"Robot 'climber' vehicles, powered by laser-like beams of light that relay electricity from solar panels aboard the mother ship, would move up the ribbon, carrying fresh spools of nanotube ribbon up to the top. From there, smaller rockets would carry still more lengths of ribbon to a final point 62,000 miles up. At that point a massive counterweight would hold the entire ribbon in place as the earth's swift rotation keeps it taut -- much the way a rock at the end of a string stays taut when a kid whirls it around and around. The elevator could be used by relays of 'climbers' carrying entire spacecraft and supplies -- even with astronauts aboard -- that would hurtle into space, on to the moon, Mars or wherever, when they reached the top of the ribbon." (Via Beyond the Beyond.)
The cost? $10 billion. Compare that price to W's Iraq war, steadily ticking away before your very eyes on the sidebar . . . or, for that matter, the well-intentioned but next-to-useless International Space Station.
2 comments:
Thanks for noticing, and posting about, the SE. We also welcome input at our Forum at www.liftport.com
This may sound like I'm trolling for visitors but .. no. I like the idea - an SE is an elegant hack on space access. I'm glad other people are noticing as well.
Brian
Liftport
You don't mind if I link to our FAQ? Note it needs a fair bit of work, which is something I'm supposed to be working on tonight.
http://www.liftport.com/faq.php
One of the neater ideas is the realization (by I think Robert Munk) that the very first thing a rational actor does with a space elevator is use it to build another one for a fraction of the cost of the first.
Then you have two ribbons. Ribbon A is for revenue, Ribbon B is a backup ribbon and a ribbon-making ribbon.
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