As I understand it (see: not at all), if you leave a spaceship with no suit on, you’d get baked like Marie Curie’s ovaries from the radiation. It’s mainly our atmosphere that protects us from most of the nastiest stuff. Would a giant cable reaching from Earth all the way to a platform outside the atmosphere become dangerously-radioactive over time? And if so, would that eventually cause the entire planet to get radioactive over hundreds of years? Kinda like if the hole in the Ozone layer were replaced with a Mario pipe.
And if that is the case, maybe we could forget the elevator aspect of it and just aim for a free eternal source of radioactive energy, like a really shitty Dyson sphere 👀
We have a free eternal source of energy.
It’s called solar.
If a space elevator became a reality, the real problem would be that it can get destroyed easily by terrorists or even just a defective satellite in low earth orbit crashing into it.
And then you have a 20000 mile long cable wrapping around earth at supersonic speeds.
Oops we accidentally cut earth like a big wheel of cheese
Yum!
If a space elevator happened, I would certainly make sure I don’t live in its flattening path around the equator
wouldn’t it be a 125–250 mile cable tops?
No, the upper end needs to be in geostationary orbit, which is at a distance of 35786 km (22236 miles).
Otherwise the cable will just wrap around the equator as soon as you launch it.
And even if you used a rigid rod instead of a cable, spacecraft released at the end would just fall back to earth cause at that low altitude it doesn’t rotate with escape velocity.
How do you anchor the end in space so that you don’t just retract the cable every time you try to use it?
That’s the neat thing about geostationary orbit. If the station at the upper end has enough mass, its own centrifugal force keeps it anchored in its orbit.
It’s passed geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is balanced, but it needs centrifugal force pulling out. So, you need to be going faster than the orbit wants, hence, further out.
Except that you would drag it out of geostationary orbit every time you used it? Like no matter how heavy it is your still moving it closer every time you pull on the cable. You would need to constantly thrust equivalent to the mass of the cable and whatever the cable is pulling. At that point aren’t you still basically just launching shit?
The more you think about it the dumber it gets. You would need to constantly move reaction mass to to the platform to create that thrust, but you’d have to use that thrust to counter the mass that you are bringing up. It’s all the same problems as conventional rocketry.
Think of earth as a rotating bowling ball, with a string attached, and a tennis ball attached to the other end of the string. The craft you launch is an ant walking along the string.
Its legs push against the string, but that’s nothing compared to the rotation of the bowling ball that keeps the string tight.
Technically, the ant’s climbing will slow down the rotation of the bowling ball over time, but this won’t have a noticeable effect for many millennia.
Right, except that a bowling ball weights about 6kg and a tennis ball weighs about sixty grams, so we would only need to build a platform that weighs 1% of the total mass of earth.
The way a normal elevator works is one way to lessen the problem: the port on the top is used to launch cargo AND to receive it, so when you make the outgoing cargo rise you use the incoming cargo as the balance. 1 ton goes up, 1 ton goes down.
Assuming it isn’t intended to return to earth at terminal velocity the station will ALSO need to bear the mass of arresting its descent, so no, that wouldn’t do much.
There’s no need for that speed. Ships won’t have to be build on the ground. The ideal is having an space dock at the geosync part and only move up and down the payload, not the ships.
If you figure that out give NASA a call, they’d be real interested.