The concept and application of Space Elevator/Orbital Lift

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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

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Our actual technology isn’t enough to do it. We’re talking about building a structure, starting at dirt level, one hundred million meters high. Let’s write that out and contemplate it for a minute.

100,000,000m

Now let’s write out the height of the tallest building humans have ever constructed.

828m

If we built something a thousand times as tall as Burj Khalifa, we would be not quite 1% of the way there. I don’t mean to crap all over this because it’s a neat idea, but we need materials and construction techniques that don’t even exist yet. If God appeared and told us we had ten years to build a space elevator or be scourged by warrior angels with sword blades coming out of their mouths, I’m pretty confident we’d be getting scourged.

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