We need YOU to join the Space Elevator Party

We can build an Orbital Ring Space Elevator today, using steel and kevlar. The Orbital Ring goes to low earth orbit, so it does not need advanced materials.
youtube.com/watch?v=0qezLhypA0Y
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-I.pdf

Why build the Orbital Ring? It would cut our costs of going to orbit from about $2000/kg to about $1/kg. There are individual asteroids that have tens of trillions of dollars in materials on them that could be mined. One mission could easily pay for the cost of building the Orbital Ring.

We could then deploy solar power satellites in orbit above cloud cover and return the power back to the surface with near zero loss by running power transmission cables down the elevator, and sell the power at a profit.

With increased luminosity in space, enhanced exposure time, and the ability to deliver base loads, solar panels pay for themselves in only 1-2 years while having a 20 year life time.

In other words, if you put $5 trillion of solar panels into space, you get your $5 trillion back by the end of year two and a $5 trillion income stream each year thereafter.

In other words, the US could cut everyone's taxes, both personal and business, income, capital, death, or otherwise, all to 0%, not even cut any benefits or current spending, and pay off the national debt within a decade.

Other urls found in this thread:

orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-II.pdf
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

why not a moonbase and a lunar space elevator first?

They're good ideas, but it would be a lot more expensive to do with our current costs of getting to the moon. Do the one on earth, then do one on the moon.

Doing it for the earth would be impossible right now, doing a lunar one is technologically possible and only a question of money.

A moonbase could also work as a manufactoring and energy center, building starships to colonize the rest of the solar system

Or just cut the whole crap and go back to the Orion System. It literally ruins my day when I think about it, we had a system ready to take 7000 TONS to space, ready to build in a moments notice in the FIFTIES and we are still fucking around with toys like chemical rockets and the ISS.

have fun getting the rest of the world to just go along with having a potential weapons platform floating hundreds of miles over their heads

>Doing it for the earth would be impossible right now,

What do you mean? The Orbital Ring can be built with existing tech.

>there will never be any more Space Elevator threads on Sup Forums

Fucking redditshits ruining my Sup Forums.

This is literally a Space Elevator thread.

>t. Sup Forums is my favorite sub4chan I found it last week! the cake is a lie XD!

We dont have materials strong enough for a space elevator. Some carbon nanotube based material maybe could work but its a decade or two away at the very least while we could start building a moonbase and a stardock over there right away.

Too bad the american gubmint rather spend literally trillions of dollars on desert adventures rather than conquering space.

>We dont have materials strong enough for a space elevator

That's the point of the Orbital Ring. It doesn't need the long tether, so we can build it with kevlar.

>Too bad the american gubmint rather spend literally trillions of dollars on desert adventures rather than conquering space.

sigh

What is the point of a ring vs an elevator if it will still require the same amount of fuel to get to it?

The form of energy. To use a rocket you have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars each time you want to go to space. With an elevator, it's about as expensive as a maglev train.

$2000/kg to around $1/kg.

How about a space ramp? We could drive to orbit.

> It would cut our costs of going to orbit from about $2000/kg to about $1/kg.

This number factors in the build and maintenance cost of said elevator, right?

There are some ideas like this. Star Tram and Launch Loop. The problem is partly in keeping the supports stabilized. I would support building on, but the Orbital Ring is better.

That is the marginal cost of putting things into orbit. So, electricity, which is the biggest expense. I don't think the maintenance is baked in there, but it's not expected to be a huge figure, like hundreds of billions of dollars per year or anything.

Kevlar is a horrible material selection for tensile properties. It is best suited for transverse shear. It also absorbs water and is damaged by exposure to the sun. Learn to materials science. Steel only has one thing going for it, and that thing is cost. You do not want a low cost but extremely massive material for something that needs to be off of the ground. Who the hell wrote this?

I completely understand that, but they arent proposing an elevator, they want to build a ring. What im saying is that a ring with no elevator has no benefit.

>Kevlar is a horrible material selection for tensile properties. It is best suited for transverse shear.

Yeah, you'd want to combine it with steel.

Build the ring, and then hang tethers off of it to the surface.

Are you legitimately suggesting that we should make a metal Matrix composite out of Kevlar? People have done that in the past. It's pointless because the only thing Kevlar provides to you is transverse Shear strength which steel already has.

Which is going to cost some hilarious amount more and incur the same structural problems as an elevator. We arent that far off being able to suspend one in low earth orbit and build down with current materials research. Id rather wait for that.

*space*

fuck off globecuck shill. The earth is flat

(((space)))

Jacketed. It might help if you read the article.

