I’ve been reading about this subject but I find it difficult to understand because of the large amount of opinions out there about how it would work and why we aren’t building it right now if our actual technology is enough to do it, also because it would be a way to get rid of greenhouse gases apart from the different applications to our plans to space exploration.
In: Engineering
The concept of a space elevator is simple, in theory. The most difficult part of getting rockets to space is escaping the atmosphere. The vast majority of the fuel a rocket uses to reach orbit is spent on that process. If you could skip that step, and launch a rocket directly from orbit you could travel much further, with heavier payloads. A space elevator attempts to answer that: What if we just took the rocket up an elevator to orbit, or constructed the rocket in space at an orbital platform bringing material up the elevator.
A great idea in concept. The problem of course is the how of making one is completely out of our depths. We would need a cable of immense tensile strength thousands of kilometers long. We would need a massive counterweight at the top to keep the cable tense and in a geostationary orbit. Our climber, the elevator box, would need to be able to counteract potential issues with the Coriolis effect.
The simple matter is that we have no way to construct a cable long enough. Actual lengths vary but since we need a geostationary orbit, the cable would need to be at minimum 36,000km long. Thats about 90% the circumference of the entire planet. The only material we have that could withstand the tensile forces would be carbon nanontubes which we quite simply can’t produce at that scale. We are not technologically capable of doing this currently.
I am not sure what your talking about when you refer to greenhouse gases. Rockets produce very very little greenhouse gases, with liquid rocket fuel main exhaust product being water vapor.
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