You were serious enough about this to presumably hire someone to make concept art of a bad idea centered around another bad/impossible idea? Hell yeah you were!
Somewhere in Silicon Valley, NYC: "OK, OK! The architects want to ignore orbital mechanics! Alright! Let's make it happen, team. Park that sucker right up there, c'mon guys, I know we can do this, just middle-manage out, guys, split it up amongst you, delegate, delegate!!"
The only reason I'm posting this is because those morons have just given me an idea: An equatorial* space elevator tethered to a captured asteroid in geosynchronous orbit. Ideally, the tether is infinitely light, but in reality, half of the thing is continuously running up a supply of fuel for constant orbital boosting. An array of ion thrusters spread out across the Earth-facing surface make it happen. Devac, someone should do a perturbation/small-oscillations analysis to determine the regime of asteroid mass to target (considering how much more difficult it is to orbitally inject a fatty). Find out how sensitive the thing would be to lunar perturbations over some mass range, assuming (for example) 20 kiloton payload delivery up from Earth's surface over 12 hours, think about methods of damping oscillations in the tether, etc. etc., so much fun. Way cooler project than parachuting every day to go to work, Jesus, guys.
We really need to clean up space, though. My idea in this department is a device(s) either built on the moon or in geo that de-orbits near-Earth space junk with photon momentum. I remember when one of Virgin Galactic's darlings told me that the insurance companies in the space tourism industry would have the incentive to clean things up. Let's see how many millionaires we can kill in the process.
Most days, my mind is in space.
*I would like to stress that an orbiting asteroid "centered" above anywhere NOT at the equator is impossible. Please ask a physicist next time.
Edit: LOL, I finally read the article. Got clickbaited so hard, bro! Doesn't matter; Had idea.
Just for the record, I worked on an AIA-award winning project where the architects slowed us down a month because the client had the nerve (the nerve!) to insist that their fourth-floor rooftop garden pavilion include guardrails. And for the record, architects (not all, but enough to give the profession a bad name amongst engineers) are big on "my job is to come up with the ideas, your job is to make it happen." SEE: Frank Gehry and his CATIA-designed I-beams that had to be shipped in pieces in order to make the Experience Music Project possible. But for the record, this was design student you've never heard of, light on work, that gets to demonstrate just how "outside the box" they can think. And I mean, c'mon. They drew a daily circuit that goes from NYC to La Paz and back in 24 hours. That means that mammerjammer is averaging over 300 mph. Kinda makes that whole "transfer station" thing pretty dramatic. I mean, the stall speed of a C-130 is 115mph. Here's a Fulton in full funmode: So... set aside the whole "asteroid capture" bit, as well as the 35,000km of unobtanium monofilament necessary to drag the thing around, and the fact that they wanna build a "building" over 20,000m tall. It doesn't take much of an architect to understand that 300mph winds are a thing and that really, they wanted to put some cool pictures together. I for one applaud their audacity.
Devil's advocate: not a terribly large amount of air up there, or maybe they raise it up when they're really screamin' through the upper atmosphere? And I do think the asteroid capture thing is going to happen within two or three decades, for sure. Won't be a very big rock, but hey, baby steps. (roughly in order of contribution) For anything with one unfastened end of finite mass, hanging from a finite mass in a very inclined orbit,with a relatively large moon nearby, all in an elliptic/eccentric orbit around the sun, and considering Jupiter,in a gravitational field gradient,... lelz. nooooo..! Too nonlinear. Driven oscillations in the tether would eventually destroy the system. I'm unaware of any practical material and/or structure that would make it possible. You'd have to make it incredibly wide (or that infinitely rigid unobtainium) to damp out the oscillations. Even for the equatorial-geo-asteroid-space-elevator, with one end of the tether attached to the Earth, there will have to be considerable flexibility built into the system, and things will (of course) be broken into smaller pieces for assembly on/in the asteroid. Combating damping will be a monumental challenge, let's just assign it to Devac for homework. I'm throwing my Rotten Tomatoes (is.. is that where that comes from?). P.S. maybe one end of the tether could generate calculated optimal destructive interference movements while the other is loaded/unloaded at a stationary point. But that would have to be a huge facility, considering scale sizes. P.P.S. if you devised a way to steadily beef up the structure around a space elevator, outwards, gradually boosting the asteroid orbit while keeping the system's center of mass at geostationary height... hmmm......really, they wanted to put some cool pictures together. I for one applaud their audacity.
