator "car" is propelled by something else. Maybe they should change the name to something more static, like pillar, shaft, or stem.
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Elevator (Score:2)
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And on tracking a laser to a climber? Sounds pretty doable actually, given that modern optical telescopes compensate optically for air movement, without the luxury of a close physical object which can tell you it's position and b
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Please remember, we aren't talking about a laser that makes pretty lights. A laser that imparts power for a climber would be downright dangerous if it misses the power collector on the elevator. combine that with the very considerable lateral movem
Re:Canadian Laser Powered Climber (Score:5, Informative)
Right now the largest disadvantage for lasers is the inefficiency in creating electricity from photovoltiacs. The team i'm on - Punkworks [punkworks.ca] is hoping to use a microwave rectenna [wikipedia.org] array to convert 2.4 GHz RF energy into a few hundred watts of electricity. Right now we're lending our transmitter to another team, and have reached a deal to split the prize 50/50 if they win with our transmitter. The reason we're using microwaves is due to the conversion efficiency, there's lots of journal papers on microwave rectenna design indicating a maximum efficiency of 85%. This is a huge improvement over the ~30% you'd get from a solar panel.
My team has yet to compete, and I'm eagerly waiting to hear how our climber performs. Right now they made us move to another location at the test site despite our approved application from the FCC. Apparently the airport doesn't like the idea of us beaming 13 kW of microwaves into the sky
unfortunately I'm not in New Mexico for the competition, but a number of my teammates did the 44 hour drive.
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Not trivial, true, but we do have billions of dollars worth of R&D results lying around about how to track movin objects with lasers, and that was for the harder problem of tracking objects that didn't want to be tracked.
Quick idea: medium-power guide laser on the car, aimed in the general direction of the power laser. Power laser has a pulsed cycle where it periodically turns off and "listen
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It looks like the tech is there, really, but there is no commercial backing for it, and without money it is a no-go. Current tech can probably produce carbon nanotubes appropriate for this kind of project, but it would be VERY expensive, and no government is willing to pay for it, so it won't happen within the next 20 years (or more). Lots of gr
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Canada had one of the leading contenders for the X-Prize, The Da Vinci Project, behind Space Ship One. We were among the first nations to launch a satellite, and have had vital technology on the space shuttle, and ISS. If someone feels inferior because lowly Canada where it's all ice and snow and Inuit is doing fine science, well then boo
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2 days? (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So......when will it be? (Score:5, Funny)
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[1] Earth
[2] Care-a-lot
[3] Space
All you're going to do is piss off the care bears.
Welll..... (Score:5, Funny)
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You could simply move farther north, away from the border.
We have to wait for the global warming to kick in (Score:2)
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I said it before and I'll say it again: we're putting a fence up along the wrong border.
Re:Welll..... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't know there were so many native Americans left.
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True, but... (Score:2)
million (Score:2)
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It all makes sense now.
Gravity Kite (Score:2, Interesting)
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We are the only nation on earth who borders no one else but the most powerful country in the world. We live and die under the shadow of the United States. In fact many parts of the world view us as the little brother of the US. So like a little brother we are always looking for something that proves our importance. Even better if we find one or two things we can do better than big brother. (this article not a good ex
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Taxes? (Score:2)
Canadian taxes average to 40% of earned income, American taxes 30%. Seems like a big difference, until you note that Americans get piss all of their money. Shitty schools, no health care, prisons that are basically slave labour camps, universities that only the ultra-wealthy and a few token geniuses on scholarships can attend, ghettos, etc. In terms of actually getting value for one's tax dollars, we're so far ahead of Americans that I'm sur
Space elevator (Score:1)
Re:Space elevator (Score:4, Informative)
As for the ionosphere, they've actually done a lot of research entirely unrelated to the space elevator including physical tests. From what I've read on it, they're not ignoring the problem, it's just not significant. The proposed carbon nanotube cable isn't really conductive and would only be affected by the very local area anyway. That doesn't ammount to much. They've even bothered to calculate whether having a conductive cable could generate any useful power. The answer was no, there's just not enough energy there to do anything useful with. Even if the cable could act as a lighting rod, lighting is the result of built up potential. Having a lightning rod to the clouds would prevent any potential from building!
A concern you didn't raise, that's nonetheless of interest (to me anyway) is the scale of the project. IIRC, the individual wires that make up the cables of the golden gate bridge if placed end to end would actually be as long as the space elevator. Probably heavier as well. Since the cable has so much surface area, and most likely would be cut very very close to the ground (ie still in atmosphere), the cable would flutter harmlessly to earth. So disaster situations are unlikely.
