Michael Laine Will Answer Your Questions on Space Elevators

by Nancy Atkinson on July 26, 2010

Artists concept of a space elevator. Credit: Caltech

After our recent article featuring the concept of a lunar elevator, many of you posted questions about both lunar elevators and space elevators in general. Liftport’s Michael Laine has graciously agreed to provide answers for these questions, and if anyone has additional questions, leave them in the comment section here. We’ll post Michael’s answers in a subsequent post.

For those of you who have really big questions, you may want to attend the first lunar elevator workshop in Seattle, Washington this coming weekend, July 29-August 1 in Seattle Washington. See this link for more information.

And there’s also a space elevator conference August 13-15 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington. Find more details at this link.

Tagged as: lunar elevator, space elevator

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  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    I find a certain amusement in such statements as these. In line with the cosmology blog page from last week on the aging universe and with the aging sun and the rest it is funny to listen to people go on about how depressing these things are. Yet here we are in a world that bristles with nuclear weapons, we are tearing up the planet (20,000 species lost per year, a Belgium’s worth of arable land on the planet lost per year, more natural ecosystems destroyed by urban sprawl and the increased demand for petro-corn, global heating and …), and we humans have an unfortunate history of putting mentally ill people in charge of our affairs. In effect our species is really little more than a somewhat brainy form of ground ape on an out of control exponential rampage. The future time frames by which our species could face utter annihilation could easily be a few centuries, and for that matter maybe a few years. And we want to colonize space with ideas of surviving mega-eons into the future by escaping this planet and a long term future of a dying sun? This a serious disconnect with regards to time scales and the impending issues which really impact us.

    LC

  • jimhenson

    Can the space elevator connect to the moon, Venus and Mars, to help build a carbon nanotube or space shield that shelters protects defends earth against supernova gamma ray bursts, intense solar flares, asteroids? Carbon nanotubes can withstand incredible heat and have incredibly high tensile strength to sling shot a ship towards another star in zero gravity it might reach half light speed? Earth is doomed if everybody must keep electing politicians. They want to save the country they say

  • Torbjorn Larsson OM

    we stand a good chance of going extinct the next time we’re hit by an asteroid.

    Oops, too late, we were already hit with asteroids as you typed that. (Well, interplanetary dust particles, but you didn’t specify the size.)

    While the individual risk of dying from an asteroid is up there with the ones that you see yearly (say, from lightning), the only known extinctions from an asteroid is from the Chixculub impact.

    The non-avian dinosaurs killed represented maybe a few hundred species of the estimated ~ 4000 that ever existed. As a comparison, avian dinosaurs estimates to ~ 9000 species. Sea species was hit severely, ~ 30 % extinct.

    So out of the millions of species that exist at any given time and billions over the whole biosphere life time, the risk that a land species dies from impact is on the order of 10^-6 – 10^-7 or so.

    You call that “a good chance”? Ridiculous.

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