"Up there" is a misnomer as they intend the bottom to interface with existing ground structures. Seriously. Click through to the actual proposal. http://payload478.cargocollective.com/1/12/384722/11863260/analemma_XFER-left-GIF.gif Imagine that except it's going somewhere around 350mph and it's the size of an office tower. Let's ignore the hard stuff - pure wind shear on an object pushing through 20km of atmosphere is gonna be something, assuming all the orbital shit works out (it won't work out). Just dealing with the "I want to get on and/or off this thing" means you get to hop onto a gimbaled funride in which - 'k. Area of the Empire State Building is around 90k square feet. That means 300 feet on a side. Say happy fun ball is half of that at 150 feet on a side. For starters you're going to be going from zero mph to 350 mph in the space of about 300 feet. vf equals vi plus at 350mph equals zero plus (a) (300ft at 350mph) 350mph equals (a) 300ft/(513 ft/second) 350mph equals (a) (.584s) 513 ft/second equals (a)(.584s) a = 877 ft/second^2 1g = 32 ft/second^2 a = 27.2g And I mean, that's just linear acceleration. You're also being spun through 180 degrees which some random internet calculator puts at 165g. Wolfram alpha tells me that's roughly ten times the force Jack Nicklaus puts on a golf ball when he tees off. So fuck all your high-falootin' Keplerian hijinks, Mr. Rocket Scientist, Saint Newton tells me that if you could build this thing, you'd reduce everyone on it to a fine paste the minute they tried to get on or off. And that's without invoking materials science, which has long since run shrieking away. Clarke and Sheffield introduced space elevators to the world in '79. In '82 Heinlein had terrorists blow one up. And maybe that's why I'm cheering this asshole on - it takes some stones to out-hubris a Skyhook. Dude imagined a building cruising through the air at roughly the speed of a black powder musket ball and worked his way crazier.
Omg, this is too fucking rich. Thank you. Yeah, it's just like... a bigger cruise ship! It's the same thing! No problem. That .gif answered all my questions. That's how I'd dock too! Just catch it as it goes by. Make sure the station is reversible to accommodate the second asteroid stalactite city passing by the opposite direction. We don't even have weather anymore, almost. Not if we didn't want to though, right? Incredible. Future's finally now! We're flying into teleporting wormholes tomorrow, Harry Potter's parallel universe, it's a quantum cloudserver of akashic knowledge and politically correct genetic expressions. Several thousand virgins, reincarnating into white holes, feeding back into strings tangled up by hyperinflation. Soon, I'm publishing. Soon. There's another degree of freedom; axial rotation around the center line of symmetry. Devac, aren't you done with this homework yet? Edit: I'd rather diminish a joke than miscommunicate, so.. Devac, I am not being serious :). Although, I should warn you that my Noble Pries is in the mail, only 3 easy payments of $19.95, my mom signed me up. I'm sorry, I condensed all my shit into one easy to shit shitpost.
Favorite sentence of the day. And that's even after seeing Don Trump declare war on conservatives.We're flying into teleporting wormholes tomorrow, Harry Potter's parallel universe, it's a quantum cloudserver of akashic knowledge and politically correct genetic expressions.
Yeah, all the things you know? Forget them. Approximately two hours after two hits of LSD, do three whip-its, and then get back to me ASAP.
