NationStates Jolt Archive

For those of you not familliar with the theory this is an elevator that reaches to space pushed by electromagnets. It's theoraticlly cheaper in the long run but would take a massive initial investment. The question is how much would this cost in USD approx?

I'm thinking about creating an RP where an ally and I build one but I really have no sweet clue what the price tag would be. Comments?

if i get my old nation back i will help you....well how big electromagnets how many how much material you will use to construct it all that put into consideration...then labour costs...

say 9,000 per electromagnet with that magnet being 15 ft by 15 ft or something like that..

Yes but the building surrounding the elevator is prime real estate, to recoup costs. The elevator needs to be massive, big enough to lift a couple of the space shuttles at once.

I have already been discussing such an idea for some time with my closest allies.

I have already been discussing such an idea for some time with my closest allies.

But this doesn't answer my question does it? How much do you think it'd cost?

hey man, this is the nation i just got revived i was rabid monkey fish....look you can't ask other people prices really if you give yourself a guideline eg eg 10 foot of material will cost x amount and then how much the estate is etc it will all be good i will help out a bit more if you give me more detail etc

I suppose its in the hundreds of billions of dollars to construct one of these things, maybe even trillions. The atmosphere is like 60-80 miles high, this thing has to be huge while not falling over, etc. etc.

It doesn't need to stand up that's the point. It just needs really strong cables, while the top part stays in geostationary orbit.
The cost depends on how easily you can manufacture the cables, with the one-time cost of putting the top part into orbit. I'd say two trillion USD would cover it.

I suppose its in the hundreds of billions of dollars to construct one of these things, maybe even trillions. The atmosphere is like 60-80 miles high, this thing has to be huge while not falling over, etc. etc.

The accepted way to construct a space elevator is to dangle a cable /down/ from a geosynchronus satelite (all the while dangling a counter-weight 'up' and out from there to keep your hub at the right point) and making sure your system is rotation-neutral w.r.t. the planet. Once the lower end reaches ground level you then anchor it (possibly reel out the upper end a little more to get a managable tension set up) and then build up the initial cable with whatever else you need to allow your transportation devices (either friction or electromagnetically driven) to travel up and down the path of the cable.

(Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since I last read up on the subject.)

There's a book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Red Mars which has some excellent comments on space elevators. I can't remember how much it was in the book, but he calculated it would cost more than several years of military budget for a country like America, and to be affective would actually have to be several times the length of the planet it was attached to. To keep costs down though he considered moving an asteroid into a high orbit and constructing it from there. Sorry I waffled a bit there, hope I could be of help.

i wrote a darn essay here and it didnt send, so let me sum it up, geosync therefor build on equator, u ken, pyramid base miles high: cut down on rope cost, upper platform above gravity, rope: carbon fibre (or other poylmere), not yet developed, larger at top 2 take strain, upper platform u can work out, power can b teleported thanx 2 quantum, elevator itself big box like wharhouse size, ur thinking 2 small, need counterweights, estimated cost $10,000,000,000 tho i dont really know, prob will b more, tho gd save in the long run, hf, and i wanna ride lol

I have already been discussing such an idea for some time with my closest allies.

But this doesn't answer my question does it? How much do you think it'd cost?

A lot. lol.

You'd need a material with enough tensile strength to resist gravity. The most obvious material that comes to mind is diamond. Otherwise if it was just steel, it would sway and eventually snap in two.

A few useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Space%20Elevator&lastnode_id=589103
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_elevator_020327-1.html
http://www.isr.us/SEHome.asp?m=1

Google is your friend.

This is all ooc btw I just wanted to get the ppls thoughts.

For a small base, large satilte and dangled cable (of a carbon based molecule I need to do more reading before I can speak knowledgably about it. Recommended diamonds if cost wasn't a factor.) It's be approx. 40 billion


I'm thinking an actual sky scraper 1Km by 1Km by 36 000Km. Diamond suport beams and carbon based sheilding. I'd need to do something about the low earth orbit debris. I'm an equatorial country, so that's good. It will have to expand into a larger structure in orbit to act as counter balance.

