Japan hopes to turn sci-fi into reality with elevator to the stars | Hacker News Reader

Japan hopes to turn sci-fi into reality with elevator to the stars

timesonline.co.uk

18 pointsgibsonf16 comments

I read this story several years ago in Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/02/57536). I think I read it again in 05 in some other magazine. Most of them like this one, at first says how amazing it'll be to ride, then talks about how hard it'll be to build, throws something about carbon nano tubes and some cool diagrams.

Makes me wonder whether they are just recycling old content or if their has been real progress. (I went to the site of the company that is referenced in the Wired article to be building the space lift and its just spam!)

It's still very 'gee-wiz' science, I think the longest carbon nano tubes in ribbon form are only measured in inches.

See http://www.spaceward.org/ for more information, or search "space elevator competition".

The even-bigger problem, as I understand it, is that the nanotubes don't just have to be 30,000 km long, they also have to be more-or-less defect free.

I remember attending a talk on the space elevator (besides the Japanese project), and they were thinking about using a laser on the ground to shoot at the bottom on the elevator to power it up.

If it works, the trip up the elevator will probably take a couple hours, if not the whole day. When you have a bunch of people idling around for a long time, they'll want to do stuff. And in doing stuff, they might want to spend money. I can imagine the space elevator selling a part of its limited space to a store selling binoculars to look down at the earth. Or maybe some other entity like walmart or starbucks.

Well I think the commercial aspect will probably be the ticket price for the trip. As far as for-sale accommodations during the trip, I expect them to be analogous to those you get during airplane flights: mostly refreshments. Since looking at the earth will probably be one of the main attractions of such an elevator trip, I bet most people will plan to bring binoculars, so I don't foresee a significant market for that particular item.

They could do like cinemas: you can't bring your own popcorn/binoculars.

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