Search results

Damn! Lost another long post to an inadvertent page closure. Mark, your example is a good one, and illustrates nicely some of the problems of orbital physics. While you can conserve the CM position, you cannot also conserve the angular momentum. This is because the CM is determined by the...

So Ray, is that you beating your head against the wall over on the Tivo forum about this? Thanks to that news piece, the same type of arguments are flaring up over there. The saddest part is that the loudest defender of the elevator isn't doing so out of any first hand knowledge, but because the...

What do I think? I think that if I could reach to Florida, I'd give you you a good whack, that's what I think! I don't feel the need to repeat any of my previous posts. I still think they're valid points that have not been addressed. Once someone can explain to me where the angular momentum...

Eric, I believe there's some overlap. You'll probably find more than a few heads on the space elevator forum that have more than their fair share of unusual bumps. Ah, well, I'd better stop bashing another forum before Jack gives me a warning. Andy

Actually, Brian, your joke is far more grounded (pun intended) in physics than most of what I saw at that forum. Hell, I'd give you $3.50 for a startup advance, which is more than I'd invest in their scheme. Kansas. Sheesh. Andy P.S. and yes, I know exactly the cause of 1 and 3...

Eric, Just for the hell of it, I registered over there to see what responses "my" posts had generated. As expected, the only one started off with a word choice flame, then an appeal to authority (one of the logical fallacies), and finally a smug suggestion that I go off and talk to people who...

Time to fess up: I made a math error. The mass of the ribbon seemed really high, and there's always trouble when calculating volumes with both millimeters and kilometers. I decided not to give them the benefit of water density, since that's just not gonna happen. so with a density a little above...

Eric, I don't mind, so long as you didn't include my email address. I didn't want to register to read the forum, but I read the summary material on the home page, and I think there are more problems than I originally thought. There seems to be a missing paradigm in their concept. The...

Well, the materials problems aren't even close, really. We're talking tethers on the order of tens of miles. A space elevator would be 42,800 miles long, since its center of mass has to be at geostationary orbit, at 21,400 miles. But you're correct that the tethers don't have to worry about that...

"Relative" does refer to the difference in vehicle masses. The larger the lower vehicle is relative to the higher vehicle, the more energy can be transfered and the greater altitude that can be reached. However there is a point of diminishing returns: if the lower vehicle mass is significantly...

Still won't work on Mars: there's still gyroscopic precession and nutation that cause it to wobble. Everything wobbles, no getting around it. But if you like the elevator concept, you might be interested in tethered vehicle delivery systems. The single largest obstacle to leaving Earth is...

As a NASA contractor I've been following the X-Prize candidate's progress. Rutan's entry is probably the best shot. However, it's a one trick pony, designed specifically to meet the X-Prize criteria. There is a HUGE technology gap between this craft and anything that could reach orbit and...