i remember reading here on HN someone explaining why space elevators are not possible. I can't recall why, but he/she had very convincing arguments.
Anyone here remember that thread and can link it back here? Thanks
Anyone here remember that thread and can link it back here? Thanks
* If would need to be the most precisely engineered thing we've every produced just to stand a chance of being good enough.
* Because of that, it will be particularly sensitive to wear and tear. How the maintenance would work is an open question.
* It will probably attract terrorists like crazy.
* It needs to never get struck by lightning. It is a particularly attractive lightning rod.
* It generally should avoid bad weather. Whatever it is attached to on Earth needs to be able to move. When moving it you have to avoid not only the bad weather but everything in space, too.
* If the cable breaks, bad things could happen. Bad things can range from burning up in the atmosphere to it whipping around in space damaging satellites, or anything else.
> It needs to never get struck by lightning. It is a particularly attractive lightning rod.
Haven't buildings solved this problem with lightning rods?
On another note, I am personally fascinated by space elevators which is why I am somewhat interested in going back to the moon where we can build a space elevator with today's tech, avoid all of these problems, and have a large body of resources to build/fuel spaceships with.
The only thing I can think of is that all that energy unloaded into cable at once might ablate some of it, causing it to no longer be able to handle the tension.
Once you figure out how to make them en masse, now you have to figure out how to secure the strands into a bundle.
Less of a challenge than warp drive, but still...quite hard.
That's a colorful quote from a NYT editorial in the 1920s arguing that getting rockets into space would not only be impossible, but obviously so. When Musk announced his intentions to autonomously land and rapidly reuse rockets it was mostly dismissed. Certainly companies, full of world class engineers, that had been launching rockets since before he was born probably knew a bit more about what is or not possible than some programmer with an undergrad in physics and negligible real life aerospace experience, right? Then it became, 'We've looked into it already, of course. It's perhaps theoretically possible, but it's a complete waste of money and in way economical.' Then it became, 'Shit we're a decade behind technologically!'
There are a practically infinite number of ways for why any given nontrivial thing might not be possible, and quite a bit fewer ways that it can be possible. So it's generally quite easy to formulate compelling and intelligent arguments against the viability of something (not that my little paraphrasings above were intended to be intelligent). But these arguments are not necessarily as meaningful, or productive, as they might seem. Think of how much of our technology today would have seemed impossible, or extreme long-term future tech, not that long ago -- even to those most qualified to make such judgement. This of course does not mean anything is possible, but it does mean we'd likely be a much more backwards civilization if not for the headstrong visionaries among us doing what conventional knowledge told us ought not be able to be done.