I'm thinking 200 000km^2 of carbon nanotubing and several hundred million carats of diamonds. Of course several thousand tonnes of carbon reinforced steel etc..... hmmm I'm gonna do some calculations then I'll start and IC thread about this and my need for materials.

Relic region just got one, the top of it is a large space station that holds the nation of New Kuban. This doens't come as much of a surprise though, as Relic region has the most space to ground trading on earth.

Another neat feature is the powerful lasers we have mounted on it, basically providing 24/7 orbital support on our continent.

Good luck with yours!

(I was going to make a thread to announce it, but two space elevator threads would be kinda pointless)

Why the fuck would anyone use Diamond? Diamond itself only has a tensile strength of about 700 MPa(megapascals), some of the best titanium alloys have a GPa of 1.3-1.6 GPa+.. rethink your materials, please.. anyway.. im lost now..

Why the f--- would anyone use Diamond? Diamond itself only has a tensile strength of about 700 MPa(megapascals), some of the best titanium alloys have a GPa of 1.3-1.6 GPa+.. rethink your materials, please.. anyway.. im lost now..

I was more thinking, how much it could stand compression wise. As for tensile strenght that's what the other materials are for... Hmmm I'll rethink about the titanium alloy though

I'd invest in the future. But will it cost anything to use it once it has been accomplished? :?: :?:

I'd invest in the future. But will it cost anything to use it once it has been accomplished? :?: :?:

I'm not interested in investments (In this thread anyway)

As for cost of usage, it would be fractional compared to a space shuttle launch.

Use a carbon molecule called buckminsterfullerin (sp?). It's amazinglly light and strong, but it can only be produced in space. The cost would be over 100 billion USD, I believe. Don't go with heavy metals for the project, because the elevator would collapse in on its self at a maximum height of 2 kilometers. But if the buckminsterfullerin is drawn into long cables, dropped down through orbit, and latched to a secure point near the equator, you could send train sized cars up into orbit within a matter of hours. At the top it would have to be connected to a space station so that all the shuttles could pick up passengers and go to their destination. Since the shuttles would never have to reenter, this would save litterally billions on fuel cost, and maintenance.

Why the f--- would anyone use Diamond? Diamond itself only has a tensile strength of about 700 MPa(megapascals), some of the best titanium alloys have a GPa of 1.3-1.6 GPa+.. rethink your materials, please.. anyway.. im lost now..

I was more thinking, how much it could stand compression wise. As for tensile strenght that's what the other materials are for... Hmmm I'll rethink about the titanium alloy though

Titanium is far to heavy and weak, it would collapse in on itself. I agree that you shouldn't use diamond, it's far to brittle, but I do believe that carbon is the way to go. It's light, cheap, strong, and versatile, see my last post for details.

So as it stands genral consensus is that the tower cannot be that tall. Hmmm How about a X:1Km Y:1Km Z:3Km with several cables dropped down and affixed to the building. There'd be a large space dock on the top, to counter the weight and of course dock with shuttles.

Use a carbon molecule called buckminsterfullerin (sp?). It's amazinglly light and strong, but it can only be produced in space.{snip}

Technically, you're looking at 'buckytubes'. BMFene is (if you're talking strictly, at least) 60 carbon atoms in a dodecahedron (C(sub)60(/sub)), although larger variations may be considered that extend the geodesic theme and (with the aid of chlorine ring scaffolding, apparently) a smaller one that is C(sub)50(/sub) can be created.

Buckytubes (or nanotubes) are basically what you're talking about, being constructed the same sort of thing (at the atmoic level) but being created in a graphite sheet wrapped in just one direction (rather than in all 3D), where the strength and tortional resilience of the resulting megamolecule depends on whether the 'wrapping' occurs tangentially to one of the bond directions, perpendicularly to one of them or so that none of the bond directions (at 120 degrees to each other) have such a relationship.