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Would that be the same carbon nanotubes that are being used for MIT's super capacitors as well as being looked at for super conductors?
Re:Space elevator (Score:4, Informative)
In addition, the current idea is that the cable will be made of short filaments of carbon nanotubes glued together in some as-yet-to-be-developed fashion. The glue alone would probably make the cable non-conductive.
As a material, nanotubes have very flexible properties. By the time we're able to produce the quality and quantity necessary to make a feasible cable, we'll probably have the technology to pick and chose its attributes.
If it's conductive, (Score:2)
With no atmosphere to create corona discharge, you could transmit power over remarkable distances by going to really high voltages.
Angular Systems (Score:2)
Nice try tho
It's not going to work. (Score:2, Funny)
I was there! (Score:5, Interesting)
One interesting thing is that, having to power the climbers from beamed power, they had to make them as light as possible, relative to the area of solar panels trying to capture energy. So these were pretty flimsy looking devices, and you could see wind causing trouble. Stripped bolts and computer glitches also caused their share of failures...
It was also nice to see all those young teams of excited people trying to do this - mostly undergraduate engineering students, but there were even some high school students participating.
And having John Carmack hanging out chatting with the crowd while his crew was trying to get his "hover" craft back in shape was fun. They had jumbotron displays for their challenge attempts, but you could also see it just hovering there a hundred feet up (not too close to the crowd, but quite visible). Of course the crashes had a bit of a car-wreck interest too... The most successful things seemed to be some straightforward high powered rocket launches. But there was a big enthusiastic crowd, and lots of sideshows. Definitely worth a trip to the El Paso area if they do this again!
I was there too! (Score:2)
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What happened? Was it full of eels?
So... (Score:3, Funny)
What is the article about? (Score:2)
Space Elevator and the X-Prize competition, or the Canadian participants of it?
"Oh, look, Canadians — how cute"?
Popular Mechanics, june 2056 issue (Score:2)
In other news,
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No, no, no, you're doing it all wrong. A curmudgeonly rant must always start with "If man were meant to $(ACTIVITY), God would have given him $(POWER)". Then you should follow that up by complaining about some perceived shortcoming of "kids these days", and conclude with a demand that they get off your lawn.
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I think as older americans like myself, there was a bit of jingoism in what we were taught about the history of heavier then air flight, the brave wright brothers battling the doubter
Canadians will lead the way (Score:5, Funny)
North Pole? (Score:2)
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> would be theoretically possible to anchor the cable at the pole, the additional problems would far outweigh the benefits.
I am amazed at the many incorrect comments here, this is a typical one which doesn't make any sense. I thought we were supposed to be nerds who know about this sort of stuff?
It is almost completely unlike swinging a weight on the end of a rope. It's the r
Rotation (Score:2)
Couldn't we build... (Score:1)
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Eventually they need a 100,000-kilometre tether. A tower 10 times Everest is 88 km up. 99,912 km to go.
Now, they might actually build a tower for some odd reason (say, to prevent wildlife from nesting on the tether) but the reason is NOT going to be to "get close".
bush gets out his bottlerockets (Score:2)
But... (Score:1)
Excellent! (Score:3, Funny)
Now then, while we're up, there's a few things we could dump off in orbit that we've been meaning to for a while now. Celine Dion will be taking the first trip up. She won't be coming back down.
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I'm sure with the nanotube design, they can have Labatt's taps there too.
Space elevator? Bwa hah hah hah (Score:4, Funny)
We need a new X-Prize. An X-Prize for coming up with a psuedo-science "flying car" of the future and selling it to a uneducated and unwitting public. The first person to get 10 million believers wins.
I'm working on developing a space catapult that we can use to launch payloads into space. We haven't developed the supertension springs and bands we need but with advances in carbon nanotubes, the human genome, and nanobots we should have that technology in full production in the next 30 years so I'm going to focus on the catapult "cup" used to hold the payload.
And if that doesn't work I'm also developing plans for a capsule that will burrow to the center of the earth using two simple principles weight and edginess (meaning sharp not hip but disturbing). The capsule will use nanobots (which will be commonplace in 15-20 years) to farm bacteria that will sharpen and resharpen a super-carbonnanotube-alloy shell to the finest point ever known in the universe. A point capable of cutting through any material known to man. The capsule will use an EOD (extremly dense object) attached to the opposite end of the point to provide weight to push the point into the ground. This EOD will use new alloys and atomic manipulation techniques that will only be available in 10-15 years. Since we know we'll have these things I'm going to focus on creating a comfortable chair, probably made of leather with a racing stripe, to be installed into the capsule.
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Economics (Score:2)