These early cable experiments are important, but someone should also be working on the composing an 8 day Elevator Muzak score that won't drive you insane.
Also, it makes the need for muzak nonexistant because all your passengers are dead and can't hear it anyway. Seems to me that defeats the purpose of trying to time the trip to coincide with the length of a particular song.
It just wasn't really that good.
We should probably treat it more like commercial air travel than compressive-structure elevator rides.
0: 200kph*8day/8min/2min => 67.981081 gravity
It looks like 6 Gs is about as much as is feasible for an extended period of time.
Any pointers to 6 Gs as being tolerable, for how long? Tnx.
10 Gs for 1 minute is lethal.
I don't think you'd get actual paste, but yes, 8-minute space elevator rides aren't looking very physically possible.
3.4x10^7/(500)^2 = a m/sec2
For an 8min20sec flip time. 20+g if you really want the 8min.
Geostationary orbit is 35,786km above the equator, so 8 days feels a fair approximation.
It is possible to crack a joke here and get it upvoted, but it's hard to pull it off. I even once had a joke upvoted by quite a lot,* like 50 points or something, but most jokes are downvoted not because humor is forbidden, but because insubstantive comments are discouraged.
Some humor is downvoted for being uncivil because a lot of humor is basically poking fun at people or mocking them. A lot of humor is not nice at all. HN tries to meet a very high bar for civility.
* Under my old handle and it hit 59 points:
At any rate, way better than "harumph! HN hates fun!"
It’s just a culture thing. HN tends to be more news and factually focused than reddit/Twitter/etc. People here just prefer to stay on topic, especially since humor is very different between people and can be very hit or miss.
Why would it be "zero-g" you're not in orbit?
If you want constant acceleration, you need to maintain constant force. A higher-velocity vehicle applies that force across a greater distance per unit time, and therefore requires more power.
Accelerating 1 metric ton at 1g requires 9800 N. So at peak velocity (18 km/s), that's 180 megawatts per ton, which is more than 700 times the power to mass ratio of a Tesla P100D.
So, there's surely a safe speed limit built into the materials being used? It's probably faster than the speed they're starting out with, but I kinda assume it can't be fast enough to shorten the trip to hours from days.
As an aside, moving people is probably not the most profitable use of the thing for the foreseeable future, as cool as that sounds. Getting a satellite into orbit for a tenth the cost is revolutionary (though they mention the cost compared to the shuttle, which is much more expensive than rocket transport...so they may be cherry-picking numbers to make this seem more revolutionary than it is).
Anyway, I can't think of how they could accelerate much beyond the fastest non-maglev train speeds without tearing apart the cable and car, but I may be underestimating the strength of carbon nanotubes, and whatever other component materials they're using. Perhaps there's a materials nerd here who knows.