Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator

Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator

http://www.space.com/31180-diamond-nanothreads-support-space-elevator.html

This is good news. The elevator will be expensive but I think it is a practical way of getting people and goods into and from space more cost effective than using a rocket ship.

Who knows even an elevator from the Earth to the Moon and then from the Moon to its surface and back again would provide for a new means of transporation.

 

Wake me when someone can make enough of these super strong materials to make such structures viable.

 

Poof!!! Zing!!!

You get your wish...in increments.

...PRICE? mmmm...that is another matter!

http://www.eteknix.com/mass-product...-become-possible-thanks-japanese-researchers/

 

Wake me up when they can create s tether a few kilometers long.

 

Zzzzzz...

 

Wake me up before it go-goes.

Because I'm not taking the space elevator solo.

Wake me up before it go-goes.

I don't want to miss it when I hit that high.

 

From our Friends We Nuked The Shit Out Of:

http://www.eteknix.com/mass-product...-become-possible-thanks-japanese-researchers/

 

Hell, of ANY material, let alone a super-strong one.

A tether constructed in a single piece, 30,000km long? Finding the right material seems like the EASY part...

 

That would be 1858. Long cables are a basically well-solved problem.

It is widely believed to be possible to join two cables at some kind of junction, and so produce an even longer piece than could be made in one extrusion.

 

You are the weakest link. Goodbye.

 

I was not being snide. Create a cable maybe 10 km long, with this composition and do a demo with it in Earth orbit.

 

They could make a really amazing cheese slicer, but you'd probably cut your fingers off trying to wash it.

 

Cables, yes. Tethers are a different matter. We're talking about a load-bearing cable, in a single piece, in the neighborhood of 20km long that manages to maintain its tensile strength under load. This becomes problematic for reasons that are already well understood: at a certain length, the weight of the cable actually matches or exceeds the load of whatever it is the cable is holding up, and the tether has to be reinforced to support the weight of the REST of the tether.

It isn't just the tensile strength of the material that's a factor, then, but the actual construction of the tether. Different weave types, binding methods, ways of reinforcing it without adding additional weight. When you add stresses from wind turbulence and small perturbations in the load traveling up and down the tether, shear strength becomes a factor too.

Lots of things are widely believed, but it's not something we have even the slightest idea how to do in practice.

 

Yes, strangely, we haven't got a lot of experience with making very long extrusions of a quite new material. However, humanity has got a fair bit of experience with making extremely long cables. And with making load-bearing cables. Surely long cables of a new material are going to be different in detail, but we have a lot of experience on similar, related problems in cable-making.

Unquestionably a space elevator cable would be an enormous bunch of new challenges. I'm skeptical the thing can be done myself, much as I love the space elevator concept. But it seems quite clear the challenges in constructing such a thing are like the challenges of making a self-sustaining space station --- big, but roughly understood in the main, and imaginable that we could have workable detailed plans done within a generation.

I'm pretty sure at some point in human history we have evidence of cables being connected together. The art cannot be completely lost.

 

What you're saying is indisputable, but it is precisely why the material is the problem. The strength (breaking length), weight and price per metre of the material are of paramount importance in whether you could pull such load-bearing cable to support its own weight. Breaking length is estimated over 6000 km for carbon nanotubes—whether that holds in practice is another matter—I am not holding my breath. And that this is only at sea level, as the actual strain on the cable decreases as you go further from the gravity well, so the cable could be considerably longer (if it can be that long in the first place, which is presently doubtful).

Nebusj said it best about the one piece part... That part made no sense at all.

Well, yeah, no kidding. It's partly why building a practical cable of such scale is obviously not happening now, but I don't see that as being wildly disputed (OP excluded). Doesn't mean it's impossible to the point of ridicule. Especially given that tensile strength passes. Yeah, only on paper, but that's more than some of humanity's past accomplishments. And then, finding an even better on paper material ensures weave types, etc. will matter less.

In one thread a certifiably insane megastructure is considered not insane, in another a whimsy cable that makes any megascale engineer laugh his ass is laughed at. And not for how tiny it is... I guess I will never understand.

 

Use a bend knot?

I doubt a space elevator will ever be built, or even if it were, it might well soon fall into disrepair. We just don't seem to have the stamina and strength of will for building and maintaining such large-scale projects. As a species, we seem doomed to just fumbling around until we finally go extinct.

 

But NOT an extremely long load-bearing cable. Simply put: we've never successfully built a freestanding tethered structure more than about 5km high (tethers for observation balloons and some other structures). Gondola lifts and aerial tramways can extend this for a few kilometers only because the cables are supported by towers along the length and are not completely vertical throughout.

The leap from a cable car to a space elevator is NOT a trivial engineering challenge. It's similar to comparing an airplane and a space shuttle: despite their similarities, they have a completely different set of problems.

But not in multi-kilometer-long tether making. Just the massive distances involved makes this a very big technological leap.

Except that space elevators, unlike space stations, have the added problem of depending on an engineering process that we haven't actually developed yet (in addition to ALSO needing a self-sustaining space station to be in place before the elevator can even be built, but that's another matter).

If I recall my history there was a lot of talk among scientists about sustaining space stations as early as the 1930s, when manned space flight was still a theoretical at best. The discussion about space elevator tether materials is about as relevant as a 1930s discussion on what the combustion chamber of a moon rocket should be made of. Which is to say, it is probably NOT the biggest problem you need to solve, just the simplest.

But not tethers in a multi-kilometer long free standing structure, joined in such a way as to distribute the loads on both cables evenly without also causing a major shearing event while ALSO allowing vehicles to traverse the tether without damaging it.

That's not a thing that has ever been even REMOTELY attempted in the whole of human history. It's not that the art has been "lost" it's that it has to be totally reinvented to work in a completely different way before we can even attempt to TEST it.

 

Is there somewhere else in the solar system we could go that would save us from potential extinction?

 

^ I hear Ganymede is lovely this time of year.