Japanese Construction Company Plans Space Elevator By 2050

I'll pitch in a couple hundred. First step!!!! Maybe first joint human enterprise?! Lets do it, i want the ladder before i die people!

That elevator will probably have so many delays that it will take till 2060
The Genius

hearing this coming from Japanese
i can say only one thing: FINALLY!!! ^^

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bored? lets go mine the stars... ^^

The major problem that I see is the need for a counterweight on the end. Getting a weight into space that`s significant enough to prevent the elevator from bending (I assume it`s much like swinging a loose string vs swinging a string with a ball on the end) would take enormous energy. Sure, the station at the end would provide a lot of that, but being 36,000km away, I assume you need a LOT of mass. Perhaps they could get this mass from all the space junk that`s up there using that system that was the topic of an article last week.

I look forward to seeing something like this happen, hopefully in my lifetime.

I believe in the engineering abilities to design this elevator and make it work. I just hope they do not build it in Japan with the extreme history of earth quakes.

If we could actually touch outer space and the earth ground with an object, I wonder if it would also pull a static charge and help make electricity, hmmm??

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Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.

I looked into this concept with a team of engineers (we were considering entering the Spaceward Competition a few years ago) and we concluded that it was not feasible. I assume that once Obayashi Corp. starts to really get into the math of this type of challenge, they will come to the same conclusion.

The idea would work better if the cable is coated in diamond and it is connected to a ring that goes around the planet like a giant circle and has multiple space elevators attached to it on evenly spaced sections but thats just how I think it would work better.

I can just imagine having this all set up, then an 8.5 quake strikes nearby that wasn't in the picture at all, and the resulting ground motion--in excess of 30 feet--severs the cable and bye bye everyone on it for a free trip to DEEP space. Like a sling shot!

@ tertertert: In my understanding, the counterweight doesn't have to be all that big if you're only bringing up small loads. It would probably be cost intensive to get a basic counterweight up there, but after that we could use the cable itself to get the required mass into orbit.

@mrwright85: What were the main issues? Have you considered contacting Obayashi Corp? They might be interested in buying your data.

@gismowiz: A space elevator would have to be anchored at the equator, so Japan isn't a likely home for it. Also, a free-floating ocean anchor station seems to be the most likely solution to earthquake (and security) concerns.

@MDW There were a lot of issues with this, but without going too far into detail - it came down to 2 things that proved most problematic:

1. materials - no currently existing material is light enough, strong enough, and able to maintain its integrity over a reasonable amount of time being exposed to UV rays, wind, ozone, moisture, etc.

2. safety - there are far too many things that happen everyday on our planet (and around it) that could cause a catastrophic failure. The insurance policy alone would more than surpass the cost of current methods of getting mass into space

Oh and thanks for the suggestion, I'll have to see if I can find my old hard drive with that data.

Why not just use the anti-gravity device recovered from the 1947 roswell new mexico crashed exterrestrial spacecraft? We all know it's sitting in a U.S. bunker somewhere, and probably has already been reverse engineered.

all jokes aside, after the first one is built, several more could follow, each linked together. a great step for man kind, a great target for extremist terrorists. get a large cluster and it could be a launching pad for missions to the moon or other heavenly bodies.

It was Goliath that was tipped over from one well placed small stone.

It this thing touches outer space, one well place meteor might topple the whole thing; perhaps some flying space junk too. Leverage, harmonic vibrations, balance, solid foundation or soft soil, strength, rigidity, flexibility, wind, flying debris, atmosphere and barometric changes in pressure and gravity will all be playing in this structure.

I wonder what company will provide insurance for this building.

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Science sees no further than what it can sense.

Please please do this. The united states poeple have given up on space. Someone needs to make it happen. This will lead to building ships in space to go to mars. No wasted fuel getting out of the atmosphere. Please do this!!!

Sometimes a few colleagues and I have some beers and kick around some engineering and research challenges and what needs to be done to reach the goals. The more we drink, limitations in the state of the art of materials and technology tend to find their way into the “details” category and the ideas become more imaginative also. Financing usually ends up to be the first resident in the “details” category.

I do not see a space elevator happening.

