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Comment by ttepasse | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago in a very idle moment I was searching for a place on Earth where you could anchor an hypothetical space elevator.

You'd need a place near the equator, preferably unsettled but still politically stable. A mountain would be nice to shorten the length, but mountains are difficult.

For my internal fantasy I settled on Ascension Island, part of a British Overseas Territory, at 7.5° South.

It's not natively settled, the only people there are for work, military, spooks, space agencies for tracking and telecommunications. With the arrival of European explorers there was an ecological extinction, mostly the island seems to be barren.

And the name, of course, is perfect for a space elevator fantasy.

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I was en route to St Helena and I had several days of a raging fever on Ascension, and my memories of the place on either side of my illness are suitably strange. I remember walking through a landscape of sharp, anthracite grey volcanic rock and throwing a banana peel into the sea, to watch the fish churn around it like piranha. I remember going past a rock covered in paint -- everyone who was determined to never come back added a new splash of colour. I think it was right next to 'the worst golf course in the world'. I remember leaving the barren low-lands and climbing the mountain switchbacks, into rainforest-like verdancy. A very odd place.

You’d make a fascinating writer. There's something about the way you constructed these sentences - so enchanting!

Agreed. I sort of couldn't stop reading this...

right here with you.

Thank you! I'm on my 3rd draft of a novel so that's actually super lovely to hear.

are you an AI asked to introduce an existential crisis? no? no matter, keep writing, seed some urls

> A mountain would be nice to shorten the length

Starting at the top of Everest (even if it were at the equator) only gives you a 0.02% head start.

…and a logistical nightmare to start such an ambitious project.

I once wondered if it would be more environmentally friendly to bore straight down into a mountain and then build a mile high building on the peak to create a giant rail gun. Then shoot raw materials into orbit where the actual manufacture takes place. Sadly there is too much atmosphere no matter how much I want a cannon to the moon.

This actually is a proposed idea. To launch enough satellite shields to slow down global warming. The proposal isn’t straight down but rather diagonal, increasing the length and aiming it at the right angle & velocity for orbit

At first I thought it was simply science fiction, but it’s fairly ingenious from a price point. If the physics work of course

Just anchor it to the oceanic crust. If you're unafraid to spool cable 37,000,000 meters up, you shouldn't be afraid to also spool down 50 meters or so—the maximum depth of the equatorial Sunda shelf[0] in the SEA region. Convenient to Singapore.

(Singapore itself is roughly 10% former ocean, terraformed).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Shelf

And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

> And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

Is it as corrosive as lightning? All space elevators will encounter that problem pretty regularly.

We've been running cables under the ocean for over a century now, there's ways to address seawater corrosion and intrusion.

I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where building a space elevator is possible but sea water corrosion is an insurmountable problem.

If you're building the base of the elevator in water, your whole operation is basically operating in water.

The effort to do that is huge.

It's basically a big over complication.

"In Ascension" is really wonderful sci-fi novel set partially on Ascension Island. Recommended if you like Ted Chiang or Jeff VanderMeer style weird, meditative sci-fi.

It must be common due to its space lineage.

Near future sci-fi books "Delta-V" and "Critical Mass" by Daniel Suarez also feature it!

There is a good scifi "Jumping Off the Planet" by David gerrold about space elevators if you have not read it yet.

It is much easier to build elevator right at the equator. It is possible to have base off axis adds extra length and loads. It doesn't make sense when there are plenty of places right on equator.

Quito, Ecuador is probably the best location since it is at 9350 ft. Could also attach on top of Pichincha volcano to west or main Andes to the east.

In Afrcia, Mount Kenya is nearly on the equator and goes up to 17,000 ft.

There are multiple options in Indonesia. None of them high. The mountains of Sumatra or Borneo are probably the best options but there is Lingga Island near Singapore.

The advantage of these locations is that they cover the world and are close to Africa, Americas, and Asia. They are also all safe since there is nothing to the east to be hit by broken cable.

Looking at both Wikipedia and Google Maps (for Ascension Island), I'm not seeing anything that might pass for either a harbor, or a port facility.

Seems like you'd want cheap all-weather shipping, at scale, to & from the Ground end of your space elevator.

Building a big deep water harbour is a piece of cake compared to building a space elevator, and has been done for centuries, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherbourg_Harbour.

Depends on the topography. Building Ascension Harbor's offshore breakwater would be dull routine in 5m deep water, but herculean in 100m+ deep water.

There's also the issue of Ascension Island being a live volcano. With 3 eruptions in the past couple millennia. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...

(Though if you were writing a novel about an Ascension space elevator, the volcano adds a whole extra dimension of possible drama.)

100m of concrete vs tens of thousands of km of unobtainium cable in orbit. The harbour is far easier.

Compared to the cost of building a DC, using 24K gold for all the wiring in it would be small change.

It's fine in imagination or fiction. But in the real world, the guys who sign the checks seldom buy that type of "cheap compared to" argument.

It seems like the money would be there though, right?

A functioning space elevator would immediately make you the richest person in history, I would think.

I'm sceptic about that.

I am, see above, a space nerd, formed by SciFi. But I wonder what the economical case for space colonisation above LEO, human or robotic could be. Asteroid mining is the typical use case, but again, I'm a sceptic. You'll need to mine the materials, separate them, transport to earth, down a non-realistic space elevator made from unobtainium and do all that cheaper than mining or recycling on earth. I don‘t see that for a long, long time.

European colonisation very soon had economic use cases, It started with spices, that very soon beaver furs, wood, plantations with the original sin of slavery and over the centuries the colonies developed into bigger societies which could produce industrial goods. What could Moon or Mars sell us that we want, that could rationalise a gigantic capital investment, which only could be paid back over multiple centuries? I don't see it, and I say that as a space romantic.

Google Maps is surprisingly empty.

Open Street Map has much more detail, and shows the harbour at Georgetown: https://osm.org/go/PzLP7syAF- as well as what I think might be an oil/fuel terminal for the power station further north.

There are also pipelines from a fuel storage depot in Georgetown to the RAF base (south), which has pipelines to the coast, so there must be others too.

> and shows a harbour at Georgetown.

Look closer at that harbour. Especially its scale, and facilities. There's nothing resembling a spot to tie up (say) a 500' freighter. Nor a breakwater - if a storm hit the west side of the island, then everything afloat would have to be hauled out of the water, or flee.

(Yes, obviously my original comment should have been more specific.)

For military facilities, on a military budget, there's all sorts of "wait 'till the weather and tides are right, then transfer cargo ashore via helicopters and small boats" stuff that you can do. At commercial scale, the extra costs are poison.

Reminds me of the StarCraft map looking at it.

> You'd need a place near the equator

Isaac Arthur argues that you wouldn't: https://youtu.be/dc8_AuzeYKE?t=835

I am a fan of this plan for the nominative determinism alone!

Wouldn't you have to dig deep to make the base structurally stable so that the elevator doesn't fly off into space eventually?

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