AHC: Space Elevator by 2010

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to use a POD after 1950 where at least one operating, reliable space elevator has been built on Earth by December 31st, 2010.
 
Radushkevich and Lukyanovich's paper on carbon nanotubes is smuggled out of Soviet territory and translated, leading to increased Western interest in the subject.

Carbon nanotubes ~two decades earlier then gives us obviously a two decade jump on now, by which time we can assume we'll have the strength to do it.

Of course, we'd need a stronger (if that's possible) space race between the US and USSR to push funding for a space elevator earlier. And that means one of them will own territory on the Equator.
 
Space elevator from Earth to Moon or simply to some location out of Earth's atmosphere? Probably the latter, but a moon elevator would be awesome.
 
Space elevator from Earth to Moon…

That's… physically impossible.

Elevator to GEO needs a counterweight, and I don't see a way to do that within this timeframe, but maybe one to LEO would work…

Or do you consider a launch loop valid as an elevator? Because that's easier… ;):p
 
Space elevator from Earth to Moon or simply to some location out of Earth's atmosphere? Probably the latter, but a moon elevator would be awesome.

Thats not how space elevators work...

You can't connect the earth and the moon directly like that. You could, build an elevator out of the moon's gravity well, heck, using far earlier materials than carbon nano-tubes, but of course this would take huge investments, and its more likely they'd just build a mass driver, since that's relatively simple.
 
That's… physically impossible.

Elevator to GEO needs a counterweight, and I don't see a way to do that within this timeframe, but maybe one to LEO would work…

Or do you consider a launch loop valid as an elevator? Because that's easier… ;):p

Thats not how space elevators work...

You can't connect the earth and the moon directly like that. You could, build an elevator out of the moon's gravity well, heck, using far earlier materials than carbon nano-tubes, but of course this would take huge investments, and its more likely they'd just build a mass driver, since that's relatively simple.


Sorry, had a big brain relapse.

I'm a big idiot sometimes. :p:rolleyes:;)
 
Not going to happen. We STILL cant make the necessary length nanotubes, and thats the necessary first step. Getting an earlier start on nanotubes would be nice, but almost certainly you need pretty much todays tech to build sufficiently long nanotubes.

I would guess that with development starting in the 50s we might have sufficently long tubes by today. Possibly even by 2000, say. But figuring out how to do that on an industrial scale would take longer, weaving those fibers into sufficiently strong threads/ribbons, to build thousands of kilomeyers of said ribbon, without a single flaw, thats all going to take time and money. Billions and billions of dollars of money.

We also havent figured out how to practically get a load up and down such a ribbon in a practical and economic fashion, although thats "just" an engineering problem.

So... without an early pod that advances all tech, im pretty sure 2010 is about as early as engineering tests could happen, and i cant imagine a full scale tower by then. Thatd be more like 2020, imo.
 
But, as I've pointed before at least twice, why not use CABLES, which let fibers be shorter and less reliable?
 
But, as I've pointed before at least twice, why not use CABLES, which let fibers be shorter and less reliable?

??? No one is talking about 100,000km fibets. Any conceivable elevator will be made of 'short' fibers. But how short is 'short'? Any way you connect fibers, whether twisting together or in a matrix, is going to reduce strength, and the longer the idividual tubes can be, the better.

Orbital elevators are very close to the limits of theoretical carbon-carbon bonds, and every tiny bit of strength you lose increases maximum width literally exponentially.
 
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