Pyramid Skyscraper To Orbit?

[Zulu Romeo]

The last couple of posts actually gave me this idea:

How about building it in orbit and then putting it down somewhere, you know where there's a country/continent we might like to destroy anyway, Wouldn't that be easier?

I'm assuming you want to make sure the pyramid is intact afterwards, massive ground-air shockwaves and surrounding land be damned.

The friction generated by the pyramid when descending to Earth will be one major limiting factor. Heat could damage the structural integrity of the pyramid, so very strong heat-resistant materials will be needed to avoid such a massive structure breaking up in the atmosphere and causing destruction over a scattered area.

Assuming it is able to overcome the friction, it then needs to slow down more to allow a decent touchdown or splashdown and avoid blowing up on impact. The old NASA space capsules and Soyuz deployed signiciant parachutes to help slow the vehicle in the low atmosphere in order to protect the precious cargo (the astronauts). Soyuz even employed braking rockets. How these will be incorporated into the heat-shield-protected pyramid will be tricky, assuming they survive re-entry in the first place.

Finally, given the measures to protect the pyramid from harm, will it still be able to be supported by the ground? Such big structures need a decent foundation deep inside the ground beneath its metaphorical feet, and the choice of land needs to be good and solid in the first place, and of course unharmed by the effects of re-entry, otherwise, like the king who built three castles, it'll just sink into the swamp.

 

[trekkiedane]

^I see, there are problems with that method as well...

Hmmm, how if we build it from space, then: There's plenty of material up there -it only needs to be brought into Earth near space and put into some sort of 'controlled descent'. If it is all aimed at the same point it would pile up and become an artificial mountain

Sure it wouldn't have the perfect pyramid shape -more like a conical shape I suppose

 

[Zulu Romeo]

Actually, the problems I mentioned regarding getting the thing from orbit to Earth also apply to building it in space itself. It still needs to get back to Earth, you know.

And even then, there are even more problems.

Where are you getting the raw material from? If it comes from Earth, you still need to get it up there. Ditto if it comes from the Moon. Even then, from an energy conservation point of view, there's no point in using up so much transferred energy to get the materials up there, only to send the whole thing crashing back to Earth, thus utilising even more energy.

And that's just building it from orbit - if the materials come from the Moon, the round trip from the Moon is anything up to a week, and more energy will need to be used to achieve the escape velocities required to actually get the raw materials from there, the equipment to utilise it all there, the required supplies in terms of manpower, food, electricity, entertainment (lest you face a heavy psychiatric bill from prolonged time spent from Earth) and of course marketing.

Careful planning is required, I think.

 

[trekkiedane]

No, no, I'm thinking more along the lines of capturing some asteroids and crushing them into gravel and then just pouring it down into a pile somewhere - alternatively building some sort of rail gun on the moon and launching massive amounts of moon gravel on some trajectory that would make it all land in one big pile.

It wouldn't all have to 'land' simultaneously -just at almost the same place.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

A pile of rock --> a pyramid/mountain thing. Demanding energy requirements to generate the amount of force needed to pull them towards us aside, it sounds ambitious, and if your artifically-created rock satellite ends up massive enough that it could disrupt the delicate balance of gravitational push and pull in the Solar system... sounds like fun.

 

[Urge]

I have a related idea:


If you manage to build a building that is one, two or three kilometers tall, then that will be a good start for a spaceship. (perhaps you can also build it some hundred meters into the ground) The building itself is a gigantic coil-gun, or rail-gun that accelerates the ship horizontaly as fast as possible without injuring the crew, or perhaps much, much faster if its firering a un-manned craft (Most types of cargo can take more Gs then we can). The shaft itself can perhaps be air-free to give extra speed (some sort of airtight foil can be at the top, alowing the craft to burst through it at exit, and then replace the foil and pump out the air inside before the next shot), and then the craft engines can be smaller because the speed at the starting-point for the engines is mucher bigger then zero, witch is what spacecrafts are starting at now.

Such a space-gun will probably be something like a long tube standing up from the ground, held in place by wires attached to the ground at different places. A bit different from the elevator-to-space, or pyramid idea, but still related.