Woohoo! Only slightly sleep-deprived? I'm not going to post my sleep schedule, I will be chastised. And I'm a big boy, so I do my own scolding these days. We're possibly entering another grand solar minimum. Very little storming/spots, the previous sunspot cycle was a dud, but it's almost over. No one really knows what happens next. Either way, we have been steadily putting more and more satellites up there, and another major coronal mass ejection event could happen any day, even when the sun's looking chill. We know space weather, but not space climate. If we have another Carrington Event sometime soon, I'm worried somebody will think somebody else has plans to use the opportunity for a nuclear strike, and go on the defensive (read: offensive). Regardless of whatever chain of events it sets in motion, we have the potential to see tens to hundreds of billion$ in damaged satellites. Yessir. Geo is in the outer rad belt, true, but the outer belt is electrons, and the stopping power of several MeV electrons isn't so bad. You could (and probably would) have people living on the thing, underground, but not many, and they should have an evacuation plan that takes less than a day to execute, in the event of a "serious enough" storm. You could kinda control the asteroid's potential, if you needed to, with the ion thrusters, and you could shield the most sensitive electronics using the asteroid's surface geometry (and going sub-surface). As for induced currents from geomagnetic storming, I think you could design for it, but there's no need to run the thing during the rare storm. Strong currents from storming most intensely affect systems above a certain scale size (as I'm sure you know). Cosmic ray degredation of circuitry edit: and people :( might be the biggest problem, no atmosphere. No cosmic showers! Probably not many showers on that hunk of rock at all. Here's another space-y idea for you to check out: Ballpark estimate how energy would have to be dumped into the Earth's atmosphere (over some span of time) to de-orbit the Iridium satellite constellation (via enhanced drag from more collisions cuz higher density) in a period of 2 hours? In a period of 8 hours? You can assume homogeneous heating of the atmosphere and equilibrium with a magical heating element that we're distributing evenly across all of the atmospheric particles, so still a maxwellian distribution (in the thermosphere). Edit2: I'm thinking it's not exactly maxwellian up there, but whatever, justify some boost in the distribution function/shape. You'll need a couple/few other simplifying assumptions, probably. I think in reality, heating would be quite localized to the auroral regions, and the Iridium satellites are in polar orbit, so they do pass through there. Actually, people get magnetometer data from those guys, AMPERE, and nobody tells anybody else about much of this cool stuff, because I dunno. This is now a space thread.
Instead of going to class and turning in my homework, I went to bed. I'm fucking done for the week, dude. Edit: "Fourier transform the Coulomb potential into 6D k-space and back again." It's not even hard! It's just fucking follow math rules, Wo0o0OO0o0, wow, that's teaching people how to think! Let's pretend everyone's a calculator! Go get fucked. How can anyone wonder why there's a lack of creativity among scientists when we're basically jamming fist fulls of punchcards down their throats since they said "ma-ma". No one's well-rounded anymore. The expertise required to achieve any coveted status in a globalized world of 8 billion stamps out generalists.I'm getting swamped with projects that require some independent research.
It's a kinetic plasma theory course. We're taking a two or one-fluid plasma phase space distribution function into fourier space for dispersion relations, and laplace transforms to get into Fokker-Planck diffusion treatments. It's more than a little cool, it's just not the sort of thing you only have 10 hours to budget for every other week because you're spending most of your time teasing out electron motions near the diffusion region of magnetic reconnection. Every class here starts like "OK, so when we subtract two vectors..." and then two months later it's "...arriving, of course, at the Christoffel symbols, a rank X tensor containing the coefficients of fictitious forces arising form coordinate transformations". My academic situation is rapidly deteriorating, yes. Someday maybe you'll read about it in a book! ...written by my future child for a fourth grade literature project. Thanks for listening by the way. I've not truly been myself for months, now. I'm leaving this place soon, American universities are becoming a generally toxic environment. I think there are 3 to 4 "administrators" for each professor, and we're still wondering where the grant money is going? Trump's going to bleed them dry, if he has his way. Big brain drain over the next few years.
I'm not taking any more of your money, I'm already using tax dollars in my existing (feeble) attempts to save the world. If you're talking about giving money to the architecture firm, maybe they won't tell you the same thing.
No, like, can I start a kickstarter for this. It's a perfect metaphor for, like, what society has become. Or something. Crowdfinding a space skyscraper. Frivolous, impractical, and dreamed up by people who are out of touch with reality.
Totally agree. Theranos comes to mind. "Hey subscribers! And if you're new here, welcome to my channel. As you can tell by my username (DyingHeart69), I can't afford a heart transplant, but if you just click here, you can head on over to kickstartmyheart.com and help me out! What'dya say? Think I should live? I know it's not a sanctioned kickstarter, but I didn't have to time to get licensed!! It's gonna stop beating any second now!..."