About $4-500 billion, conservatively.

>and incur the same structural problems as an elevator.

Except it can be built today.

>and incur the same structural problems as an elevator.

We can do that.

Fuck off, Earnest Voice!

>There are individual asteroids that have tens of trillions of dollars in materials on them that could be mined.

If the materials could be easily accessed, the price of them would drop drastically after the first few successful missions.

But well, its the first few grabs which would net the most money.

No reason to build it today when 10 years down the track we can do it better, and for half the cost. The need also doesnt exist yet, we have to wait for spacefaring technology to catch up before its worth building any kind of orbital launch platform.

Jacketed means metal matrix. I'm a composites subject matter expert. I don't need to read an article written by a fifteen-year-old to understand the basics.

Monopoly pricing. And they would be used for things like solar satellites.

Even if the price collapses 90%, it easily pays for itself on the first mission.

No guarantee of that. And 20% economic growth is a good reason to build something today.

>Jacketed means metal matrix. I'm a composites subject matter expert.

If you say so.

I do say so. Unless, of course, you think that putting two materials next to each other who have extremely different tensile, shear, compressive, thermal and hydrophilic properties and react very differently to strain and rates of strain would not be an issue when building something that is on the kilometer scale. This is some truly r/eddit garbage. Which adhesive are you going to use to bind them? Which process are you going to use? Where are you going to get that much Kevlar? Are you using Kevlar 29 or Kevlar 49 derivatives?

I don't know if this is the intended purpose, but if you actually built what OP has in the picture you could use it to launch things into orbit for almost no fucking cost at all. If it were a maglev system you could accelerate it past the escape velocity with the cargo attached. Once you reach the desired speed and location release it to launch into orbit or beyond, the train obviously staying on because of the ring.

And then their prices rebound as cheap supply of materials starts driving the industry and demand picks back up.

Also, space manufacturing could create an entire new field of industry.

>if you actually built
That's the issue, user. Scale is a bitch

If you are a materials science expert, why would you expect some idiot on 4 chan to know the detailed answers these types of questions? Did you look anything up on the subject? I'm obviously not a materials engineer and I don't know every morbid detail, but clearly we combine materials like this in many industrial uses, and it's far from impossible.

tldr "We can't do this because you don't have a master's in my discipline"

Yes, that is basically the main purpose of the system. Launch things into space.

America's Saudi bosses will not allow this.

I'm sure they can bring it down.

>If you are a materials science expert, why would you expect some idiot on 4 chan to know the detailed answers these types of questions?
If you think these types of questions are difficult, I sincerely hope you never become an engineer.
>Did you look anything up on the subject?
I'm a subject matter expert. I'm the guy you come to when you have questions about composites. Do you not know what a subject matter expert is?
>I'm obviously not a materials engineer
Clearly.
>we combine materials like this in many industrial uses
No, we don't. Kevlar has almost no purpose with the exception of compressive strength, of which it is worse than many common fibers and most metals and transverse shear where it is superior to most fibers and metals since it doesn't spall. In your application Kevlar is a horrific material choice. I would expect an undergraduate to understand this.
>it's far from impossible
It is impossible. There's this thing called strain. There's this thing called strain rate. Learn to engineering. Strain and strain rate related problems become huge pains in the ass when things become large in scale. It's why most large structures are monocoque.

Anyways, have fun LARPing in a thread where you know nothing about the material. I'm sure if you just read enough articles written by 15 year olds you'll change the world. The only reason we haven't pursued this is because we want to keep you down and shit, man.

They gotta be a lot longer than just to low orbit because as an elevator car goes up it the center of gravity changes and throws off the centrifical force that holds it straight.


Between the weights of the matierials and the sheer-forces involved in flexing something so heavy under so much stress we do not currently posess matierials capable of handling it.

Both steel and kevlar are not capable of even just handling thier own weight at that scale, let alone the counterweight at the end. Carbon fiber and other composites are light enough but too brittle.

In order for it to work wed need it to be built out of carbon nano-fiber which we currently cannot manufacture in amounts big enough to make a ball of yarn with it, let alone weave a kilometers long meters wide cable. Plus that shit currently costs like, $300 a gram and you would need hundreds of tons of it. Space elevators are possible in the realm of thought only when one deliberatley excludes many other factors.

>I'm a subject matter expert

If you say so. You also think that materials with different strengths can't be bonded together, and you didn't read the part of the paper that explains how the tethers would work.

> as an elevator car goes up it the center of gravity changes and throws off the centrifical force that holds it straight.

p.4 of the PDF.