I don't have any information about which orientation is preferable, nor significant facts about any of the strengths, but a lot of people feel that several differeing sizes of buckytubes (conentrically arranged) provides enhanced properties. You might need to consider the fact (or rather my opinion, as I'm extrapolating this from graphite's properties) that strands have the same slipperyness between each other that layers of graphite have, and thus I find it hard to believe you could 'spin' multiple short nanotubes into a thread, string and (eventually) a rope like you can with most fibres. This might mean that you'd need to ensure that your base cable was effectively monomolecular (or whatever you call it when you start concentricising it) or else create 'gripping' regions along it or at the ends of the threads in some way. Beyond current technology, but not yet ruled out as a complete impossibility.


So as it stands genral consensus is that the tower cannot be that tall. Hmmm How about a X:1Km Y:1Km Z:3Km with several cables dropped down and affixed to the building. There'd be a large space dock on the top, to counter the weight and of course dock with shuttles.

I'd avoid building towers to solve this problem. If nothing else, the mass of the tower is going to start causing techtonic stresses, in my mind. A 1km*1km tower (all the way up, because I can't remember the taper-factor for a square-based pyramid) would have a volume of 3.57x10^13 m^3. Volume-for-volume this would mean taking around 4cm uniformly off of the entire land surface of Earth (assuming I've got the maths right, of course), though you'd probably not make the tower completely solid, at least not all the way up (using the width as bracing structure, rather than to resist load-compression, at this height). Say you had an average density of half that of water (this being a wild guess), that means half a tonne per cubic metre.

So, barring the fact that a tower 1km*1km*37,500km is going to be dangerously tall for it's width /anyway/ (try building a pile of 37,500 D6s in anything other than a completely windless environment) you're going to end up with a tad under 18 million million tonnes (18 billion in European money, 18 trillion in the US, I think) of stuff pressing down on a 1km square area of land. You better get some 3rd-Party Volcano And Earthquake insurance sorted out pretty sharpish, never mind the contingency planning for evacuating, at a moments notice, every single person living within several degrees of the equatorial line around the /entire/ planet if/when the tower collapses for any reason. And that assumes that the tower even falls in this convenient manner (it's perfectly capable of wrapping completely around any 'great circle' line with a minumum of pre-impact structural breakup) and whatever happens, the entire planet is in danger of falling debris on a scale at /least/ as great as that resulting from the the Yucatan impact, whether suffering from a direct fale, the delayed de-orbiting of the upper stretches (broken off into a decaying orbit) or the after-effects of even (say) a single 1km^3 chunk of building falling from a few kilometres up. It's a quite frightening scenario. (Even the breakup of a 'dangled rope' style of space-elevator is frightening, but on not so quite a gigantic scale.)


After all that, the caveat is that you should bear in mind that all the above calculation and theorising shown above has been done from scratch, and there are plenty of wild holes in it all that could mean the actuality varies wildly towards either the optomositic or pessimistic points of view. There are plenty of people who have done these calculations before, and who possess more expertise in the subject, but I felt that the general concepts needed to be mooted.

(Minor spelling edits made, probably more to come... :)

Nova,

Was this along the lines of what we had previously and briefly discussed?

-T

Yes Tarqys it was.

Gonzos thanks man I will honestly take this into consideration. (However on a lower level I want to kill you because it means more work for me.) But seriously I think this is helping because I'm getting a new design in my head.

Why the f--- would anyone use Diamond? Diamond itself only has a tensile strength of about 700 MPa(megapascals), some of the best titanium alloys have a GPa of 1.3-1.6 GPa+.. rethink your materials, please.. anyway.. im lost now..

I was more thinking, how much it could stand compression wise. As for tensile strenght that's what the other materials are for... Hmmm I'll rethink about the titanium alloy though

Titanium is far to heavy and weak, it would collapse in on itself. I agree that you shouldn't use diamond, it's far to brittle, but I do believe that carbon is the way to go. It's light, cheap, strong, and versatile, see my last post for details.

You couldnt make it entirely out of diamond, but i mean a thin layer.... Ehh, im no engineer. *Runs*