I am astonished and happy by the amount of effort that people have brought to the Liftport forum.  The discussions are rich and fruitfull.  They have contributed to the questions and issues that Liftport has to deal with, but I have a nagging issue.  It is probably irrelevant to others in the forum but for me it is the elephant in the room.

All of our questions and issues are for nothing if we do not solve the project killer.  We are nowhere near building a space elevator without the material to make the tether.  We can plan and propose solutions to problems that may exist but, we keep on ignoring the one that really exist.  We have not discovered the material yet, and we are still far away from discovering that excalibur. 

In the military, especially the infantry and spec ops which I am very familiar with, in the field there is a process when you set up a RON.(remain over night)  This process is known as priorities of work.  In the military it is usually weapons cleaning, which is mission critical to military operations, that is the first priority, sometime this could be replaced by chow or rest.  The priority of work was dependant on what is most mission critical.  This experience that I had in the military explains my irritation.

For me the most important priority of work for the space elevator, is the work on finding the material that can make the space elevator a reality.  For Liftport this is one of their priority's of work, but because of other issues to its mission it is not the top priortiy.  I understand Liftports reality and since I work for the company I accept it. 

But for me there is not a lot noise in the forum about the actual critical point of current space elevator development.  Where is the material?  This is work priority one and it should be for anybody who is involved with the space elevator discussion.  All of the other problems are important after this one is solved.  All the other ones are easily solved because with a little search and effort we can sovle the other logistical, economical, and legal issues, because we have solved them before for other endeavors. 

This is not rocket science it is material science.

I probably be less hostile if there was more or equal amount of discussion about the material topic as there is for any other topic.  I do understand that other people are generating contribuitons from there experiences and abilities, and I am bascially blowing a little steam, disappointment, and frustration, but never the less this a real issue that can make all of our topics and efforts an inefficant use of our time.  If that happens I will not be dissapointed or frustrated, I will be    

Sean-

Sounds like we have much in common.  (Although, when I ended my missions, it was a few seconds of terror as the back of the boat got very big, very fast, a debrief on the jet and mission, and off to the wardroom for a slider...  Too bad I fly a desk, now...)


I agree completely.  Something I wrote in a previous post a while back:

Oh, and add diamagnetic strength - would be critical for a maglev climber.

The main problem is that none of us are in the field of material research - and if we are, are remaining quiet due to legal and proprietary issues, and patent rights. 

I would repeat that ALL engineering - including the macro scale concept for the SE - depend on the material properties of the ribbon.  Until we know what those properties are, we can only "what if" the possibilities.

And as we have seen, Liftport needs to generate some revenue along the way.  We are rolling the dice that non-related CNT and/or other material research will help produce a high macro-strength ribbon of ANY material that is suitable for the SE... 

Unless you have significant funding to supply to a research organization, you are with the rest of us waiting to see what develops...

Be Safe
Mumbles

Sean has it exactly right. I think the problem is that it now looks like the initial high expectations put in the strength of CNT were unwarranted. We, the SE community, who had started to think we made it past the stage where everybody stops laughing, now realize that the joke may have been on us.

Luckily, we are not on a battlefield, but on a discussion forum. It is quite legitimate, I think, to entertain some hypotheticals in the interest of exciting, wide-ranging discussion. Kind of like a good science fiction book.

Let the real scientists worry about how to make the material. Once they do pull it off, who knows, our discussions may have contributed just a little bit of clarity to figuring out what is next.

Andreas

Morale at LiftPort Inc. is obviously at rock bottom at the moment.  The absence of a price list from the Tethered Towers website gives that away.  If refinement of LiftPort's products over the next couple of months changes the costs then the prices displayed can be changed.


When the balloons are working it will be a good time to look at the climbers.  Can climbers be invented that are able to lift a payload?  This will make the lifter into a “Climbing elevator”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator

The advantages of a lifter and ribbon are:
a. The height is easily adjusted - mines and quarries keep getting deeper.  Whilst being constructed buildings get taller.

b. Lifters designed to work 5 miles off the ground will not be worried by skyscrapers, the sides of mountains or holes deep into the ground.

c. They can be made portable.  Useful when an off road group wishes to ascend/descend cliffs.  Surveyors and the military may be interested.

d. Lifters can work horizontally as well as vertically.  This permits the crossing of rivers and crevices.  The lifter will need to have a gap in its wheels to go around the supporting poles. Some poles will support the ribbon from below other will be wires supporting the ribbon from above.

e. The route has both vertical and horizontal sections.  This can happen in mines.  Currently they use separate lifts and rail lines.  The hopper carrying the payload will have to tilt.


Power can be supplied to the lifter motors by on board batteries or electrical cables attached to the ribbon.

In remote locations customers may prefer solar power to using a generator.  Fuel can be very expensive to transport.

Space Elevators and rockets are not the only way of getting into orbit.  As fall back positions there are:

1.Towers made out of Ultrahard fullerite or aggregated diamond nanorods.  Building a pipe to the sky from which all the air has been evacuated would allow a Maglev train to gain some real speed.

2.Andreas Windemut's aerovator.

3.Lunar Space Runway; the track can be anything from the standard metal and concrete used by Maglev trains weighing thousands of tons to 6 metric tons of CNT.

4.Some other ideas.

I notice some typos and like to apologize.  I will pay closer attention next time.

I am afraid I do not have a product.

If LiftPort is in the tower rental business it can put up a price list of daily and weekly rental fees including operators.  The price may say "Contact salesman for a quote" but the list would be up.

One of the main jobs of a price list when negotiating with large organisations is a tool used by the buyer to calculate his budget.  The purchasing department then asks for a discount.

That is a possibility.  I came on board with Liftport because it was the most interesting game in town, and I would love to be a part of that game.  It is a company that can survive by transforming according to what is needed to build a space elevator, or if the space elevator is absolutly not possible then the company can transform again into a major R&D company.(the space elevator not being feasable will in my opinion never happen.)  But before that can happen we need to explore all possible avenues of construction, because it will dramaticaly change utilization of space.   

I do not think that our discussions have been mis-directed.
I think a general consesus has been found in that a rotating (bolo) space elevator is superior in almost every way, and can potentially be constructed with existing strength materials for a much lower price.
The problems of a roating space elevator are in boarding from a sub-orbital plane, but these are more linked to designing accurate guidance systems which is the way technology is going.
Coming up with some kind of MAGIC strength CNT might leave us waiting till the end of time. We might be lucky , but to the average person on this forum there is nothing we can do except wait (or raise money for the project) .
It is like asking the average soldier to design an atom bomb back in the 1930s rather than clean his rifle.