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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday September 15 2019, @05:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-do-you-anchor-it-to-green-cheese? dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

Fans of sci-fi and fringe tech may already be familiar with the idea of the "space elevator," which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — and totally impossible with today's technology. But a pair of scientists think they've found an alternative: a Moon elevator. And it's slightly less insane... technically.

The idea of the space elevator, first explored in detail by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel "The Fountains of Paradise," is essentially a tower so tall it reaches space. Instead of launching ships and materials from the surface of the Earth to orbit, you just put them in the elevator of this tower and when they reach the top, somewhere about 26,000 miles up in geosynchronous orbit, they're already beyond gravity's pull, for all intents and purposes.

It's a fun idea, but the simple fact is that this tower would need to be so strong to support its own weight, and that of the counterweight at the far end, that no known material or even reasonably hypothetical one will do it. Not by a long shot. So the space elevator has remained well on the "fiction" side of science fiction since its first proposal. Hasn't stopped people from patenting it, though.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/12/scientists-propose-spaceline-elevator-to-the-moon/


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  • (Score: 2) by Mer on Sunday September 15 2019, @11:36AM (1 child)

    by Mer (8009) on Sunday September 15 2019, @11:36AM (#894303)

    I misunderstood the headline and thought it was a proposition to build a tower on the moon, pointing toward earth and stopping just above the atmosphere. Spacecrafts could grab onto it and repel down, then relay at a moon spaceport for much better launch parameters.
    That tower would be under lower gravity and have no wind problems. Still science fiction but eh.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 15 2019, @06:19PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Sunday September 15 2019, @06:19PM (#894399)

    That certainly sounds like a reasonable description, except that it's not a "tower on the moon" any more than a beanstalk space elevator is a "tower on Earth" - it may look like a tower from the surface, but it's a cable suspended from above, rather than supported from below.

    So, you put a beanstalk on the moon, extending through the L1 point (it and the L3 point being the only places a lunar beanstalk is possible), pulled tight by the competing gravity of Earth and the moon. And make it long enough that the near-to-Earth tip is traveling at roughly Earth-surface speeds. Not sure how "geosynchronous" got involved, since it's not possible for anything attached to the moon to achieve, though the diagram clearly indicates angular rather than linear velocity.

    Hmm, but on re-reading, you're correct - it sounds like it's not actually connected to the moon, just co-orbitting. Geosynchronous still makes no sense though, as the L1 point moves at exactly the same angular velocity as the moon.