>
Between the weights of the matierials and the sheer-forces involved in flexing something so heavy under so much stress we do not currently posess matierials capable of handling it.


Ibid.


>Both steel and kevlar are not capable of even just handling thier own weight at that scale, let alone the counterweight at the end.

You didn't read the OP. This is an Orbital Ring.

>f you just read enough articles written by 15 year olds

I had no idea that Paul Birch was 15 when he wrote this:

orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-II.pdf

Can I say that Ive worked with aramid fibers a lot and its also very dense and heavy compared to other composites?

Also kevlar is a brand name, the family of polymers it belongs to are known as aramid fibers, and again, theyre really heavy. When building a cable dozens of kilometers long weight would very quickly become a huge issue. The cable would simply break under its own weight.

:)

I mean, it might be a fair question if it wasn't so obviously just a penis-waving maneuver. "Oh, you don't know the morbid details of how to bond certain things together? CAN'T BE DONE!"

p.4 of the PDF.

Why do people always exclude cost of construction and maintenance in the cost of launch?

They just kinda take it forgranted that as soon as its built its there and everything is free. The cost of building an orbital ring is, to combine a cliche and a pun, astronomical.

It would not cost $1 per kilogram until you moved atleast as many kilograms as dollars you spent on it, and maintaining something as big as an orbital ring is never going to be cheap under any circumstances outside of science fiction.

Possibility does not equate to feasability.

>Why do people always exclude cost of construction and maintenance in the cost of launch?

It's an unecessary step. Ammortize the cost over the launches, then de-amortize it again to calculate annual return? Either way, it's a 100%+ return on investment annually.

>The cost of building an orbital ring is, to combine a cliche and a pun, astronomical.

Not even as expensive as the last bailout.

eh I can still see it happening in the near future if musk keeps doing what he is doing. that being reducing costs of space travel.

would you even need a full ring before you start dropping down elevator teathers? or would a low orbit station be able to stay i orbit with a teather?

>start putting ring segments in
>needs a manned station every so often for easy repairs and potential teather points
>space travel becoming cheaper and cheaper
>hire civilians to man and maintain ring segment station
>people actauly start living in space for long periods of time
>ring now completed with many stations
>average civilians can now affoard to visit these stations
>wealthy civs now start making their own spessships in orbit for transport, tours, going to the moon, etc

>just because I don't know what I'm talking about and talking out of my ass doesn't mean it can't be done
Really rang my bells.

>tfw you were just born too early to experience the wild frontier of colonizing the solar system
>tfw you will never strike out with your bros with a rickety private spaceship and colonize a moon or an asteroid to stake a claim for your nation
>tfw you will never have a yuge laff at planetbound durkas and niggers while you and your spacer bros are building an utopian future in the heaven with your scientific knowledge and hard work

LEO To Earth ring isn't going to work. The ring needs to be moving at nearly 10m/second to stay in orbit. If you want to make something like this work, the Rotovator is your only practical option.

We need to hold off on giving humanity cheap access to space until we solve this whole globalist problem.

Do you really want them out there doing the same shit to every alien civilization they encounter?

It'll be a looong time before we find aliens friend.

>It'll be a looong time before we find aliens friend.

implying that they haven't already found us.

I have never heard of that. But from what I can tell looking over it it sounds perfectly doable. I just have no idea how you will construct something like that. At some point you will have to redirect the ring and simultaneously have this ground connection cable up. How do you want to do that?

We should discuss the politics if such a thing were being built. Which countries would own this space?

where would we build it?

You can pretty much build it everywhere. You can anchor the cables even at a sea station. You just need two antipodes of the earth to build on.

>The ring needs to be moving at nearly 10km/second to stay in orbit.
And where exactly would be the problem?

why does the ring need to move
if it surrounds the earth, then g cancels itself

I hope this is bait, people don't actually believe this is real "busted" proof, right?

No it doesnt. Also, you need to build it somehow, dingus, it wont magically pop into existence.

>if it surrounds the earth, then g cancels itself
It's not a solid ring, it's more like a cable that surrounds the earth. You can't build a rigid body of that size. And it would be instable anyways.

Why? What is the thing that flies downward there?

Not in the Middle East or Europe. I don't want debris raining on my town because one Abdul decided he wasn't ok with it.

Thinking of it:
The ring has to be very elastic in the longitudinal direction to be able to accelerate/decelerate so that the whole structure can work, right?
How does that work?

It has to be so elastic that no energy is lost during the stretching and contraction phase. The more I think of it the less convinced I am.

what is micro gravity. ISS technically free falling towards the Earth..