Elevator to the Moon, it's possible!
Space
elevator to reach the moon is no longer
a distant dream,; it is now a possibility. And the elevator between Earth and
moon is more than a possibility. It can be a reality soon. It will be the
longest elevator ever built. It will help to transport men and material to the
moon and in turn transport rare minerals mined from the moon....
It’s an incredible idea to install an elevator to
Moon. It might sound crazy or weird. Actually it’s possible. It’s easier and
less expensive than you think. In 1910 scientist Fredrich Zander described an
elevator to the moon in his notes. And in 2019 Cambridge University student
Zephyr Penoyre and Columbia University student, Sandford proposed Spaceline, a
lunar space elevator to carry humans and cargo to and from the Moon.
Penoyre and Sandford, a graduate student in
astronomy at Columbia University and a co-author of the study, call their lunar
space elevator concept Spaceline. Its central element is a cable that would be
anchored to the moon and span more than 200,000 miles to a point above Earth's
surface — perhaps an orbit about 27,000 miles from our planet. The cable of a
lunar space elevator couldn’t be anchored to Earth’s surface because the
relative motions of the moon and our planet wouldn't permit it.
Sending rockets to the moon is too expensive, and
if we have to settle there, hundreds of trips might be needed every year. A
permanent space elevator might work out cheaper to transport men and material. A lunar elevator could significantly reduce the
costs and improve reliability of soft-landing equipment on the lunar surface.
For example, it would permit the use of mass-efficient, low thrust drives such
as ion drives which otherwise cannot land on the Moon. Since the
docking port would be connected to the cable in
a microgravity environment, these and other drives can reach the
cable from low Earth orbit (LEO) with minimal launched fuel from
Earth. With conventional rockets, the fuel needed to reach the lunar
surface from LEO is many times the landed mass, thus the elevator can reduce
launch costs for payloads bound for the lunar surface by a similar factor.
All major inventions start with a dream with a person in some corner dreaming about something crazy. Since it was first dreamed up and conceptualized by the Russian rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, supposedly inspired by looking at the
Eiffel Tower, and later refined by another Soviet engineer in 1959,
many people have pointed to a space elevator as the solution. The latest
proposal—that building a space elevator from the moon to Earth orbit is
theoretically feasible.
A lunar space elevator or lunar spacelift
is a proposed transportation system for moving a mechanical climbing vehicle up
and down a ribbon-shaped tethered cable that is set between the surface of
the Moon "at the bottom" and a docking port suspended tens
of thousands of kilometers above in space at the top.
Spaceline – 321,869 km-long cable fixed on moon
surface, thin as pencil lead and made from Kevlar might cost around $ 1
billion. The cable from the moon will end thousands of kilometers above earth.
Rockets will to carry you to the end of the rope. Solar powered robotic
capsules glide to and from the Moon. About 53 trips needed to recover cost of
Spaceline. It will cart rare metals like neodymium and gadolinium, which are
used in electronics, from Moon mines to Earth orbit.
The basic idea behind a space elevator is
to do away with the requirement of carrying all that fuel with you while going
up, by building a giant cable and climbing up it. This isn’t as ludicrous as it
sounds. Imagine such a cable, extending into space with an orbiting
counterweight, which could be an asteroid or a space station, on the end of it.
Just like in a game of tetherball, the centrifugal force from that
orbiting counterweight as it rotates around the Earth pulls the rope taut. If
the cable is long enough, that centrifugal force can be enough to support the
weight of the cable, suspending it: a vast elevator to the sky.
Once you have this elevator to space, robotic
‘climbers’ on the outside crawl up the rope. You can send payloads into low
Earth orbit, geostationary orbit, or further out into space—all just by
choosing how far to climb. If the tower is tall enough, simply letting go at
the top flings you into deep space, escaping Earth’s orbit entirely.
Regardless of the design, the economics of the
space elevator always look glorious: sending mass into low Earth orbit could be
reduced from $10,000 per pound to $400 per pound. Some estimate that an
elevator could be constructed for as little as $6 billion. Compare this to
the space shuttle program, which cost a total of $209 billion by one
estimate.
It sounds wonderful. But, of course, all the
creative designs so far have been torpedoed by one flaw: What do you make the
cable from? The cable has to support a tremendous amount of tension without
snapping. Since part of that tension is supporting the cable’s own weight, the
less dense the material, the less force it will feel. So you need a material
that’s lightweight and can be pulled without breaking. Steel, titanium, and
almost everything else you can think of would simply snap under the forces
involved.
For a while, it was thought that maybe carbon
nanotubes might provide the solution—they’re the first material designed that
might get up to the strength required. But issues abound here, too. Manufacturing them at sufficient purity is
extremely difficult. A single defect can ruin the strength of the
material. Then there’s the fact that the cable might be vulnerable
to lightning strikes and, if you’re not sold yet, the fact that the
longest ever carbon nanotube cable manufactured was around half a meter,
falling an agonizing 35,768 kilometers short of the length required.
The new design, which the authors dub the
Spaceline, circumvents some of these nasty requirements by proposing that
the cable should be built on the moon and dangle down to Earth orbit. This
immediately does away with the counterweight. The Earth’s gravity pulling down
on the cable is sufficient to hold it taut.
The major advantage is that the cable does not need
to be nearly as strong, as it need not support large amounts of cable mass in
Earth’s strong gravitational field, but instead in the weaker lunar field. This
means that you could actually make such a cable with materials that exist: the
authors note that Kevlar, the same material used in bulletproof vests, could be
up to the challenge.
The major disadvantage is that the cable can only
extend slightly closer than geostationary orbit, which is still a long distance
from Earth’s surface. So you’ll have to make that first stage of the journey
and grab the rope by yourself. But for the cool price of a billion dollars,
this lunar space elevator could enable regular travel to the moon’s surface
with only a third of the fuel.
While this doesn’t solve the problem of escaping
Earth’s gravitational field—you’ll still need rockets and the miserable physics
of space launch to reach the Spaceline in the first place—the authors envisage
some potential advantages, alongside saving fuel costs once you reach the line.
For example, the cable would run through the Lagrange point between the Earth
and the Moon—in other words, where the Earth’s gravitational pull cancels out
the Moon’s gravitational pull. This is one of the regions in space where you
can actually dream of stably constructing a floating base. And the Spaceline
could transport materials from the moon to Earth orbit for, well, for whatever
it is we want to build there—satellites, spacecraft, space stations, you name
it.
The idea of using the Lagrange points as
stepping stones—beyond our only current space outpost, the ISS—is an exciting
one that offers many benefits. Not least, it gives humanity a workable project
to focus on whereby we can develop all of the ancillary technologies that are
going to be necessary to achieve anything practical in space. If we are ever to
leave the cradle of our civilization, we’ll need all the ingenious ideas we can
get.
Future space travelers would use a spacecraft to
fly from Earth to the end of the dangling cable, which would be held taut by
Earth's gravity, and then transfer to solar-powered robotic
vehicles that would climb up the cable to the moon. The voyage might take
days or weeks. Return trips would simply reverse the process.
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MyPost
Indonesia
has world’s largest Buddhist temple
The Borobudur Temple, located on the Indonesian
island of Java, is the largest Buddhist temple. Built in the 9th
century during the reign of Syailendra dynasty, the temple was constructed with
approximately 56,000 cubic meters of volcanic stone, has around 504 Buddha
statues and is decorated with 2,672 relief panels. It was restored with
UNESCO’s help in the 1970s.
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Picture Post
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| Lake Palace, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India |
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