Aside from the materials challenges, safety issues, and financing the builders are going to need a clientele to pay for the service of having their goods or themselves hoisted into space. Also the trip is going to take a week. Virgin Galactic is going to be able to provide a passenger service for suborbital flights this or next year and Reaction Engines has the Skylon space plane on the drawing board and figures in 10 years to have it in service to get 12 tons into space.

The projected service date for the space elevator, according to the article, is 2050. I think if fellows like Brandson, Bigelow, Musk and the people at Reaction Engines are given that much time they are going to come up with a vehicle to provide the same service that is cost competitive, safer, simpler and quicker.

I kind of thought of this overnight, if we have more than one space elevator connect to eachother then we can put the technology we use for satelites and combine it with the space elevator we can get rid of a lot of sateites that are floating around the earth but all the nations will have to help with cleaning up the space junk thats floating around up in space so that we may actually be able to build more than one space elevator for everyone to use and instead of actually making more rockets and such we should focus all of our available space technology to build a space elevator and like what beefymclovin said in an earlier comment instead of wasting resources on making stage rockets all that metal can be used to make other things and we would be able to make rockets that can just be launched from any of the connected space elevators.

See what you have to say about that world.
From a smart kid who is a junior in school

Nightmare scenarios -- all involve the damn cable:

- The damn cable: It'll be a hazard for ordinary aviation and such. Probably hard to see on radar. (Though, it probably will have to be several yards thick -- I would think. And thinner would only make matters worse.) Still, I wouldn't want to fly into that thing. How big of a no fly-zone will you need? (Assuming it *never* breaks, that is.) Better get International approval before you build somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific. Unless, you're okay with turning all of Japan into a no-fly zone. The Japanese people might have something to say about that. Besides, equitorial regions would work "best". ("Best", as in, way so relatively speaking regarding this dumb idea.)

- The damn cable will be a hazard for good old fashioned rocketry as well: Better make sure no one ever needs a trajectory where the cable happens to be in the way. Also, there's all that space debris just waiting to slam into the cable or orbiting platform at some random moment. At least the US Space Command have, at least some, satellite repositioning capabilities when space junk presents a danger.

- Cable snaps with elevator full of cargo and/or people: Maybe if the elevator also doubled as a re-entry vehicle, you can at least save the people -- maybe. But, then you have to avoid that hundred miles of loose cable whipping in the wind. How exactly do you fix a broken cable? If you can't fix it, how do you get rid of it?

Have I missed anything? I'm sure there are more nightmare scenarios.

Just being cool is far too lame a reason to build this thing. Look, the only plausible reason to build something this hideously insane would be economic. But, I think we're much better off relying on true geniuses like Burt Rutan to find more economic ways to reach orbit.

Lets just go back to the moon and drop a line to earth, sheesh!

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.

The biggest problem to me seems to be the material limitations. A tower 60,000 miles tall (316.8 million feet) is over 100,000 times the height of the current tallest structure on Earth. This suggests the most obvious problem: structural integrity. The forces and moments on this building will be massive. Even carban nanotubes (ult. strength ~ 100 GPa) cannot compensate for this project's scale.

We simply cannot build this using carbon nanotubes unless we shape it like the Eiffel Tower with a base the size of California.

In my opinion, it'll probably be cheaper to develop and use efficient single stage engines.

damn has no one looked at any of the comments i mad e about this because like i said the cable will have to be coated in diamond or at least some of it is made from diamond although i wonder if it is possible to make something harder than diamond but just as flexible as cable wire like they use in cranes

i think im going to try and create something like that now

Perhaps an electrostatic charged cable could hold the tension.

A cable made of alternately charged capacitors in series could use the electrostatic force between opposite charges to hold the tension force. Strain gauges can measure how much the cable stretches under tension. A power controller can use the strain measurements in a feedback control system to adjust the voltage of the capacitors and to match the tension force.

In this way, the majority of the tension in the cable is held by electrostatic forces between the charged capacitors. The physical cable sets up the electrostatic fields and has control systems to keep them in balance with the cable tension. A cable system with integrated tension control like this could potentially hold far more tension than a neutral cable. Since electrostatic charges don't weigh much, the increased tension strength could be enough to pass the strength-to-weight ratio needed for the space elevator.

This is just an idea. I don't know if it would work.

Thanks,
-Tony